Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

Taro never said anything to me. I only formed a hazy idea of what had gone on between them by piecing together the snippets that Yoko let out. She went to Kamata because meeting me had allowed her to get away from the Saegusas, and once she had the chance, she wanted to surprise and please Taro. Kamata wasn’t part of her original plan, but the trip to Oiwake was something she had worked out before leaving for New York, making advance arrangements with Taro by mail. Apparently at that stage she had meant them to spend the night there, have sexual relations, and exchange promises to marry someday. Once they had been intimate, even if they were far apart, they could feel at ease. Not only that, with intimacy an established fact, when they broached the subject of marriage somewhere down the line, her parents would be more inclined to listen. But just before all this was to happen, when she saw him in Kamata, she realized that the image she had built up in her mind during the three-year interval was nothing like the actual, grown-up Taro confronting her. Her disappointment turned to anger, with him and with herself, and she no longer knew what to do. When she tossed her head at him and shrieked, “There’s no way I could ever marry you!” I believe she meant every word of it.

But her refusal was that of somebody who could afford to entertain the idea of going back on her word if things changed. Her despair was not that of someone who’d been absolutely bent on marrying him; it was more that she pictured herself frequently quarreling with him and making up—and if along the way he regained his old spark, why, then yes, she might consider marrying him; but if not, he wasn’t the only man in the world, and surely somewhere out there she could find a husband who would be less of an embarrassment, to her and to others. That, I think, was her frame of mind. Otherwise, how could she have shouted, “There’s no way I can ever marry you!” to his face and still, after he’d turned and fled, expect him to come back—indeed bitterly resent it when he failed to do so? It was impossible for someone in that frame of mind to understand how shattered Taro must have been.

“Where is he now?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Isn’t he at the Azumas?”

“Does he ever come to see you?”

“No.”

“Well if he does, you tell him that I’ll never forgive him, no matter how much he apologizes. Tell him I’ll never forgive him as long as I live.”

I let this slide.

Although the two of them never had any intention of “eloping,” somehow that was the way everyone came to refer to it.

UNTIL HE COULD feel easier about Yoko’s condition, Taro remained almost completely silent. Night and day he holed up in my apartment, a cup full of shochu in one hand, saying nothing. He obviously had no intention of returning to the Azumas. As a courtesy to me he busied himself with household tasks, dipping into the cash in the candy jar under the sink to do some basic shopping and getting simple meals ready when I came home from work. He scarcely touched his own food and just sat drinking—something he must have started doing in broad daylight—with a harrowed look on his face. While I read on my futon before going to sleep, he kept right on gloomily drinking, and when I left in the morning he was still asleep. Or rather, he lay there sodden with drink and, to cover his shame, hid himself under the quilt, head and all. Only when he heard that Yoko had recovered enough to go home did he ease up on the shochu . A bit later, he began working at a neighborhood factory. He still drank steadily from the time he got off work until he went to bed, but that was only for a few hours, and he didn’t get falling-down drunk. He began to talk to me; and sometimes I even thought I caught him smiling.

A month or so after Yoko had gone back to Sapporo, Taro and I began having daily quarrels. It turned out that while he was staring into space with bloodshot eyes, drink in hand, the wheels had been turning. One day he said out of the blue that he wanted to go to America—either there or Brazil, somewhere a Japanese could find work; in any case, he wanted to leave Japan. By spending so much time at the Utagawas, he felt he’d come too much under their influence, and this had led to the ludicrous notion of going to college like a good middle-class boy and studying to be a doctor. But he now realized how silly—and almost impossible—the whole idea had been. In Japan, for someone of his background to lead a respectable life meant making it his goal to become respectable—but a life focused on a goal like that wasn’t what he wanted.

This provoked me. If he went overseas, there was no knowing how things would turn out, whereas if he stayed put, at least things could get no worse. I repeated my earlier proposal. He could stay on in my apartment and quit the factory job, either going back to high school in the normal way or studying for an equivalency test. He could commute to college from my apartment too and decide later what to do next. I tried to get him to listen to reason. I’d been waiting for him to pull himself together and give me just such an opening, so words poured out of me as if a dam had burst. Being male, as long as he finished high school he could certainly look forward to a better life than I’d had. If he graduated from university, he could have what seemed to me a pretty damn good life. I offered to do anything I could to make that happen. But he wouldn’t listen. While I was unburdening myself, he bore it with a frown, but when he talked he simply repeated the same things as before. From the start of the rainy season, around and around we went, arguing in circles.

I realized something then for the first time. It made me feel small, and sad. Like old Mrs. Utagawa, I too had become dependent on Taro. What’s more, I lived alone. If he disappeared from my life, I would have to endure the same old loneliness and dreariness; the thought was dismal, even horrifying. Taro must have guessed how I felt, and only brought up his plan to go abroad quite a while after he’d already made up his mind. Once his decision was out in the open, though, he was adamant. While I argued with increasing vehemence as he sat beside me with his cup of shochu in front of him, he would pull out a textbook for learning English that was among his few belongings and make a show of studying, turning away from me. The blatant rejection in this gesture was absurdly irritating, and in a harsh voice I sometimes said things I should not have. In the end I even wept and pleaded with him. It seems obvious to me now that part of his wanting to leave Japan was to avoid having me around his neck in the future, so the more I begged, the more difficult it must have been for him to endure.

Toward the end of the rainy season, I gave in, and decided to do my best to help him carry out his plan. I got in touch with Uncle Genji, whom I hadn’t seen since my divorce, in the hope that he might have connections that would help Taro get started overseas. Together we went to his house in Soto Kanda. He seemed surprised at the sight of Taro, as if wondering whether this really was the same boy I’d brought to meet him before. He also seemed to get the wrong idea about us and embarrassed me by saying out loud, “Well, Fumiko, I see you’ve gone off the deep end this time.” My uncle frowned at my request, claiming that his experience of foreign countries was a thing of the past. I plowed on, playing up Taro’s merits. This young man, I said, has ten times the ability of any ordinary person, so he would never disgrace you, you can be sure of that; anyone who took him on would be grateful to you; please ask around on his behalf. Recent history forgotten, I pleaded his case as well as I could. Uncle Genji said that he would see what he could do but advised us not to expect much, adding as he looked from one of us to the other that if Taro spoke no English there was little point in even considering the matter.