Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

YOKO AND MASAYUKI’S marriage came last of all.

Masayuki studied abroad at Yale’s School of Architecture on a scholarship, coming back to Japan in the summer and staying in Karuizawa, where he patiently cultivated Yoko’s affections. For an intellectual, he was an ardent lover; for someone so ardent, he was mild-mannered. He and Yoko often went on walks to Foggy Pond or drove to a teahouse on the ridge. I would also see them out in the yard, deep in conversation. Once, at dusk, when they were sitting side by side on a bench, I saw Masayuki gently lay a fingertip on her forehead and knew immediately that he must be touching the scar he’d caused long ago when he made her trip and fall. Yoko sat still with her eyes closed. As wisps of white mist drifted through the yard, it seemed as if the air around them stayed motionless.

He seldom talked to other people about his experiences studying abroad, but he often did to Yoko. And it seemed she told him things about Taro that she let no one else know. I saw him comforting her as she wept. One summer when her father had a heart attack from overwork and needed bypass surgery, Yoko couldn’t come to Karuizawa. Masayuki went all the way to Sapporo to see her. With the “elopement” a matter of common knowledge, I’m sure his mother couldn’t have been entirely happy, but it wasn’t in her nature to put up any strong opposition. His father, Masao, did oppose the match, and for once this even-tempered man and his son clashed. But since in every other respect Masayuki was a perfect son—someone, I should say, Masao seemed rather in awe of—in the end he had his way. “Fortunately” might be the wrong word, but the senior Shigemitsus had died one after another some time earlier, so their attitude did not come into play. After a three-year stay in the United States, Masayuki got his master’s, came back to Japan, and joined an architectural firm. That same year Yoko graduated from the English department of her university and started work as a private secretary in the faculty of economics at Hokkaido University. That winter, a group of radicals calling themselves the United Red Army staged a shootout at the Asama Mountain Lodge in Karuizawa, and the three Saegusa sisters and indeed all Japan were mesmerized by the events unfolding on television. Another two years passed before Masayuki and Yoko were married.

One day as I was ironing in the Karuizawa kitchen, Yoko came in and made an announcement. “I’m going to marry Masayuki,” she said.

“Go right ahead,” I said, not looking up as I sprayed starch on a napkin.

She walked over to the sink and looked out the window, her back to me. “There’s been no word from Taro.”

I said nothing.

“Seven years.” She twisted her head around and looked back at me. “Seven years, and not a word.”

I wasn’t sure from her expression whether she was angry or weepy.

“So I’m going to marry Masayuki.”

“No one’s stopping you.”

I folded the napkin and ran the iron over its surface one final time, then reached out and picked up another one, spraying and then pressing down with the iron. She watched me for a while before going on in a different tone of voice.

“Masayuki says that if Taro ever comes back, I can run away with him that same day if I want to. He’s said it more than once.” Her voice was no more than a murmur. “I never thought there could be anyone who would say something like that. Only he would. No one else in the whole world would think of saying it.”

I kept on ironing as she talked. Her whispery voice filled the kitchen.

“I was so miserable back then, I never dreamed I’d ever be this happy.”

They had a simple ceremony in Karuizawa, since that was where they’d found each other. Her father was there, wary about his heart yet also sincerely happy, as if he’d finally put down a heavy load. Natsue could hardly be disappointed that her daughter was marrying Masayuki, but the whole thing had been such an extraordinary turn of events from the start that even when confronted with the final outcome, she seemed unable to take it in. Harue was resigned, since the ceremony came well after both of her girls were married off. Still, she said some spiteful things behind the scenes.

“So Masayuki is more eccentric than we thought.”

At the time I felt this was a mean thing to say, but looking back, the comment does not seem too far off target.

The young couple avoided Seijo. With help from both sets of parents they made a down payment, took out a loan, and moved into a small condominium in Nogizaka, in the center of Tokyo. Concerned about Yoko’s frail health, Masayuki apparently did not want children, but Yoko felt that she ought to give the family an heir and, although in that sense a boy would have been better, she gave birth to a girl, her only child. The baby was born on a snowy day, so they named her Miyuki, with the characters for “deep snow.” Since she had fair skin like her father the name suited her, even with Yoko for a mother—though everyone ended up calling her Miki, which is what she called herself when she was little. Masayuki began teaching architectural history at his alma mater and eventually opened his own small architectural firm. After she married, Yoko gave up her singing and actually went to a vocational school so that she could help out in her husband’s company as an interior designer. But her mother was away from home so much that Yoko, who was concerned about her father’s heart condition, used to leave Miki with someone—the housekeeper, or a part-time office worker, or even Natsue herself, if she was there in Seijo kicking up her heels—and go back to Sapporo as often as she could.

Gradually it became apparent that Masayuki and Yoko were an unusually close couple—that he took exceptionally good care of her, not minding how it might look. In Karuizawa, when the fog rolled in, I often saw him running upstairs to fetch her sweater. If she so much as sneezed, he would give her a sharp, worried look, wherever they were. She was still highly excitable and had trouble falling asleep, so he made a habit of sitting at her bedside reading aloud to her until she dozed off, then doing more work before going to bed himself. His mother, Yayoi, learned about this only from living with them in Karuizawa, and, discreet though she usually was, when she found out she was so amazed that she couldn’t help telling the three sisters, and so everyone knew. Even Harue had to join in the laughter.

AS MORE TIME went by, both the Demon and Grammy Saegusa died, leaving only Grampy (who was in his eighties but looked no older than sixty-five) from that generation. But the sisters’ grandchildren went on increasing in number, so the Saegusa villa was if anything livelier than before. Since the house needed repairs each year and grew more cramped as the number of inhabitants increased, extensions were added at the back and on top, and a separate wing was built in front, slightly off to one side. The two elder sisters were at this point approaching sixty, and their looks inevitably had faded. Their energy was steadily flagging too, and efforts to re-create “the good old days” seemed to be too much for them. Eri and Mari left their husbands in Tokyo during the summer and came to Karuizawa on vacation with their children, but they were less fussy than the Saegusa sisters were. Sunday brunch became still more abbreviated, often consisting merely of ready-to-eat dishes from the Kinokuniya supermarket. Yoko, as the young mistress of the Shigemitsu family, was of course no longer looked on as a cut below the rest. In the daytime she shared her time between the two houses, but slept at night in the Shigemitsu house. She was sensitive in all her dealings with her in-laws. In fact, perhaps from Masayuki’s influence, she was in fact such an exemplary young wife that as time went by it began to seem that all the events at Chitose Funabashi and Oiwake were just figments of my imagination.