Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

The cicadas kept up a loud droning all day long, and just as they fell silent, white mist rose from the valley, marking the onset of evening. I joined the rest of the family around the oval dining table for dinner, and afterward did the dishes. Even when Yoko was alone with me in the kitchen, the name “Taro” never crossed her lips. The evening wore on, and still she didn’t mention him. As I bustled around the house, going upstairs, downstairs, and back again, her silence began to weigh on my mind. I realized for the first time that one of my main reasons for coming to Karuizawa had been my concern for those two. After the tongue-lashing her parents had given her a couple of years ago, perhaps she was trying to give him up, or may even have done so already—I remembered Taro’s strained face at our last meeting. Thoughts like these flitted through my mind.

That night, just after I had crawled under the quilts in the attic room and settled down to read, I heard a soft knock on the door. At this, I felt a wave of relief. For Taro’s sake, I inwardly said a prayer of thanks.

“Fumiko?” Yoko had come tiptoeing down the corridor from the bedroom at the other end. She had on a pair of woolen socks and was wearing a cardigan over her pajamas. As soon as she came in she plopped down on the tatami by my pillow, looking despondent.

“Fumiko …,” she said again, and pulled an envelope folded in two from the breast pocket of her pajamas. “Here.”

“Another letter?”

I sat up on the futon. I didn’t let my relief show in my face. At some point I had decided, without even consciously realizing it, to do what I could to help the two of them, even though I had scruples about conspiring against my former employers, who had been so good to me.

“Yes, another letter,” she said awkwardly, and turned it over. “This is the address of the post office in the town next to Miyanomori. I thought I could write to Taro by general delivery.” She looked at me pleadingly. “We’re not going to do anything naughty.”

She’d wanted to write to me sooner to ask for my help, she said, but was afraid that after what had happened last time I might refuse to act as a go-between. If she could stay in regular contact with Taro, she would feel a lot easier, and she wouldn’t try to see him without her parents’ knowing. She just wanted me to give him this address.

When I didn’t reach out for the letter, she sagged, and seemed on the verge of tears. After a few moments she began to speak again in a muffled voice.

“You know where he’s living, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said, “I do. Yoko, dear, you’ll catch cold. Sit on a cushion.” I drew a cardigan around my own shoulders. “I do know where he lives, but even if I deliver your letter, there’s no telling whether it will reach him. Your father left strict orders with Mr. Azuma to keep an eye on Taro, you know.”

“An eye on him, ha!” Yoko straightened her back. “That nasty old hag of a stepmother and her sons will just gang up on him, that’s all!” Sitting on a cushion, she tossed her frizzy mop and rocked her small, thin body in agitation. Then she slumped back and spoke in a pleading tone of voice.

“I know it won’t do any good to send it through the mail. That’s why I want you to find a way to hand it to him in person. Have him come to you, or you go to him.”

Without really knowing why, I sighed.

“I promise I won’t cause you any more trouble, ever again.” Her face was full of entreaty. Not knowing about her grandmother’s dying request to me, she seemed to have only modest expectations of help.

I took the envelope, promising only that I would do what I could to get it into his hands. I warned her, though, that when I sent him my new address after becoming single again, there had been no response, and I couldn’t be certain that he was still living in the same place.

Yoko nodded, then launched into a long lament. Ever since the incident two summers ago, her mother had cracked down on her, keeping a sharp eye on her every move and opening all her letters. Her private life was an open book. She wanted to go to college in Tokyo, but that was no longer an option. Instead she would have to attend Fuji Women’s University, which she could get into straight from her school without even taking an entrance exam. And so on.

“Anyway, trust me, it’s not fun having a mother with time on her hands. After letting me do as I pleased for so long, now all of a sudden she starts interfering.”

The sarcastic tone had an adult ring to it, but the sallow face in front of me remained that of a child, with lingering traces of her features as a baby. No doubt Taro was to be pitied, but this childish girl who had a future far brighter than mine yet was haunted already by a ghost from the past, aroused my pity in her own way, and this replaced the feeling I’d had a moment ago when I heard her soft rap on the door.

“Are you unhappy in Sapporo?”

“I wouldn’t say that …” Her eyes were on her lap.

“Have you made any friends?”

“Yes, some.”

I was silent. She looked up and began ticking off the pleasures in her life.

“The new house is nice, and I like singing in the church choir, and I love Hokkaido crab.” She looked down again. “But the thought of how unhappy Taro must be in Tokyo makes me feel such pain, all the time; I can’t bear it.”

She was quiet for a moment, still looking down, then raised her head and looked into my eyes. “Fumiko, did you know our old house in Chitose Funabashi is gone?”

“Gone?”

“Whoever bought the property decided to tear it down and rebuild.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes. Not even the gate is there anymore.”

“Oh dear.”

“The whole neighborhood’s changed. Including the vacant lot where the air-raid shelter used to be. It’s gone too.”

“That’s awful.”

“I know.”

The skin around her eyes slowly reddened, but perhaps because she had matured a little, she did not cry.

WHEN I RETURNED to Tokyo I sent Taro a postcard inviting him to drop by for a visit sometime, but by the time the cold winds of autumn set in he still had yet to come. My brother’s wife had a baby, and in return for the present I sent, they mailed me some soba. I wrote to Taro again: “Soba noodles from home—come and have some with me.” He never showed up, but neither were my postcards returned in the mail. One day I made up my mind to go and see him. After work I took the train to Kamata and asked the way at the police box by the station. The place turned out to be one of a number of little factories all jumbled together.

In the center of the room, on a floor of packed dirt covered with iron filings, the first thing that met my eyes was a huge lathe. Mr. Azuma was busy turning something on it. When I told him that I happened to be in the neighborhood and thought I should stop by, he paused in his work, but only to say with more than his usual gruffness that Taro wasn’t back from school. He avoided my eyes and seemed so anxious to get back to work that I told him I would come back another time, and started to leave. Then O-Tsune came in from a room at the rear with a fussy baby on her back that she was trying to soothe. She barely nodded at me in greeting. There was a look of obvious annoyance in her eyes. I was shocked to think that she’d had another baby at her age, until she explained it was the eldest boy’s child. Later I heard from Taro that his brother had managed to get a seventeen-year-old girl pregnant, a live-in waitress at the corner eatery, and after considerable wrangling had been forced to marry her.

It was already pitch dark outside. On my way back to the station, the whine of motors and the heavy thud of punch presses echoed in my ears, while sparks from welding torches briefly dazzled me. Men with deep creases in their dark-brown faces, and bodies showing the accumulated weariness of years, were at work loading and unloading trucks. It occurred to me later that there in the noise and commotion was the very sound of Japan’s new economic growth, the “economic miracle” of the late 1960s.