Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

Time went by in this fashion until there were only two nights left. Yoko and Masayuki usually went out together, whether for walks or to do the shopping, but there was nothing to stop her from going out alone. If Taro would just get word to her, he could see her in some way. He wanted me to make the initial contact, I supposed, and I was waiting for him to bring the subject up—or rather I was even trying in roundabout ways to draw it out of him, but he said nothing.

That night, knowing he only had two nights left, I took the plunge myself as I toyed with my teacup.

“Taro, you’re leaving the day after tomorrow, aren’t you?” It would be too awful if he went back to America like this. “Just what are you planning to do?” I looked him straight in the eye, trying to pin him down. Even without hearing Yoko’s name, he knew what I meant and looked away.

“Why are you being such a damn coward?”

He still looked away.

“Why?” I said again.

As I watched, his cheeks went rigid. The skin under his eyes twitched. If this were the old Taro, he would soon be in tears, I thought, but in the course of fifteen years—fifteen difficult years—the poor man had probably forgotten how to cry. All he could do was sit tight-lipped under the light.

As the silence dragged on for one minute, then two, then three, I felt something shift inside me, as if he had made some unspoken appeal.

Before I knew what I was doing, I went around to the other side of the table, crouched down beside his chair, and gently laid my left hand on the small of his back. My other hand I put on his knee. Then slowly, soothingly, I began to stroke him. It was like holding a crying child in my arms, yet somehow I was the one crying, unable to keep back the tears. Taro didn’t resist, but held strangely still. For a while I kept on silently stroking him, and as the warmth of my hands conveyed itself to him, little by little he eased up and began to talk in low snatches. I heard for the first time that he had been trying various approaches on his own.

Twice he had telephoned. Both times she had picked up the phone, but when he heard her say, “The Shigemitsu residence,” in a slightly affected voice, he had hung up, unable to speak. Every day he drove quietly around the two villas, hoping she would come outside, but she never did. Time and again he had started to write to her, but it was fifteen years since he had written anything in Japanese, so it wasn’t easy, and anyway, he had no idea what to say. Besides, sending a signed letter might cause her trouble, something he wished to avoid at all costs. The idea of sending an anonymous letter was so pitiful that the urge to write had died away.

For some reason he felt he couldn’t ask me to act as a go-between—that itself weighed heavily on me and made me sadder still. Not that I wanted to do it. There were Yoko’s husband Masayuki and their daughter, Miki, to consider, not to mention what others might think if they ever found out. But just imagining how Taro would feel if he went back to the United States without ever contacting Yoko nearly drove me to distraction. In Karuizawa the next day I did my work mechanically, following Yoko’s movements out of the corner of my eye. Finally, at dusk I made up my mind.

I had seen Yoko in an apron in our house a little while earlier. I asked Natsue, who was curled on the sofa in the parlor reading an old novel, where she was. “She’s in the attic making up the beds for Yuko and her children. Taking her time about it too, I must say.” Yuko would be getting in from San Francisco in a couple of days’ time with her girl and boy, Naomi and Ken, and Yoko was busy getting things ready for them. The Saegusa villa had been enlarged and had wings added on as the family grew, but Yuko and her family came only once every two or three years and stayed for no more than a couple of weeks, so they slept in the attic, in the former maids’ rooms.

I climbed the steep attic stairs and found all three white doors on the corridor standing ajar. One by one I checked the rooms, and in the last one, at the east end, I found Yoko sitting on the bed holding a pillow half stuffed into a pillowcase, looking absently out the window at the sky.

“Oh, hello, Fumiko. Are you going home now?”

By then in her early thirties, she had filled out and was finally losing her girlish looks, becoming more matronly, but perhaps because she was sitting in her old room she looked quite childlike to me and I couldn’t help talking to her as if she were still a little girl.

“What were you doing, sweetie?”

“Remembering when I was small.”

“Any time special?” I asked, wondering if she’d been remembering the days she spent with Taro.

“Back when I was really small. The first time you ever came here. That’s about my first real memory, you know.”

I too had vivid memories of the first summer I had ever spent in this villa. As I kept coming back summer after summer, over the years it grew increasingly difficult to sort out what had happened when. Events overlapped in my mind, memories were tangled. But that first summer was special. I could remember exactly what Yoko had looked like, lying in bed in this room with a white bandage around her head and a sullen look on her face.

She turned back to the window. “The morning sun shines in here through cracks in the blinds, but it’s completely different from the way it came through the rain shutters in the old house in Chitose Funabashi. Whenever I woke up here it always used to amaze me.”

She gave the pillow a smart pat and stood up, then walked over to the southern window and looked down at the garden below with a little smile. I moved next to her, and side by side we watched the three little girls at play.

“I was younger then than Miki is now.”

Her daughter, Miki, was in the second grade. To make up for her being an only child, they had decided to send her to Seijo Academy, where she’d become fast friends with the two little girls who were Harue’s granddaughters and her own second cousins. Harue had five grandchildren in all, Mari’s two boys and a girl and Eri’s boy and girl. Adding Miki to the mix meant there were three girls, so the “three sisters” tradition continued in the third generation, at least in some form. In Karuizawa Yoko spent a good deal of time at the Saegusa villa during the daytime, partly because her mother was always asking her help with every little thing, but also because Miki was always playing with her cousins. By coincidence, all three were the same age.

Miki’s laughter sounded especially shrill. Seen from above, the girls were hard to tell apart at first since they were all the same size, but Miki was the most active of the three and soon stood out. Yoko followed her around with her eyes, delight on her face.

That little girl was fortunate in every possible respect. To begin with, she was the Shigemitsu heir, which naturally gave her a certain prestige in everyone’s eyes. Yayoi and Masao of course doted on her as their only grandchild. And Natsue, being Natsue, fussed endlessly over the girl, her one grandchild in Japan. Not only that, Miki luckily took after her father but also for some reason closely resembled her maternal grandmother, Natsue. This meant she had the “Hirano face,” a synonym for beauty, and was the prettiest of the three little girls. Even Harue, with all her prejudices, seemed partial to Miki, favoring her over the offspring of her two sons-in-law, neither of whom she had ever cared for much. With every advantage on her side, it only stood to reason that Miki should be growing up in a manner quite different from what her mother had experienced as a child, always looked down on and left out of things.

“Time for her to put on a sweater,” murmured Yoko.