Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I have a long-term savings account.” I thought she was worried about the money I would need for the wedding, but I was wrong.

“Fumiko, this may sound like meddling, but it’s a good idea to set aside some money for yourself that no one else knows about. There are two kinds of people in this world, those who have something to fall back on and those who don’t, and which one you are makes all the difference.”

That, I think, was the last coherent exchange I ever had with her. It might not have been the sort of advice that would occur to a woman who had had an arranged marriage and raised a family in the usual way, and I felt as if she had dashed cold water on my prospects, but from that moment on, any intention I might have had of proudly showing my future husband the savings I had accumulated over the past decade began to fade.

“Getting married? You, Fumiko?” Taro looked incredulous. He may have thought that I existed solely for him and Yoko.

Our formal marriage interview came at the end of the year. For us to make our final vows by the end of March, before the Utagawas left for Sapporo, seemed like rushing things. My fiancé had no objection, though, so I hastily got ready and we had a simple wedding ceremony in mid-March. The guests on my side included Harue and Fuyue from the Saegusas, the entire Utagawa family, my parents, and my siblings and their spouses, who came down for the occasion. Uncle Genji, by then in his mid-sixties, with a head of white hair, came accompanied by his husky-voiced partner. Before the wedding, we visited his house in Soto Kanda to pay our respects. All my uncle did was laugh and say he’d figured I was never planning on marrying at all. Perhaps no longer as sharp as he’d been in his younger days, he was pleased that I seemed content with my choice. My parents insisted on doing something for me after all this time, and so they paid for our honeymoon. I wore a rented bridal kimono and, for the reception afterward, a Primavera cocktail dress. After a four-day trip to the seaside resort of Atami, the first thing I did was go back to the Utagawa house to help with the move. I saw the family off to Sapporo, then moved my own things into the apartment my husband had rented for us in Iogi. As part of my dowry, the Utagawas bought me a fine chest of drawers—Western-style—at a luxury department store that had recently opened. They also told me to help myself to any of the furniture they weren’t sending along to Sapporo, but our apartment was so small—just two tatami rooms, one six-mat and the other four-and-a-half-mat, and a tiny kitchen—that all I took were the things that Mrs. Utagawa had bequeathed to me. Even so, those items added to all the stylish clothes in my trousseau amounted to quite a pile. My husband was bug-eyed when he saw what a person of property his new bride was.

That husband of mine turned out to have problems after all. Ordinarily he was pleasant enough, but it took less than a month for me to discover that when he was drunk and alone with me a change came over him. He became mean and spiteful. Certainly I tried the best I knew to be a good wife. I took in mending from the neighbors to help out, picking up the basics from a pile of how-to-sew manuals that Natsue had given me when she didn’t need them anymore. On my own, I made do with simple meals of hot tea over cold rice so that I could give him an extra side dish for his evening meal. He seemed happy enough, but for some reason, whenever he had too much to drink, all trace of contentment would evaporate and complaints would come pouring out instead. As the sake took effect he would pick away at what he saw as my faults: I was only a middle school graduate; I talked in a fancy, “stuck-up” way; I somehow looked down on him. This last point had never crossed my mind, but as soon as he said it I realized he might be right, though how on earth had he figured it out? I’m ashamed to say that when he accused me of this I felt myself smiling—which of course only made him madder.

Once he started drinking, he couldn’t stop. One night, past two in the morning, I decided I had listened to enough. I laid out my futon and pretended to go to sleep, but shockingly, he threw a cup of cold water in my face and just went on with his badgering. Luckily he never resorted to actual violence, but it was plain from the first that he had no interest in making our marriage a genuine partnership. In the daytime I used to wonder what prompted him to marry me in the first place.

It was six months before I found out the truth. He had a long-standing relationship, going back six or seven years, with his boss’s wife. When he learned that rumors about the two of them were circulating, he rushed into marriage to cover up the affair, taking it for granted that someone like me would have no choice but to stay quiet even if I found out about the other woman.

WHILE ALL THIS was going on, around the start of the rainy season in early summer I received a bulky envelope from Yoko: a short two-page letter for me and, enclosed with it, a long letter addressed to Taro. According to her, they had been corresponding ever since she went to live in Sapporo, and even though she heard from him barely once or twice a month and the letters he wrote were innocent, nothing she couldn’t show her parents, her mother complained that this was still too much to be getting from “a boy like that.” Anyway she had a favor to ask. Would I please hand the enclosed letter directly to Taro within the next few days? It contained some money that he needed, and she knew from him that his stepmother was opening his mail without permission. There wasn’t a word about how things were going in Sapporo or any proper reference to my marriage, just a line tacked on at the end: “How are you two lovebirds getting along?” Very silly indeed.

Considering all that I owed her parents, I ought to have ignored this request. Yet I also had in mind the request that old Mrs. Utagawa had made toward the end. I wavered, but two or three days later I went over to the house in Chitose Funabashi around dinnertime, when I thought Taro would be home, and caught him just as he was coming out through the gate. Although it was only three months since I’d last seen him, his shoulders had broadened and his cheeks looked sharper, as if because he no longer needed to hide how grown-up he was getting to be. He seemed altogether a different person. I expected him to pocket the letter, but he opened it on the spot, giving me a glimpse of sheets of stationery and thousand-yen bills. He was quick-witted, and probably opened the letter in front of me in case he needed my help with something. But as he read, his face stiffened. I dared not ask him what the money was for. We boarded the train together. He said he had to work part-time two nights a week, three hours at a stretch, at the factory along the Koshu Highway where Mr. Azuma worked.

“It’s to pay my board.” The ironic lift of his eyebrow showed his annoyance.

About my married life he made no inquiry, but neither did he make any silly comment about it as Yoko had done. He got off the train at Gotokuji and walked away from me, a person somewhere between a boy and a young man.

Soon summer was upon us, with the Bon festival holidays just ahead. My husband, who apparently didn’t get on with his elder brother and sister-in-law, said there was no point in our going to visit his parents in Kashiwa, and offered to go with me if I wanted to visit my family in Saku. I instantly lost all desire to go there after hearing this. If I went at all, it would be to steep myself in the atmosphere of the old, familiar villa in Karuizawa, but I doubted whether I could take off on my own and leave my husband with my parents. The thought that he might insist on going along to Karuizawa to pay his respects gave me the shivers, and so I abandoned all thought of going back. For the first time in a decade I spent my summer in Tokyo. Oppressed by the heat, the humidity, and the lack of space, I kept the fan going as I sat nose to nose with my husband in our tiny apartment. With the 1964 Olympic Games scheduled for the fall, Tokyo was full of construction projects, and the constant noise and dust made the summer feel that much more sticky and gritty.