Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

IT WAS JUST before New Year’s when Taro finally came to see me.

The company where I worked had closed for the holidays. I spent the day doing a major cleaning before packing without enthusiasm to go back to my parents the following day; and I had just made myself a pot of tea, settled down at the kotatsu heater, and was looking at a picture postcard from Fuyue. On it was a brightly colored photo of a gigantic Christmas tree. She had gone to New York with her parents, Grampy and Grammy Saegusa. It was cold, she wrote, but they’d wanted to see Christmas in New York, so they were taking advantage of the music school’s winter vacation and were going to an opera or a concert every night. Calculated in yen, even the cheapest seats were so expensive that they had almost bankrupted themselves. The lines were dashed off in an energetic hand. An enviable way to go broke, I was thinking, sipping hot bancha tea, when someone knocked at my flimsy door. I turned, and the door swung open without a sound. I’d been going in and out for some time, carrying out the trash and whatnot, and left it unlocked. I watched as a young man in a beige jacket and black trousers came in, ducking to keep from bumping his head on the lintel. It took a few seconds for me to realize it was Taro.

It was two years since I had seen him. Back then he’d still made a boyish impression, but now he was definitely a young man. He hadn’t merely grown up; something about him was different. It wasn’t only the unfamiliar work clothes he was wearing. Whether just his face looked different or his entire body, I couldn’t tell, but it seemed as if somewhere on the inside he had been reshaped, and that the inner change had seeped out, making him look like someone I hardly knew. I felt a surge of disappointment—or perhaps fear: fear of what the future might hold for him. His youth was no longer fresh and vigorous, but had settled like a thick sediment, with a stale smell to it. He had become like those young men you see lounging on street corners, men with no pleasure in life aside from throwing their wages away on pachinko pinball; young men who have run out of hope.

He stood there white-faced and silent. I remained where I was, unwilling to get up from the floor cushion by the kotatsu heater, the quilt cover pulled up to my chest. I told him to come in and shut the door, that it was cold outside, and that as long as he was up, he should fetch a cup from the counter by the sink. He removed his shoes and meekly got a teacup, brought it over, and sat down across from me to get warm. He may have felt that nothing had changed between us, but for my part I found his sudden presence so disturbing that instinctively I leaned back slightly. Without so much as looking around the room he stared down at the kotatsu tabletop.

“Do you want a cushion?” I asked, pouring him a cup of tea, but he shook his head, giving me only a quick glance. “What took you so long?”

Without answering my question, he finally spoke. His voice was husky. “How’s Yoko?”

“Alive and well.”

“You saw her in Karuizawa?”

“I did. She was worried about you.”

Hearing this brought a spark to his eyes for the first time. I pulled myself away from the warmth of the kotatsu long enough to take out the letter I’d kept in the bottom dresser drawer, hold it out so he could see her handwriting, and put it in front of him. He stared at the general delivery address, written in her clumsy handwriting. Then he said in an abrupt, offhand way, “I dropped out of school.”

“You did? Why?”

“Had to.”

“Did you do something wrong?”

“You know I wouldn’t. No, it’s just that now, with the Utagawas out of their life, they’ve no reason to keep their promise.”

He kept his feelings in check, but his shoulders were shaking with repressed anger. Of course, I thought, remembering how Mr. Azuma and O-Tsune had behaved when I saw them. Now that I heard what had happened, it seemed as if it had been inevitable all along, that no other outcome was ever possible.

From years back, the Azumas had wanted to go into business for themselves. Even with three breadwinners in the family, they had continued to scrimp and save to build up the necessary capital. Being evicted from the Utagawas’ rental house was the perfect chance for them to turn their hopes into reality. They set up a sub-subcontracting plant in Kamata manufacturing household appliance parts, in the process using up the money from the Utagawas and leaving Taro with no choice but to quit school after a single year. Since the family—O-Tsune and the boys in particular—had never taken kindly to the idea that Taro alone should be able to continue his education, when their ties with the Utagawas were severed, it was obvious that they would feel free to ignore their promise.

Still, Mr. Azuma apparently wanted to avoid giving the impression that his treatment of Taro was unfair. On the condition that Taro work at the plant in the daytime and attend a night school afterward, he went on paying his tuition and train fare. But the situation at home was difficult. When Taro opened a book, one or the other of his brothers would interfere, and if it came to a fight, they ganged up on him. The baby howled morning and night, and the lights went off early. He could get no studying done at home. And although Mr. Azuma allowed him to leave for school as soon as he got a fixed amount of work done, O-Tsune and the boys kept a spiteful eye on how much he did, increasing his quota little by little on the grounds that he was finishing too soon. Mr. Azuma stayed out of it, finding it too much trouble to interfere as often as was required, which was constantly.

Before long, Taro was coming to class late on a regular basis, and then he was increasingly absent. He barely managed to chalk up the minimum number of days required during his sophomore year, and this year he didn’t know if he would have enough. A night school diploma involved at least four years of study, instead of three, but at this rate he might not be able to last that long. Even if he did, how on earth was he supposed to attain the academic level he needed to apply to the faculty of medicine at the University of Tokyo? It was an open question. For the time being, he not only had to work the lathe but do the accounts, as well as drive around to make deliveries and collect payments. Also, since the plant was a household industry, his salary existed only on paper; in fact he received nothing in the way of spare cash. At most he was given an occasional handout with which to get some trousers to replace those he’d outgrown.

And yet the Azumas’ business was by no means limping along. Orders increased steadily, month by month. Mr. Azuma built a small warehouse out back and bought a pickup truck, and the moment Taro turned eighteen he gave him the money to attend a driving school, which wasn’t cheap. Success, though, only made them eager for more business. Even the eldest son, who at one time had shown signs of delinquency, settled down after marrying and applied himself to the family business. Now all of them, his bride included, were working like mules.

Taro wanted to get away from them as soon as he could and live alone, work somewhere in the daytime and, to save precious time, drop the drawn-out night-school classes to study on his own for a certifying exam that would qualify him to apply to a university. Lately this was all he could think of, waking and sleeping. But at his age, and without a high school diploma, he couldn’t hope to earn enough to be on his own. Even if he did run away from the Azumas, he would still need to find a live-in position somewhere, which meant being a soba delivery boy or a grocer’s order boy, or else working again at some household industry or other. Under these conditions, there wasn’t much chance of getting enough time and space to study. Sleeping arrangements were bound to be crowded—three to a three-mat room, six to a six-mat room—and, while winter might be bearable, in summer there would be all the insects to put up with. Whichever way he looked at it, he kept coming back to the conclusion that he had no choice but to stick it out where he was. In the meantime, life went pointlessly on while he wore out his nerves and his body, and his mind grew emptier by the day. Living, he said, was simply torture.