Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

“Oh …” She bit her lower lip. “I wonder if he’s still alive.”

“I’m sure he is,” I said, polishing the sugar bowl with a cloth. “He’s young, and young people don’t die all that easily.”

Not listening, Yoko went on half to herself: “It’s been nearly two years now since he went to New York. How many times do you suppose I’ve been to the post office since I got well?”

She was looking at me, but she didn’t seem to expect an answer.

“Every single time, I ask if there’s anything for me by general delivery. They all know me by sight—it’s so embarrassing.” She sighed and then said, again half to herself, “Why doesn’t he write?” Her eyes were on the row of gleaming silverware, unseeing.

“I wonder.”

“Why doesn’t he?” she repeated. She was so lackluster that I couldn’t help being reminded she’d been taken to see a psychiatrist.

“I feel as if I’ve disappeared, myself.” She sounded even more remote. It was as if while she was standing there her spirit had gone off to wander some far corner of the earth. I was concerned, but the moment I opened my mouth to say something, she came to and took up the petulant tone she used with Taro.

“I will never, ever forgive him,” she said in a low, firm voice, and bit her lip again. “Never. Not as long as I live.” She put up a good front, but she may finally have begun to understand what it meant to be loved that much by someone like Taro—in a life she was given only one chance to live.

AGAINST A BURST of green leaves under the summer sun, with fine linen and dishes on the table, and bright laughter everywhere—amid all this, Yoko looked sullen and abstracted, her mind elsewhere. Yet something unexpected was happening to her even then. Masayuki, the heir to the Shigemitsu family, had fallen in love with her. That was what I first saw in Karuizawa that summer, an undreamed-of development that became reality.

Harue miscalculated badly.

Before our eyes Masayuki’s attitude toward Yoko was undergoing a change. As far as I could remember he had never paid her much attention, but one day I realized that he would seek her out wherever she was on the grounds, go up to her, and engage in long talks. At Sunday brunch he sat where he could see her face. When the others ignored her, he would casually start up a conversation. Around Taro, Yoko was a little tyrant, but in front of Masayuki she was meek, and even when he addressed her she often thought it must be someone else he was talking to, and remained absent in manner. Then, when she realized the remark was aimed at her, she would break into a smile. Thinking back, that was the first summer the two of them had been together in Karuizawa in five long years. The first time after the Utagawas moved to Sapporo—the summer of her first “misconduct”—Masayuki was going to cram school and didn’t come to Karuizawa. The year after that, the Utagawas were building a house in Miyanomori, and Natsue didn’t send Yoko to Karuizawa. The third summer, Masayuki and his parents were away in New York, and the fourth, Yoko had been at a low ebb after the “elopement” and stayed in Sapporo. And so, that summer, a girl who had been fourteen the last time Masayuki had seen her was all at once nineteen. She compared unfavorably with other young women in appearance, but since he had never known her very well before, she undoubtedly came as a refreshing surprise.

Harue’s miscalculation came ironically into play.

When had Harue become so fixated on it? When did she make up her mind that Masayuki belonged to her girls? Back when the war had just ended and all three women—herself, her sister Natsue, and Yayoi—had babies in Karuizawa at around the same time, was she already dreaming of such a thing? Or did the notion arise after she watched Masayuki grow into the spitting image of Noriyuki, his uncle who’d died in the war? Or was it that Masayuki himself had turned into the sort of young man every mother wanted for her daughter? There’s no telling how far back it went, but Harue definitely wanted him to marry one of her girls—if not Mari, then Eri—and in fact based everything on the firm expectation that he would do just that. Everyone around her, me included, was vaguely aware that she lived with this assumption. Of course, Natsue hoped the same thing for her daughter Yuko, so there was always a certain undercurrent of competition between the sisters. But Yuko quickly found a boyfriend on her own, forcing Natsue to abandon the dream. With Yuko out of the way, Harue must have been convinced that Masayuki was destined for one of her girls.

Had he gone on living next door after he graduated from university, Harue probably would have let things slide. But this was just when the political strife at universities was at its peak. The previous summer Masayuki had given up on the idea of doing graduate work in Japan and decided to pursue his studies in America instead, thus exiting the stage just when her daughters were at their most marriageable. She was determined to see him engaged to one of them before he left, or if not formally engaged, at least openly committed, and so she swung into action. But the more she tried to push him into the arms of either Mari or Eri the less interest he showed, possibly a natural response for any young man. He began to avoid the sisters and seek out Yoko’s company. This irritated Harue so much that, in addition to promoting her daughters, she began to pick on Yoko in a roundabout way. That was her downfall. By midsummer there was Harue on one side, being mean to Yoko at every turn, and Masayuki on the other, being nice as pie.

If they were getting up a game of doubles at tennis and Yuko was away with her fiancé, Harue would send for a girl from one of the neighboring villas, on the grounds that Yoko played badly. At Sunday brunch she talked of nothing but New York, so that Yoko would be ignored and her own daughters stand out. She even brought up Taro’s name when people came over for tea, and repeated her pet line: “The rickshaw-puller’s boy, a chauffeur! Isn’t that rich?” Yoko was used to being ignored or left out of things, but when her aunt started up this sort of talk she would flush bright red, and Masayuki’s clean-cut features would turn pale in response. Now and then Yuko would accompany Yoko on the piano while she sang, and compliment her: “Your singing’s really improved, you know. With a bit more coaching you could easily have made it to Juilliard.” But Harue, a great Maria Callas fan, would wear a look of undisguised boredom the whole time Yoko sang, wandering in and out of the room for no reason and starting a random conversation with whoever was around.

One moonlit evening at high tea when Yuko asked Yoko to sing something and she started to perform, all but Harue among those there listened attentively. The second the applause died down she looked around and said with a sweet smile, “Now, everybody, how about a little Callas to cleanse the palate?” She may have found Yoko’s singing genuinely unappealing, but her spiteful remark propelled Masayuki out of his chair and over to Yoko’s side to comfort her publicly. Fortunately, Yoko seemed not to have heard what Harue said and just stood motionless in the pale moonlight, as though spellbound.

Masayuki felt defiant, I’m sure. And his defiance was fueled by his natural gentleness. No one as clever as Harue could have failed to realize along the way that the meaner she was to Yoko, the more someone like Masayuki would sympathize and be drawn to her. I think seeing her long-cherished dream disintegrate before her eyes made it impossible for Harue to avoid the impulse to be mean. Why Yoko, of all people? That thought surely added to her frustration. Had it been anyone else, she might have been able to bear it—so why did it have to be Yoko? Not only did Yoko have less to offer than her own daughters in every respect but, as was common knowledge, she had caused that “elopement” scandal.