Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

“It’s a good thing you went to America, isn’t it?” I said to him one day when I was feeling ashamed of my vehement opposition at the time.

“Yes, it is.”

“What was the best part?”

He thought for a moment and then answered with a mean-looking smile. “Losing my hatred of Japan and the Japanese. Now I’m actually grateful.”

Back in the old days he had definitely felt deeply resentful, and even after crossing the Pacific he hadn’t been able to shake off certain grudges for quite a while. But over time he came to feel that, compared with other immigrants who’d arrived in America equally without resources, he was one of the lucky ones. Whatever hardships he might have endured as a child, he had still grown up in postwar Japan, free of famine or war. Not only that, once he was in America, his nationality had allowed him to ride the wave of Japanese economic growth by working for a Japanese company. So, in the end, he’d come to think he ought to feel grateful to the country.

That smile was still on his lips, but he sounded serious enough.

“So you’re glad to be Japanese?”

He didn’t answer the question.

A YEAR PASSED in the blink of an eye, then another and another. Maybe it was the change of life, but the stiffness in my shoulders got worse until finally I gave up my sewing, which caused no inconvenience to anyone. Untroubled by any financial or emotional strains, my days passed peacefully from one season to the next. The town of Miyota became more and more developed, and the sight of butterflies in spring grew rarer, along with the trilling of insects in the autumn grasses. Only the sight of Mount Asama, peering out from between the surrounding hills, was unchanged. My life flowed on uneventfully, punctuated by Taro’s visits. I would happily have gone on living like this, except his generosity toward me made for unexpected changes.

It began with my husband’s sudden death.

It happened five years after Taro’s return, in January 1986, when we had been married seventeen years. One night he felt unwell on the toilet and called for me. As I was helping him back to the futon he felt faint, and then he was gone. He was only sixty-two. His blood pressure had been high, but after his sixtieth birthday he had stopped helping our daughter-in-law’s family in their pickle business and spent his time in a leisurely way tending a vegetable patch the size of a postage stamp. I never dreamed he would have a stroke.

His death completely changed my status in the family. To put it bluntly, I had no real place in it any longer. Even in retirement, my husband had remained head of the household. When the eldest boy took his place, he and his wife naturally made all the decisions. They both addressed me as “Mother” and treated me with respect, but he was already an adolescent when I married into the family, and I had never been a mother to him in any real way. His wife was able to devote all her time to their three small children, and showed no sign of needing a helping hand. Still, I couldn’t simply lounge around the sitting room all day reading, which I’d been too discreet to do after marrying. A woman’s lot is never easy.

I began to think that, once the forty-ninth-day memorial service was over, I would be more comfortable moving out to a small place close by where I could live on my own. It didn’t take me long to come up with the idea of staying in the Oiwake cottage as a caretaker. I had been involved with that cottage from the start, doing everything from helping with the purchase of the land to going over alone to give it an airing; it was the one place on earth in which I felt I had a small stake. During the cold winter months from December to March, as well as the times when Taro and Yoko came, I could stay in my husband’s house. And thanks to the long years he’d put in at the town hall, I had a small monthly widow’s pension, plus savings that I could use as I pleased. Several years back, after my husband received his retirement bonus, when it came time to rebuild the house our eldest son had applied for a generous loan, so part of that bonus had remained unspent—and with my husband gone, that money now belonged to me. There were also the yearly payments of 600,000 yen for “cottage maintenance” that I had let accumulate. As long as I didn’t have to pay any rent, I could live comfortably on what I had.

CEMETERY

As soon as this occurred to me, I sat right down and wrote a letter to Taro. He had told me to call him collect if anything came up, but in those days I found making overseas calls rather intimidating. I soon got a call from Taro.

“Fumiko, how about working as my assistant ?” he proposed. He said the word assistant in English, which sounded to me like “sistan,” leaving me baffled for a moment. He was proposing that I rent an apartment in some convenient part of Tokyo and work for him. Thanks to the booming economy, he was traveling to Tokyo in search of investors more frequently these days, and because staying in hotels all the time was becoming a nuisance, recently he’d been considering renting a condominium. Ideally, I would move into my own place and keep the condominium shipshape so that he could live there whenever he was in town. It would be nice if I did some office work for him too, he added. The legal assistant who used to handle his affairs at Nakada Associates had quit to take care of her elderly parents. Though a succession of temporary workers had taken her place, they changed so often that it was hard to get anything done that required continuity, and he had been thinking about hiring someone as his personal assistant anyway.

Taro was doing all the talking, unlike his usual self, and I just listened. “Some office work too,” he had said. But I knew this was only to make me feel less beholden to him. He wasn’t expecting anything more from me than what a maid does, and even then there wouldn’t actually be much work. He just needed reasons to give me enough of a monthly stipend so that I could live in the big city by myself.

He seemed to be waiting for me to say something, but I had no idea how to react. Dinner was over and I could see the grandchildren on the tatami floor squabbling over what television program to watch, but I felt entirely detached from the scene, as if I weren’t really there. Eventually my common sense told me that I shouldn’t take advantage of Taro’s goodwill to that extent.

“If you want a place to live in Tokyo, Taro,” I said, “I could come down from Oiwake from time to time to keep it up for you.”

“Come on, Fumiko.” He sounded exasperated. “Why not go to live in Tokyo yourself? Have a place of your own there, and go back to Oiwake whenever you feel like it.”

I fell silent again. For the past few years, I had been content just to have him take me to a stylish restaurant two or three times a year. Tokyo was far away, and for the past seventeen years I had never thought of living there again. Yet something deep inside me stirred as I heard him say this.

My daughter-in-law, kneeling on the tatami, finished stacking dirty dishes on a large tray; she stood up, hoisting the heavy load, carried it past me, and disappeared into the kitchen.

“You always wanted to live in Tokyo alone and in style, remember? You could even take classes.”

“What do you mean, classes?”

“I don’t know exactly, but you know, culture centers or hobby courses or whatever—schools for ladies of a certain age with time on their hands.”

I smiled despite myself.

“How much would you be paying me?”

“As much as you want.”