Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

“I see.” Perhaps she was satisfied, for her breathing gradually got quieter. She stared at him. I thought she was calming down at last, when all of a sudden she blazed up again: “Even so, I’ll never forgive you!”

“What for? …”

As she took a step back, he moved forward. She retreated further, stopping when her bare heel came up against the threshold.

“For going off that night and leaving me, and never coming back …”

Fifteen years had gone by, but the pain of that night seemed to revive in her as if it had been only days ago. It was as if she had spent every night of those intervening years reliving it, staring out into the darkness.

“I waited and waited for you.” Slowly she was giving way to tears. “Even afterward. I waited, and waited, and waited …” Her face scrunched up, making her look even more like the little girl she had once been. “For years I waited for you.”

With a wail, she turned and ran barefoot out onto the porch and down the steps. Taro quickly started after her, but the low table was in his way, and by the time he reached the porch she must have already gone out through the gate. I had been standing transfixed, watching the two of them, but after a minute I too slipped on my sandals and went out.

Looking up the road from beside the gate, I saw them together in the moonlight.

Taro had fallen to his knees. I thought perhaps he was going to lay his forehead flat on the ground and apologize, the way he had when they were small, but instead he reached out with both arms, wrapped them around her knees, and abruptly lifted her off the ground and swung her over his shoulder. When he came through the wooden posts I could see her bent double over his shoulder, her arms and head dangling limply down his back. Before, she’d been excited and shrill; now she was like a dead woman.

He bent down and laid her gently in a rattan chair. She slumped back and watched vacantly as he wiped the dirt from the soles of her feet. A trace of resentment flickered in her eyes. After a while she brushed his hand away impatiently. Then she slid off the chair and sat flat on the floor, knees together and legs splayed as she once used to do, her eyes still vacant as she took his hand and began to speak almost in a trance.

“Is it really true that you’re not married?”

She ticked off the fingers of one hand, then the other, as if addressing the question to them. She might have been playing a game of “he loves me, he loves me not,” with fingers instead of petals. Starting with the little finger, she would work her way to the thumb of one hand, then do the same with the other before starting all over again. Repeating this seemed to help her regain possession of herself.

“Don’t work with your hands much anymore, do you?” She sounded a bit shy, her voice now normal. “And you really never had a girlfriend?” She slid her hands up and touched his arm through the sleeve of his shirt, pressing it with all ten fingers as if she could scarcely believe she was doing it.

“No, I never did.”

“Truly?”

“Really and truly.”

She sighed with contentment and then, moving her legs to one side, lay her head in Taro’s lap and quietly began to cry. Taro, sitting cross-legged, looked down at her, not moving a muscle. After a minute he closed his eyes and leaned forward slightly, inhaling deeply—perhaps checking that the smell of her neck was the same as in years past.

The ceiling lamp surrounded the two of them in a circle of light.

I had always known that Yoko still cared for Taro even after she married Masayuki, but until I saw her with him that night, I never realized how much. Or realized, I should say, how her feelings for him had steadily deepened after he left her that time. But until I saw what happened next, I never knew, either, how deeply she had come to love Masayuki as well.

Thinking that my presence couldn’t possibly be wanted anymore, I had just laid a hand on the screen door to leave when I saw headlights approach and stop in front of the cottage. It was Masayuki.

“There’s a car out front,” I said. My voice caught in my throat. I realized that I hadn’t spoken for quite a while.

Yoko quickly raised her head from Taro’s lap and said to herself, “Maybe it’s him.” She scrambled to her feet and came to stand beside me, looking outside. The car was parked in front of the gate with its headlights on. She opened the screen door without hesitation, put on her shoes properly this time, and ran down the steps, disappearing into the darkness. Left behind, with the object of all this happiness suddenly gone, Taro sat alone in the circle of light with a stupid look on his face.

From some distance away came a steady murmur of talking or crying. She did not come back. I sighed and sat down at the table again. Taro uncrossed his legs and stood up, then sat down on the rattan chair, as if he didn’t know what to do with himself. He was silent, and so was I. Finally, knowing that if I stayed out any later my family would worry, I told him I should be on my way, took my car keys out of my purse, and stood up. For the first time he looked me squarely in the face, but still said nothing. Outside, the car’s headlights were now turned off, but the car was visible in the light from the porch and the moon. Two figures were illuminated as well. Masayuki was leaning against the car with his forehead pillowed on both arms, crying. Wisps of his hair, which had never lost its brownish tint, had a bright golden sheen in the moonlight. Yoko had her arms wrapped tightly around him, clinging like a cicada to a tree, and she too was in tears. “I’ll never leave you … That could never happen … You know we’ll be together all our lives …” Through her sobbing came these broken snatches.

WHEN I WENT to Karuizawa the next day, Yoko wasn’t there, having gone out in the morning. Miki was playing with her cousins while Masayuki strolled restlessly around the yard. Yoko came back just before noon. Masayuki went out to meet her, greeting her warmly on the spot, and together they went for a walk, brushing shoulders and murmuring.

That evening, without a word to me, Taro flew back to New York from Tokyo’s Narita Airport.

OVER THE NEXT twelve months Taro visited Oiwake twice more, once in October and again in May. Both times, Yoko left her daughter, Miki, in Masayuki’s care and made the trip up from Tokyo. Whether they slept together, I have no idea. All I could tell was that Taro seemed unwilling to have me see the two of them there. I had no desire to see them together anyway. When I went into the cottage after they left, I found innocent traces of their activities: they must have been to the antique shops in Komoro or somewhere, because the kitchen cupboards were full of bowls and plates that, to my eyes, looked less antique than just plain old; they had amused themselves with sparklers for old times’ sake, littering the ground with black threadlike cinders; and birdhouses hung from the branches again. I aired the rooms and while I was at it swept up the leaves and pulled weeds.

I told Taro to let me know if anything needed attention, but as he made no demands, I went ahead and arranged to make the cottage more habitable, getting the refrigerator fixed, for instance—although it turned out to be too old to salvage, so I bought a smallish new one instead. Toward the end of the year, to my surprise, I received notice that a payment of 600,000 yen had been deposited in my account for a year’s “cottage maintenance”—amounting to 50,000 yen per month. Once the cottage was set up, there had been precious little work for me to do. I considered sending back the money untouched but changed my mind, thinking it would probably only be an annoyance for Taro to have me make a fuss about a sum of money that meant nothing to him. I decided to save it for a rainy day.