Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

“You saw her on Sunday, Fumiko, didn’t you?” Fuyue asked.

“Yes.”

She looked at me. Leaving out the role I’d played in their correspondence, I decided to tell her everything that had happened that day. I finished my account with a humble apology, which she brushed aside. “No need for you to apologize,” she said. “If you hadn’t gone with her to Kamata, she would just have gone by herself. But we had better keep this from Natsue.” How to deal with her sister was uppermost in her mind. “Just the thought of her finding out has me worried sick,” she said. No one had yet sent word to New York.

It was cold in Nagano, with patches of snow on the ground.

We got off the train at Komoro and went by taxi to Saku Hospital. In the hallway outside the sickroom, under a fluorescent light, my sister-in-law was sitting on a vinyl-upholstered bench, wrapped in a padded jacket, waiting.

When my brother found Yoko she was lying curled under a quilt, naked and delirious. On the tatami at the head of the futon were two cups and two small, empty clay pots, a popular packed lunch sold on the Asama super-express. Scattered at the other end were her clothes, lying where she’d thrown them off. From her condition it seemed likely that she had lain shivering on the futon for a day or two. Details came out later, but obviously this outcome was the last thing she had expected. Her plan had been to ride back to Tokyo first thing in the morning and set off innocently for Sapporo on the Tuesday afternoon train. Evidently, she and Taro had quarreled, he stormed out, and she stayed in bed, sulking, and the result was pneumonia. Had she managed to dress herself and make it to the main road before her fever shot up, it wouldn’t have come to this; but no doubt she had stayed there counting the minutes, waiting for Taro to feel remorseful and come back. With no external injuries and so no role for the police, she had been admitted to the hospital without any awkward questions. The following day, Thursday, her father flew down from Sapporo, transferred to a train, and arrived in town. I had taken the day off work and went back to Tokyo as soon as he came.

When I left, Yoko’s fever was still high and she was panting for breath, but according to the doctor the antibiotics were doing their job and she was out of danger.

WORN OUT, I dragged my way home to find the light on in my room at Evergreen Apartments No. 2, with a glimmer showing under the window curtains. For a moment I thought I must be looking at the wrong apartment, but no, that was definitely my room, and those were the curtains I had hung. I soon guessed who was there.

I opened the door and was assailed by a stale, yeasty smell, a mixture of alcohol and sweat. My eyes took in the sight of Taro sitting cross-legged on the floor in his jacket, which he apparently hadn’t taken off since getting back from Oiwake. He stared up at me with bloodshot eyes like a crazed animal. In front of him was a big bottle of cheap shochu and a cup; looking around I saw another big bottle lying on its side, empty.

In a corner was an overnight bag I’d never seen before, which told me that he had left the Azuma house.

“Where’s Yoko?” he asked.

“I’m tired,” was all I said.

I removed my shoes with deliberate slowness before entering the room. When he had arrived I didn’t know, but since I’d been away from the day before, he must have started worrying that something had happened to Yoko and was trying to muffle the anxiety in drink.

“Where is she? Seijo? Sapporo?” He rolled his head toward where I stood and asked again. His reddened eyes were fixed on me, his speech slurred. I wanted to look away.

“She’s in the hospital.”

“Hospital?”

“Yes, Saku Hospital, the biggest one in that area.”

“What’s wrong?”

I didn’t answer immediately, but went to the kitchen sink and washed my hands thoroughly while he looked on in suspense. Then I poured a cupful of water and drank it down.

“She has pneumonia.”

“Pneumonia?…”

“Yes, she stayed under the quilt the way she was and got pneumonia.” Naked, I wanted to say, but I held the word back.

“ ‘The way she was’ …?” He seemed to have difficulty understanding. “Stayed the way she was, under the quilt?” he repeated, the words slurring, then got unsteadily to his feet and staggered toward the wall, laid both hands on it, and began banging his head against it with great force. He seemed in danger of cracking that prize skull of his in two.

To make sure he heard me, I raised my voice. “You’ll smash the wall! If you’ve got to bash your head against something, use the pillar, for heaven’s sake!”

“Is she going to die? Is she?” He stopped and, hands still on the wall, turned beseeching eyes toward me, desperate to know. Even at that awful moment, I couldn’t help noticing how graceful the ten long fingers bearing his weight looked.

“No, she’s going to make it.”

“She is?”

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

He breathed raggedly, shaking, then gradually slumped against the wall. He lowered one arm, bent the other one, and rested his forehead on the back of his hand. In a voice so low I could barely hear it he said, “Better she should die.”

Then he was silent. I kept quiet too. After a while he went on in the same barely audible voice, but faster now. “She said she didn’t want to marry me. Said she couldn’t marry anybody so low-class and vulgar. Said marrying me would be so humiliating she’d die. With someone like me, there’d be nothing to expect from life, not in a million years. Not in a million trillion years—that’s what she said.”

“She went all the way to Oiwake just to tell you that?”

Taro lifted his forehead from the back of his hand and looked at me with a chilly smile. “Not only that.”

“I didn’t think so.”

I said this scathingly, and he dropped that disturbingly mature, chilly smile of his to fix me with a probing look. I levelly returned his gaze. Pictures of the scene at the Oiwake cottage as my brother had described it—small, empty clay pots, Yoko’s scattered clothes—passed through my mind like frames on a movie reel. Little Taro, whom I’d always thought of as a boy, seemed to change before my eyes into a man unknown to me, someone I had never seen before. The eerieness of the transformation brought sour bile rising from my stomach.

His face turned sad, with a lingering trace of the old Taro.

“She should’ve died,” he muttered. “I should’ve killed her, then myself. I’d be better off dead.”

He staggered and fell heavily, spread-eagled on the floor. Ever since coming he must have been alternately swilling rotgut shochu and passing out on the floor like this. The thought of this young, active person drinking himself into a stupor overlapped in my mind with memories of my ex-husband and the way he used to work himself into a rage, his hot breath stinking of liquor. Taro must have resorted to this cheap spirit, the commonest and nastiest of all alcoholic drinks, in an attempt not only to drown his sorrows but to deliberately degrade himself. Again the bitter taste of bile rose in my throat.

“You’re right. Dead right. You’d both have been far better off dying than causing so much trouble for all the adults …”

I couldn’t tell if he heard me or not. He just stared blankly up at the ceiling.

“Even Mr. Azuma, whom you sneer at, and your brothers, and O-Tsune, whom you call an old hag—they all work hard at their jobs. What about the two of you? What in heaven’s name are you doing?”

Perhaps ten seconds ticked by. Taro kept on staring hollow-eyed at the ceiling; then all at once he got up and went to get his overnight bag.