Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

“Now what?”

Bag in hand, he moved toward the door. I stood in front of him to bar the way. The reek of liquor, mixed with the sweet-sour smell of his unwashed body, choked my nostrils. As he tried to push his way forward, I resisted with all my strength. We grappled like that for a while before tumbling in a heap on the floor and rolling over. Taro, his forehead pressed into the tatami, started to sob like a small boy.

From that day until he left for New York six months later, he worked the day shift at a factory nearby and stayed with me in my apartment.

THE SIX MONTHS from that day to the day Taro left for America, and the six months following, are a blur: Yoko’s slow recovery, her father’s concern, her mother’s hysteria on returning from New York; above all Taro’s nerve-racking silence as he soaked up shochu , then our endless fighting and finally the dazed numbness when he was gone. After getting so involved in other people’s lives and being harrowed by it, body and soul, I felt drained when I was alone again. I’d never had something worth calling “a life of my own,” but now my life seemed more thoroughly and bitterly empty than ever.

With Yoko in the hospital I couldn’t sit still, partly because my own family had been involved in finding her at the Oiwake cottage. Though my sister-in-law visited her daily, parking the baby with my mother, the Saturday after the “elopement” I left work around noon and headed back to Nagano myself. Fuyue, after coming down to Tokyo to rearrange her schedule at the music school, drove back to Karuizawa, where she slept at the summer house at night and visited the hospital every day. Takero had gone back north to Sapporo, but he came down on weekends by plane and train.

“I did a terrible thing to Papa. I never thought he’d be so worried. I thought he only cared about Yuko.”

After her father left the room, Yoko told me this in a frail, reedy voice, her neck as thin as a child’s. I too hadn’t expected Takero to be so affected. He seemed to have aged twenty years overnight.

Nearly three weeks after the incident, just days before Natsue was due back from New York, Fuyue finally decided to tell her everything. Yoko, who by then had been transferred to a hospital near Seijo, was dreading her mother’s return. Knowing Natsue, Fuyue must have thought that unless Yoko was on the verge of death, having her rush home early would only create more problems. She persuaded Takero to have Yoko transferred to a hospital nearby rather than somewhere in Sapporo, not just because that took less time, I think, but because she felt responsible for what had happened and didn’t want to dump everything in Natsue’s lap. She knew Natsue lacked the inner resources to cope alone up in Sapporo, without her support.

When I saw Natsue at the hospital she gave full vent to her distress, repeating lines that she must have already wailed to Fuyue over and over again. Listening patiently and giving comfort was not easy. She had grown up when the ideal of sexual purity was something shared by Japanese women generally—a direct result of Western moral influence after the Meiji Restoration, I understand. Yoko’s “elopement” occurred during the last period when that ideal held true.

“The child is ruined. She never did know how to behave, and now she’s lost all hope of ever marrying into a good family. How that boy Taro could do this to us I will never know. I just don’t understand. After all we did for him … When I told Harue, she even said we should report him to the police.”

It was one thing for her to carry on like this around Fuyue and me, but when she went into her daughter’s sickroom and said the same thing, things grew more complicated.

“Police?”

Yoko had been lying down in bed, but that brought her bolt upright with a look so fierce that her mother, intimidated, fell silent.

“Aunt Harue said that?”

“Yes, she did.”

Looking her mother straight in the eye, Yoko said quietly, “I was the one who said we should do it.”

Natsue gave a little shriek. “Is that how you treat your father and me?”

“I’m just saying it wasn’t Taro’s fault.”

“What if you got pregnant?”

A low, breathy hiss escaped from Yoko before she too raised her voice. “That is totally impossible!” The pair were alike; neither mother nor daughter could keep their emotions in check.

“How can you say that?”

“Because it’s true!”

Again that sharp, breathy sound. Every time the incident with Taro came up in conversation, Yoko made that voiceless hiss and then went into a fit of dry, convulsive hiccuping that made her temperature rise. A fever would do her no good, so I signaled to Natsue, whose face had gone as pouty as a child’s, and together we left the room.

About two weeks later I visited the hospital again, on a Sunday shortly before Yoko was scheduled to go home. Rain had been falling all day. Still wearing a thin raincoat, I stepped into the sickroom and shut the door behind me. Yoko saw at a glance that I was alone.

“Fumiko.” She spoke my name like a command, sitting propped up in bed against a pair of feather pillows they had taken the trouble to bring from Seijo. “There’s something I need to say in Taro’s defense. He didn’t do anything, even though I asked him to.”

I stood silent in the doorway.

“End … of … story.” She spoke the words slowly and deliberately, then shifted her gaze to stare at the wall in front of her. On the wall, white with a grayish tinge, hung a nondescript calendar. A window on the adjacent wall offered a rain-soaked view of a concrete wing of the hospital. For the first time, I spoke up.

“Why tell me this? Shouldn’t you be telling your mother?”

I took off my raincoat carefully to avoid scattering drops of rain and moved farther into the room. Yoko turned her head toward me again.

“They’d never understand. They never can understand Taro. They can’t conceive of there being someone like him.” She answered in the plural, so evidently she was not referring only to her mother.

She looked straight ahead at the wall again, with a faint smile that was perhaps disparaging or embarrassed. “Of course I went to Oiwake with that in mind. I told him we should go ahead and do it and be done with it.” Her mouth tightened. “He said if I wasn’t going to marry him, he wouldn’t.”

She shot me another look.

“How could I marry him, the way he is? So I said again, ‘Look, there’s no way I can ever marry you, but let’s do it anyway.’ ”

A vision came to me of Yoko casting off her clothes and flinging them at the foot of the quilts, exposing a body that was barely starting to show some curves, and shrieking wildly: “Let’s do it! Let’s just do it!”

She looked to the front and, after regaining control of her breathing, plunged on. “He shouted at me. He said, ‘If you don’t want to marry me, then the hell with it.’ He was furious. He made me so mad, I said it again. ‘There is no way I could ever marry you’—and he turned and left me.”

I stood a short distance off with my raincoat over one arm and looked at Yoko with her hair matted on the pillow, staring at the wall. The day we went to Kamata, when she’d looked so pretty and grown-up—I couldn’t help wondering if I had only imagined it. A memory came back to me of the time I first went to the Utagawa house and saw a savage-eyed little girl lying small and flat on her futon.

“He left me.” She repeated the words hollowly, drained and dejected. She stopped looking at the wall and let her eyes wander in empty space. “He left me there at night all alone.” Her flat chest, covered in a thin flannel nightgown, rose and fell. “I waited and waited, but he never came back.” Abruptly she closed her mouth, shut her eyes, and slid down in the bed, pulling the covers up over her head. After a while her face emerged, the cheeks wet with tears. “I waited but he never came back to get me.” She was staring wide-eyed at the ceiling. More tears. “I’ll never forgive him.” She pursed her lips. “No matter how he apologizes, I’ll never forgive him as long as I live.”