Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

After that Taro took to opening up his English-language textbook every evening after supper while listening to the Far Eastern Network, the all-English radio station run by the U.S. military. Soon it was summer, time for the Bon festival holidays. I didn’t feel like going home or to Karuizawa, so I begged off with the excuse that things were too busy at work for me to get away that year. We stayed in Tokyo and sweltered. Taro’s preferred destination was the United States, but on looking into it, he realized how hard it would be to obtain a visa that would let him get a job. He had just started talking about Brazil as an alternative when Uncle Genji called me at work. He sounded upbeat. He’d spoken to the cook at the Imperial Hotel, a former associate of his at the base, with the result that an American who came regularly to Japan had offered to take Taro on if he had a mind to work as a private chauffeur.

Since all he wanted was a way to get to America, Taro jumped at the chance, however unexpected the type of work, and by early October he was gone. To save money he took a freighter sailing by way of Panama, but he barely owned even a change of clothes, and getting him fitted out for the coming winter had exhausted my meager savings. By a quirk of fate he was heading for New York, where Harue and the others were.

I told Fuyue by telephone, thinking that everyone should at least be notified that Taro had left the country. As I learned afterward from her, she told Natsue, Natsue told Yoko, and the following morning Yoko stayed in bed for so long that her mother went upstairs to check, only to find her unresponsive and feverish, having spent the night curled on the rug at the foot of her bed. In a few days the fever was gone, but the lethargy remained. At the time, she was taking her first year of college off to recuperate from the pneumonia that had dragged on, and, apart from resuming her voice lessons, she spent her days hanging around the house doing nothing. Her parents were worried enough to take her to a mental health specialist. Privately, I felt that living in that privileged environment, where her emotions ran unchecked, had made her oversensitive and unstable.

At the end of the year a Christmas card, sent airmail—something I had never received before—came from Taro. He had apparently decided that his address, written in small English lettering on the envelope, would be hard for me to make out, so he’d written it out again in big capital letters in the middle of the card. He added that I should let him know if my address changed. That was all. Uncle Genji received a note of thanks from him, but he never wrote me a proper letter. As I studied those large roman letters in Taro’s handwriting underneath the words “ Merry Christmas ,” which were printed in silver, I felt a wave of emotion. In reply I sent him the customary New Year’s postcard with a message equally short.

The following spring, having heard that the Saegusas were finally back from New York, I used one of my days off to call on them at Seijo. Mari and Eri had grown from pretty little girls into beautiful young women, and their father, Hiroshi, had matched their growth, becoming stouter than ever. Harue, by contrast, gave the impression of having been rejuvenated. I’d heard from Yoko that she was studying painting with a Japanese artist over there, and much later I learned from Fuyue that she’d had an affair with the man, one that lasted for almost the entire duration of their stay. She had been at great pains to keep this secret from the local Japanese community. Since she paid her lover’s expenses out of her own pocket, a source of funding he wasn’t eager to have dry up, he himself had evidently been equally intent on keeping the affair quiet. Somehow this news came as a relief to me. It may sound presumptuous, but I had always thought it a pity that a woman like her should waste her youth and beauty as she’d had to do.

“They say that boy Taro is chauffeur to an American,” Harue said, smiling scornfully. So she knows, I thought in surprise. She had already heard from Fuyue about Taro’s eventual emigration after the “elopement,” and when gossip about someone fitting his description began circulating among Japanese expatriates in New York, she had apparently put two and two together.

As I got up to leave, Harue looked me up and down, rather as if she were looking at some zoo animal, before saying, “Fumi, I must say, your figure has certainly filled out, hasn’t it? You look more like a real woman.” I was past thirty by then, so if it had, that was only natural.

“Yes,” I said, “I suppose so.”

Then she studied my face. “But you seem a bit tired.”

Indeed, I was extremely tired at the time.

Again, I didn’t go to Karuizawa that summer. “Things are too busy at work” was again my excuse for staying away from Karuizawa for the second year in a row. Having put Taro up for six months without the Saegusa sisters’ knowing made me hesitate to go. Also, even though it was already nearly a year since he’d gone, I still felt run-down. Just getting through each day wore me out, and I was hardly in the mood to be around those high-spirited people. In December I received a second Christmas card from Taro, saying that he’d quit being a chauffeur after a year of it and had been working for the New York branch of a Japanese company ever since, as a camera repairman. His new address was again written in oddly distinct lettering in the middle of the card. As before, I sent a blunt New Year’s postcard in reply.

I REMARRIED THE following spring.

As I mentioned at the very beginning, I have an Aunt O-Hatsu, a woman now in her nineties and still going strong. Her husband, my mother’s elder brother, died at the end of the year, and I first met the man who was to become my new husband when I went back with Uncle Genji for the funeral. The man was the third son of a Saku farming family. I was thirty-two and he was forty-five, thirteen years my senior. After finishing his education at around the age of fourteen, he had taken various jobs before starting to work in the town hall. His wife had died years before, and his mother, who lived nearby, had looked after the children until her recent death. Of his three boys, the younger two were still in junior high and elementary school, so he was in the market for a wife. He came up and spoke to me several times as I was serving tea at the wake or helping out the day of the funeral. Apparently someone had told him that I’d been married but was now single again. When the mourning period was over, he stopped by my aunt’s house with a proposal of marriage.

“The lady in Western-style clothes …”

Those were evidently the first words out of his mouth. Back then it was customary for women to wear a black kimono at funerals, and my style of dress must have struck him as unusual: a black suit handed down from Natsue and a brooch of black pearls which was a gift from Fuyue.

To ask me to leave Tokyo and marry him when he was not only poor but had three boys who needed looking after was asking a great deal, he’d be the first to admit, but he hoped she would at least convey the offer. He didn’t think he stood a chance, but if by some miracle I accepted, he guaranteed that they would all be good to me. Being unaccustomed to writing, my aunt must have found the prospect of a letter daunting, for she placed a long-distance call to my company instead—which must also have required some resolution—and conveyed the message.

SMALL SHINTO SHRINE

“I know she’s too good for us, but if someone as ladylike as her would say yes, nothing could make me happier.” He had kept saying this, her voice informed me on the phone. I tried to remember him, but all that came to mind was a man unremarkable in height, looks, and way of speaking. When I hung up I was inclined to say no. As a single woman living on my own in Tokyo, I’d had my offers, but none of them interested me, and so I had stayed single. Still, the phrase “too good for us” stuck in my mind, that day and the next. A month later there was another phone call from Aunt O-Hatsu. The man had some business in Tokyo, and if I was willing he would at least like to meet me. I met him and thought he was nice enough, but still couldn’t make up my mind. Then in short order he came back to Tokyo, this time expressly to see me.