Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

Damaged goods.

No one said the words out loud, but two years after the scandal, that was what everyone thought when they looked at Yoko that summer in Karuizawa. Perhaps out of girlish prudishness, Mari and Eri avoided her company. Also, now that the storm had blown over, her mother was going around saying that she’d gone through what no mother should ever have to endure. Even though Yoko was her own daughter, she acted as if she were some incomprehensible burden suddenly thrust upon her.

From Masayuki’s perspective, however, Yoko’s involvement in the scandal only increased her appeal. No matter how friendly he was with her, neither her mother nor she herself suspected him of any underlying interest; the idea that he might love her was something Yoko couldn’t imagine and didn’t want. To a young man as eligible—far too eligible—as Masayuki, this must have felt like a breath of fresh air. And to think that she’d caused such a fuss because of Taro, of all people; that she was miserable, haunted by memories of someone like him; and that romance with anyone, even someone of Masayuki’s caliber, was the farthest thing from her mind … Surrounded by girls keen on marrying well, how different, how special she must have seemed! Harue’s inability to forgive Yoko would soon extend toward Masayuki as well, showing just how frustrated she was with reality’s continual disrespect—its utter unwillingness to conform to her wishes.

That summer, the only ones who saw their marriage coming and were afraid of it were Harue and me. I felt as if I were standing in for Taro, and that the qualms he would have had were mine as well.

It was the summer of 1969.

FROM THAT TIME on, for years I made it a habit to spend an entire month helping out at the Saegusas’ house in the summertime. And that also became the one time of the year I always looked forward to. To enjoy helping with someone else’s chores made me feel slightly guilty toward my own family; it looked a bit odd even to me. Yet that was the truth. At the time, for me Karuizawa was a place where I could breathe deeply, on my own in a crowd. Being able to head off there with a fairly clear conscience, since it helped the family budget, was a great boon to me. And the financial advantages did not end with the money in the envelope marked “A Token of Thanks” I received at the end of summer either. Since my marriage, I had started doing clothing alterations for the neighbors to supplement the family income, but Harue gave me a little push: “You can’t make good money doing alterations, Fumi. You should design your own clothes and sell them. With your sophistication, all you’d have to do is model them and they’d sell.” Well, it wasn’t long before I was getting more orders for dressmaking than I was for alterations. Primavera might have finished its historical mission in Tokyo, but out in the country fashionable clothes were still hard to come by. The sisters let me borrow old Primavera patterns and copy dress patterns that Harue had bought in New York department stores. So in summer I helped out in Karuizawa, and the rest of the year I took in sewing. That became the framework of my life.

The daughters of the Saegusa sisters all married and had children. Of the four girls—Mari, Eri, Yuko, and Yoko—the first to marry and become a mother was Yuko. When her husband found work with the San Francisco Symphony, they moved to California, and she proceeded to raise a girl and a boy while keeping on with her music, winning international competitions in ensembles with her husband, going on tour in Europe, and making records. She was the most successful of the four, and while her father was of course proud, Natsue was thrilled to death. Harue might have been a bit miffed, but Natsue’s having a daughter with an active life overseas and exotic grandchildren reflected well on all three sisters, so when company came over she would join Natsue in talking proudly about her niece’s accomplishments. Yuko had a strong independent streak, and like her father, wanted to follow her own path in life. As she grew up she would probably have liked to distance herself from her mother; but Natsue, as she got older, relied more and more on her, which may go a long way toward explaining why Yuko chose to marry an American and settle in the United States. But she was a sweet-natured girl at heart, and she came back to Karuizawa for the summer as often as she could, both to keep her mother company and to see that her children learned Japanese.

NEAR MIYOTA

Natsue for her part didn’t retire quietly to Sapporo. After moving there she somehow became a Christian, as if to compensate for the absence of her favorite daughter, and was energetically involved in Christmas and Easter services, as well as other church affairs. In Karuizawa she would suddenly let out some phrase like “the kingdom of God,” giving everyone a jolt. But as the price of airline tickets came down, she became less devout and began traveling to San Francisco once a year for a good long stay. While Harue settled permanently in this country after returning from New York—and Hiroshi’s career got on the fast track here—Natsue, by contrast, would travel overseas. Behind her ability to come and go freely, of course, lay her husband’s acquiescence. He had originally intended to return to Tokyo at the earliest opportunity, but in time he came to like it at Hokkaido University and decided to stay on there till retirement. Both before and after her annual San Francisco visit, Natsue spent a good deal of time in the Saegusa house in Seijo, and soon, counting summers in Karuizawa, she was spending easily a third of the year away from Sapporo. They had a housekeeper, but ever since her “elopement” Yoko felt responsible for her father’s well-being and made herself useful taking care of him.

Between two and three years later, Mari and Eri each married someone they met at work. Fortunately, neither one of them had really shared Harue’s plans for them, so the sight of Masayuki growing fond of Yoko right under their noses caused no great pain. Born after the war, the two girls were not in the same orbit as the preceding generation. The imposing Shigemitsu residence in Seijo, which the three sisters used to admire until their hearts ached, was, to the daughters, nothing more than a house they’d known all their lives, and which in due course was demolished. They had neither listened with rapture to the sound of the clarinet coming over the hedge from the other side, nor turned red with embarrassment when put down by the Demon. They had no reason to idolize Masayuki. Above all, they did not have strong enough characters to be obsessed by anything. I believe that a girl begins life as a doll her mother can dress up as she pleases, a mirror where her mother’s fancies are reflected; but as she grows older, her own nature begins to show. In the same way that over the years Yuko became more and more serious like her father, Mari and Eri became more like Hiroshi, less resourceful than their mother but less poisonous. Harue knew both how high the mind could fly and how low it could sink; her daughters had more equable temperaments, whether for better or for worse.

Mari married a banker she met fresh out of college through a short-term job at Mitsubishi Bank, while Eri, after serving as an English-speaking guide at the 1970 World Expo in Osaka, brushed aside Harue’s rude objections (“You’ll be an airborne kitchen maid!”) to become an air stewardess, working for a couple of years before marrying a Japan Airlines employee. The educational background of Mari’s husband left much to be desired, in Harue’s eyes, since he’d graduated from “a private university no one’s ever heard of,” but she was pleased that, like the Shigemitsus, his family had once held a baronetcy. Eri’s husband had gone to high school in the United States before attending Keio University and spoke fluent English. For a while the two couples each lived in an apartment along the Odakyu Line, but as a matter of course the Saegusas soon built them a two-family place, divided right and left, on the Seijo property. From then on they were constant visitors in their parents’ house. Their husbands hit it off, and, when they’d had a few beers at a Karuizawa barbecue, happily traded stories about their days as “sympathizers” in the student movement.