Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

THE NEXT SUMMER when I went to work in Karuizawa, I told the three sisters that Taro, the boy who had made a fortune in America, was actually behind the purchase of the Oiwake cottage. When he first returned to Japan, I explained, he had phoned me out of the blue from the Prince Hotel in Karuizawa, and that was the first I knew anything about it. Which wasn’t entirely untrue. But Taro’s call had come eighteen months earlier, and I personally had made the cottage ready for him, so it wasn’t the whole truth, either. I would have preferred to get by without telling the sisters anything, but if they happened to find out later, I did not want to have to pretend to be in the dark, so I’d decided to break the news.

They looked at first as if their hearts had stopped. Natsue’s shock was the most apparent, since she was the one who had been so quick to dispose of the property.

“No!” she shrieked, making a circle of her shapely, lipsticked mouth. “What could he possibly want with that old place!”

“I know what,” said Harue spitefully. “I’ll bet he just wanted to own something of the Utagawas’. Honestly, the thought of that boy’s vindictiveness gives me the chills.”

“Or he wanted to own something that brought back childhood memories,” said Fuyue thoughtfully. But then she added, “Either way, that property is no great prize, if you ask me,” so you couldn’t tell if she was defending him or running him down. Her sisters chimed in.

“That’s certainly true. It’s in the middle of nowhere even for Oiwake.”

“So even if he did buy it, the price wasn’t all that much.”

“It’s a dinky plot of land.”

I don’t know why I did it—perhaps I was indignant at their stubborn failure to acknowledge just how rich and successful Taro really was—but I said something I probably had no business telling them.

“As a matter of fact,” I said, “he bought up quite a large parcel of land, including all the surrounding property. The lot behind, the ones on either side, and the ones facing it too.”

All three widened their big, round eyes and looked at each other.

“Is he that rich?” This honestly inquiring remark came from Fuyue.

“I don’t exactly know.”

“I said he was vindictive and that proves it,” Harue spat out. “Going to such ridiculous lengths. That just takes the cake.”

Natsue, as Yoko’s mother, seemed to realize that they couldn’t go on cutting up Taro forever. After a little pause, she bit her lip and looked up at me. “What about … does Yoko know?”

I wondered if she had any idea how much she looked like Yoko at such times. It was really quite funny.

“Yes, apparently.”

“She does? What if Masayuki finds out? What’s she going to do then?”

“Actually he seems to be aware of the situation too. I think she probably told him herself.”

“Wha-a-t!” Natsue gave another little shriek. “Heaven help us! This is exactly why I never took to that child. I can never fathom what she’s thinking.”

“But I don’t think her in-laws know,” I said quickly. “I believe Masayuki doesn’t want to cause them any unnecessary concern, so he probably won’t tell them.”

This last was pure conjecture on my part, but I said it to stop the Saegusa sisters from saying anything inappropriate to Yayoi, or at least to delay the blow. I don’t know how much they did tell her in the end. Harue, I suspect, would have dropped hints at every chance, but Yayoi never spoke about it directly to me.

A few days later, the three of them went all the way to Oiwake to have a look for themselves, Fuyue driving. After they came back, Harue said to me with an inquisitive look, “Judging from the outside, he means to use the cottage without rebuilding it, wouldn’t you say? But it does look as if perhaps it has been repaired.” She was flanked by her younger sisters, all three of them wearing the same inquisitive expression. They seemed to suspect me of involvement, but I pretended to know nothing about it. Periodically they would ask me leading questions about Taro, but I never took the bait. Their three faces would look back at me with dissatisfaction, though they refrained from probing further.

FROM THEN ON, Taro came regularly to Oiwake two or three times a year, staying a week or two each time. He avoided the summers, when everyone was in Karuizawa, mostly coming in late spring or in the fall. Yoko would go to meet him on the pretext of buying antiques as an interior designer. Her frequent absences in the past to look after her ailing father in Sapporo meant that fortunately Miki was used to having her mother disappear from time to time. Since the girl was allowed to go to the Shigemitsus in Seijo after school and spend a few nights next door to her cousins, she actually looked forward to those occasions. More often Taro went to Tokyo on business and met up with Yoko there. On rare occasions she took a flight abroad to see him. What was extraordinary was Masayuki’s reaction. Since I myself had played the role of go-between in reuniting Taro and Yoko, for a while I didn’t dare look him in the face. At some point, however, that reservation disappeared. Whether others noticed it or not, to me it was clear that he and Yoko were even more loving than before. It was as if, with Taro’s sudden reappearance, the three of them had taken off hand in hand, out of the fog and into a realm of blinding light.

AS FOR ME, every time Taro came to Oiwake it became customary for him to give me some sort of treat. He seemed to think it would be wrong to spend time only with Yoko, and since he was embarrassed to have me around when the two of them were together, he made a point of taking me out to dinner before she turned up in Oiwake or after she went back to Tokyo. The first place we went to was an Italian restaurant called Scorpione at the foot of Mount Hanare. I passed it on the road between Karuizawa and Miyota, so it was a familiar sight, but the small parking lot was always crammed with foreign cars that even I could tell were expensive makes, and the restaurant gave an impression of being out of the reach of us locals—which was why when Taro asked me if there was somewhere I would like to go, it immediately came to mind. That first night I felt intimidated and parked my minicar with its Nagano license plate on a back street, walking down the dark road to the restaurant. But people change with astonishing speed: after two or three visits, I felt thoroughly at ease there and began to think of branching out. We ate not only at the restaurants in the historic Mampei Hotel and the Kajimanomori Hotel, but also at the Chinese restaurant Eirin near Karuizawa station and the Japanese place, Daimasu, in Middle Karuizawa—in other words, at all the smartest, most desirable spots in town. We even ventured down to Komoro to eat slices of koi washed in cold water, a local delicacy. I tried to eat out with Taro in the daytime for my husband’s sake, but sometimes we went out at night. My husband was generous, though, and understood that I had connections with a world that wasn’t his; and when I put on a little makeup and went out the door dressed up, he saw me off without a word of complaint.

BAMBOO GROVE

With Taro I would talk about my family—my husband, our eldest son and his wife, our granddaughter Ami. He listened, managing to look as if he cared. I talked about the families in Karuizawa too. Yoko must have chattered about them as well, for he surprised me by knowing the names not just of Yuko’s children, Naomi and Ken, but also of Mari and Eri’s five. He told me about America in bits and pieces. At first when he worked as a chauffeur he had been amazed at the size of his employer’s house, but years later he was hobnobbing with investors from all over the country and no longer batted an eye at even the biggest mansions. His work consisted of finding investors in order to set up companies to manufacture new medical instruments, then selling them at a profit. He explained without expecting me to understand, so I only half listened. I was just impressed by the scale of his operations; he mentioned place-names from around the world. If it had been anybody but Taro, I would have dismissed half the talk as hot air.