The Ginger Tree

This series is now available in the UK. When it was originally transmitted I had no means of recording and only managed to see the last two episodes, but I was very impressed and had always wanted to watch the whole thing.

The background detail of life in early twentieth-century Japan is most interesting and the drama extremely moving. Mary's family circumstances and her reasons for marrying on such a brief acquaintance are very much left to the imagination. Presumably she was afraid of being left 'on the shelf' with no career to occupy her mind.

When Armand tells her about the ginkgo tree I wondered if a misunderstanding of this was the reason for the title, but no, it is all explained in the last episode.