Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

“Wants to spend all his time learning English, I guess.”

“That’s going too far.”

Irie told us that until the raid, no one at work had suspected Azuma had such strange eating habits; at lunchtime, he bought a take-out sandwich like everyone else.

“Don’t ask me how his mind works, Mrs. Mizumura, I really don’t know. I just don’t like that kind of guy.” Then he turned to me: “Minae, you stay away from him, you hear me?”

I turned purposefully away, not deigning to notice the remark.

Azuma had visited us two or three times with a number of other employees, around the time he first started at the company, but I only vaguely remember his impassive face among this group. There was, however, one incident that made a strange impression on me. I suppose he must have heard other guests—people who had known me since I was a child—calling me by my first name. “Minae,” he said, “could you get me some tea?” He had never spoken to me before. Though flustered to realize I’d stupidly served him beer again, I was more startled that a man like him would address me directly, and in such a familiar way.

THE FIRST TIME the two of us spoke alone was at one of the Christmas parties my family hosted each year. We had invited Azuma along with other unmarried employees and the New York bachelors. It was the Christmas of my last year in high school, and Nanae, a sophomore at the music conservatory in Boston, came home with her latest boyfriend. Every year it was the same: The dining-room table would be fully extended and loaded with every plate in the house, along with an array of my mother’s specialties—an eclectic mix of Japanese and Western dishes including raw halibut wrapped in kombu seaweed, fried chicken flavored with ginger and soy sauce, roast beef, Waldorf salad, and other delights—which we feasted on while listening to my father’s favorite holiday music in the background, a Fritz Kreisler recording of Brahms and, inevitably, Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas,” until finally dinner was over and it was time to troop into the living room to listen to Nanae play the piano. At that point my mother and I would retire to the kitchen to clean up. I never minded helping in the kitchen, because it had always been that way, since early on. As for listening to my sister’s piano, I’d long since had about as much of it as I could take.

I was in the middle of collecting plates on a tray when I heard my mother say to the tall young man who had just stood up, “Mr. Azuma, may I ask you a favor?” He was the last to leave the dining room.

“Yes?”

Her dark eyes sparkling, she said, “Would you mind helping change the bulb in the ceiling light in my daughter’s room?”

The lightbulb in my room had burned out several days earlier. To change it, we had to get a stepladder out of the basement and carry it up two flights of stairs. Asking my father to do anything of the sort was out of the question, and both my mother and I were too lazy. She must have remembered about the bulb when she saw Azuma stand up and realized he was so tall he would be able to reach it with only a chair.

On hearing her make this request, I thought of Nanae’s new boyfriend from the conservatory. He was Japanese but, unusually, one-quarter Scandinavian. It must have been those genes that made him so tall—taller than Azuma, for one—and he had already been with us for a few days, eating his meals with us and accepting our hospitality as if it were his due. Why hadn’t she asked him? I suppose it had never occurred to her. His grandfather was a three-term prime minister and his half-Scandinavian father a famous conductor. Not the sort of people who would have deigned to visit our “humble abode” in Japan.

Taro Azuma’s low “yes” to my mother’s request bothered me. I detected something diffident, perhaps even reluctant, in his tone. The image of that rather forced smile he gave my father the first night I saw him flashed into my mind. I’d been right: this good-looking man was someone you’d be better off keeping at arm’s length. I was annoyed with my mother for the casual way she was always asking people to help, but I was annoyed with Azuma too for his apparent unwillingness.

If only I hadn’t been so lazy. Or if only I’d asked Yaji and Kita before dinner. I could still go out to the living room now, I told myself; all it would take was a quick pleading glance—“Could you two do me a favor?”—and they’d be happy to leave my sister’s recital. But both of them left a lot to be desired when it came to height, and they would have to lug the stepladder up from the basement. If Nanae’s lordly boyfriend had to be excused from being asked, I was forced to admit that my mother had made the right choice.

As I led Azuma upstairs, feeling some compunction, I was still annoyed by his reaction. Yes, he shouldn’t have been imposed upon, but, given all my father had been doing on his behalf, why couldn’t he happily do us a little favor like this? I went on blaming him in silence.

My room upstairs was very much a girl’s bedroom. The walls were covered with flowery wallpaper. There was a white built-in bookcase and desk on one side, a white dresser and mirror along another, and against the third wall stood a white four-poster bed, complete with canopy edged in frilly white lace and matching bedspread. My mother had made the canopy and bedspread for me on her electric sewing machine—something that wasn’t yet on the market in Japan—saying with a sigh as she worked on it, “You have no idea how I dreamed of having a bed like this when I was a girl!”

Azuma positioned a chair under the lamp and stepped onto it. I stood attentively beside him, showing him that I, at least, did not take his labor for granted. He removed and handed me first the drop-shaped metal cap that held the glass shade in place, then the glass shade itself, and finally the burned-out lightbulb. I handed him back a new bulb, then the glass shade, and finally the metal cap. I performed these tasks, something a small child could have done equally well, with appropriate solemnity.

For a while I was still annoyed with him, but as I watched him quietly deal with this simple task—once asking for a Kleenex to wipe off the dead insects on the shade—my compunction returned. He was dressed like a gentleman, in a dark suit jacket, yet his fingers, quickly reattaching the shade and screwing the metal fastener back on, had the nimbleness of someone used to working with his hands.

Something in his movements caught my attention.

“You’re left-handed!” The words slipped out of my mouth.

“Yes.”

There was a smile on his lips when he looked down at me. It was a surprisingly disarming smile, which confused me, yet my heart felt lighter, as if a burden had been lifted. Perhaps not an unkind person, after all.

After I flicked the switch to make certain the light worked, he climbed down from the chair. Still too young to be smoothly polite, all I could manage was a bow and a few clumsy words of thanks. It was when I looked up again that he asked, pointing at the built-in bookcase, “Did you bring those with you from Japan?”

“That’s right.”

He was referring to the Girls’ Library of World Literature , a multivolume set which I no longer even glanced at but which it seemed a shame to throw away. The books were translations of Western classics, done in a simple prose style. Each volume had a pretty slipcase, white with a sugary pink floral design.

“I’ve read some of them,” he said.

Seeing the look of surprise on my face, he gave me that disarming smile again. He reached out for one of the books with his left hand, but abruptly pulled it back, probably realizing his fingers were dirty. The books themselves had been sitting there for years, gathering dust.