Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

It was just one o’clock when I drove up to the hotel. A man in a smart dark suit—Taro—was seated on a sofa in the lobby. He seemed to recognize me instantly too, getting swiftly to his feet. It wasn’t only female vanity that made me pray that he wouldn’t be disappointed or feel awkward around me, that I wouldn’t look painfully old. As to what feelings he may have had on his return to Japan, I had no idea, but I did not want to ruin whatever memories connected him to his past. He’d made a reservation, he said. When we entered the hotel restaurant he held the door for me, ushering me through in a manner I’d never seen anywhere but in foreign movies. Although I seemed to make him a bit nervous, he was completely at ease with the headwaiter, who bowed politely and led us to a corner table marked “Reserved.” His way of walking across the plush carpet, sitting in the chair, and taking the menu was flowing and natural. That alone showed how far he had come in the world.

When he sat down across from me, I had my first good look at him. He gave an impression of intense vitality. It seemed incredible that he had once been a boy whose snotty nose I used to wipe. Never in all my life had I imagined dining in such a place, face-to-face with a man who looked like this.

“Is this your first trip back?” I said, to start the conversation.

“Second.” As if embarrassed, he opened the menu and studied it.

“When was the first?”

“I came in November.”

“Last year?”

“Mm-hm.”

“On business?”

“No.”

He looked up. Then for the first time he in turn looked me full in the face, his eyes roaming from my hairline to my throat as if to assess how much I had aged. I didn’t know whether to be relieved that I was wearing a gray suit that was on the sedate side or to wish I’d chosen something a bit more daring.

“I went to Mrs. Utagawa’s grave first thing,” he told me. “Maybe the one person who’d have been pleased to see me back.”

He said this with a wry smile, and I couldn’t help joining in. It was true: the old lady was the one person he might have counted on to welcome him wholeheartedly after an absence of fifteen years.

“I thought her grave at least would be the same, but it was all different …”

“Her son died.” When Takero died, the ancestral graves and that of old Mrs. Utagawa had finally been combined into one family grave.

“I know,” he said, glancing at me.

“You knew that?”

Yes, he said: he’d read his obituary in a Japanese newspaper.

The waiter came to ask if we’d like something to drink before lunch, and Taro waved his left hand at me, urging me to order. Since it wouldn’t really do for a wife to go home with the smell of alcohol on her breath, I asked for water, and so did he.

“Aren’t you going to have a drink?” I asked, memories of the days when he used to drain bottles of shochu vivid in my mind.

Again he looked down at the menu before saying, “I’m on the wagon.”

“Since when?”

“Since sailing across the Pacific.”

“Fifteen years ago?”

“Yes, ma’ am.”

“You haven’t had a drink in all that time?”

He shook his head, eyes still on the menu.

“Really?”

“Not a drop.”

“Well, you certainly drank enough for a lifetime in those six months.”

For a while we were silent. When I spoke again, my tone was surprisingly caustic.

“So you reformed.”

Taro said nothing, his eyes still cast down.

“Good for you.”

If he’d done it out of shame over those months of hard drinking in my apartment, then was that whole period something he wanted to forget completely, to pretend never happened? As if my cynical tone had made him stiffen, he turned a page of the menu and answered in a cheerless voice, “When I find out there’s no point in life, that’s when I’ll start up again.”

“Oh, I see.” Impulsively, I added, “Life has no point to it anyway, and you know it.”

He looked up in mild surprise and studied me with an expression that was hard to read. Here I’d rushed over after hearing he was back, intending to give him a warm welcome … Under his scrutiny, I felt ashamed of failing to be pleasant.

There was a long pause during which the waiter came to take our orders. After he left, it was Taro’s turn to ask a question.

“How’s marriage?”

“Mine, you mean?”

He looked ruffled for a moment, then nodded.

“Fine, thank you.”

“A good husband this time?”

“Yes, a good husband.”

I looked away. Not because I was lying but because his probing eyes made me uncomfortable.

“I got rich,” he said after a pause.

“I know.” I laughed. “You’re a big name now.”

“Hardly.” The old, gloomy look I’d seen so many times before came faintly back into his eyes. “I was such a money-grubber, I’m still an uneducated boor.” Another searching look. “Fumiko, is there anything you want?” He said this with his eyes slightly upturned. “Anything money can buy, I mean.”

“No …”

Most of the time I lived from day to day thinking, “If only we had a bit more cash …,” but that feeling had vanished. When he put the question to me like that, I knew at once that the only things people ever really want are the things money can’t buy.

“Nothing?”

“Not a thing,” I said, then added: “The moon. That’s what I want. The moon.” I spoke the cliché for the fun of it, but even to my ears it didn’t sound funny.

Taro looked straight at me before looking down at the tabletop. Then he said, “I’m the one who bought the Oiwake place.”

How can I describe my reaction? I thought I knew how dogged he was, how annoyingly obstinate, but perhaps in the fifteen years since I’d seen him last, my knowledge of him had dimmed. I felt my face turn pale.

“That was you, Taro?”

“Yeah, it was me.”

He answered with a casualness that was perhaps deliberate, then looked up and added an explanation. “I used a Japanese company as a broker so Natsue wouldn’t know. It would’ve attracted too much attention if a foreign company had gone after a place like that.”

On reading in a Japanese paper that Takero Utagawa was dead, he’d had a sudden impulse to buy the Oiwake cottage, he said. The purpose of his trip to Japan the previous November had been to look up the real estate agency and have them contact my family in Saku. That’s how he found out I was married and living in Miyota.

“Did Natsue say anything?” He asked this nonchalantly, as if to cool off my reaction.

“About what?”

“About the cottage.”

“She did call last week, as a matter of fact.”

As I gave him the gist of the phone call, a faint smile came to his face. The reason he’d tried to push through the sale so the transfer would take place in midwinter was that he figured that Natsue, always the laziest of the three sisters, would be unlikely to come to freezing Nagano at that time of year and would instead contact me with instructions over what still remained inside the house. He’d worked it all out ahead of time. His ability to see several moves ahead was now combined with an adult’s ability to take action. There was something unnerving about it.

“Actually, I have a favor to ask of you, Fumiko,” he said rather formally. I felt my face stiffen.

“I want you to leave the place just the way it is.”

I looked at him, deflated. His strong, masculine face was completely serious.

“Don’t throw anything away, just leave everything the way it used to be for when I take over.”

His determination to keep everything the same had also led him to negotiate the purchase of the lots behind, on either side, in front, and diagonally across from the cottage. It seemed crazy to me.