Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

“They say you’re going to art school.”

“Yes, that’s my plan.”

“So, you want to be a painter.” Before I could reply, he chuckled and added, “Wear a beret and all that?”

I burst out laughing. It was funny to hear him come up with such a quaint image of what an artist is, and even funnier to hear him trying to be funny. Still smiling, I shook my head. “No, it’s more that my English isn’t very good. I don’t feel comfortable going to a regular college.” I nearly went on to say that I liked painting, but not studying. I stopped myself in time. Those were things I knew I shouldn’t say in front of him. I told him instead: “My father’s always been impressed by how hard you study.”

He looked away, his face hardening. I suppose I may have expected him to come out with some platitude about how grateful he was to my father. But he said nothing. I took this as a rebuff. We each turned our attention to the stretch of shimmering water.

I remembered my mother’s remark that Azuma must be ambitious. Perhaps that was what affected me so strangely standing next to him. But what kind of future could this man possibly look forward to? For me, the future would begin in three months, in the fall. It would sweep me up and carry me into a new world: a new town, a new school, a new set of people. I myself would change, not only into someone different but someone better, higher. Azuma, in contrast, in three months’ time, would still be living in the basement of that gabby old lady’s house, driving that same nicked yellow Corvair, working in that same repair room with the glaring fluorescent light, surrounded by the same people telling the same jokes. Would it be much different if it were three years rather than three months? The sense of being rebuffed by him was quickly gone. I felt guilty beside the young man next to me.

The blue sea sparkled in the distance.

Something in the water nearby caught his eye.

“It’s a dead seagull.”

I too saw something white floating there, but when I tried to take a closer look, he stepped in front of me as if to block my view. Turning toward the shore, he said, “Let’s go back.” Following his gaze, I saw our group, all with heads of black hair, returning to the picnic area.

I LEFT THE group again when the men pulled out their gloves and bats and started playing baseball on a field they’d reserved, with the women chatting and watching the game. My parents, feeling no need to join in, sat at a picnic table in the shade, absorbed in conversation with Mrs. Cohen. No one would notice my absence.

A small creek flowed through the park. Following the creek was my favorite route whenever I went there, because I could always find my way back. Besides, I could be totally alone. Suburban Americans, who seldom got out of their cars, apparently didn’t subscribe to the idea of just taking a walk, and this was before jogging became popular. I walked for quite a while without meeting anyone, and when I felt I might have gone too far, made a turn and headed back until I knew I was near the picnic grounds. There were clusters of hydrangea bushes in full bloom along the path. I stepped off the path and lay down on the earth, hidden by the flowers and their tracery of bright green leaves.

In the suburbs of New York, where virtually all the ground was covered with either asphalt or manicured lawn, there was no smell of the earth. But there in the park I was able to breathe in the rich scent of black earth being slowly awakened by the heat of the early summer sun, and with it the raw and sensual smell of warm fresh grass. I could even hear the beating of insect wings, though faintly. All this brought back memories of the days when Nanae and I made mud pies in the small garden of our small home in Tokyo, the hum of cicadas in our ears. It was less an exercise in nostalgia than simply a feeling of wholeness that came over me. Flat on my back, with my eyes closed, I lost track of where I was and felt the onset of summer in every part of me. I forgot about time, about Japan and America—about me.

When I opened my eyes, the first thing I saw was a heavy head of blue-violet hydrangea blossom dangling over me and, through layers of green leaves, someone’s white-shirted back beside the creek. It was Taro Azuma: he was the only one of the men who never wore a polo shirt. Crouched down and hugging his knees as boys do, he was gazing into the water.

Another person wanting to be alone.

If I hadn’t been planning to leave for art school in Boston at the end of the summer, I might have fallen in love with him, carried away by the sentimentality of that moment. I now know how horribly embarrassing that would have been for him—and for me—but my head luckily was full of what lay ahead of me. When I went to Boston, a town full of students from all over the world, I would surely meet some young Japanese man who would run his fingers through his straight black hair and speak to me in eloquent Japanese about art, life, and even politics. We would have a full-blown love affair, the kind described in novels. Whether because I was hopelessly anachronistic from reading those old books—or because I was just an ordinary girl of the time (or of any time)—it was my basic assumption that the man of my dreams would be far more knowledgeable than I was, a reader of books beyond my ken. Beside that image, Azuma, burdened with a life that left no room for books, seemed little more than a shadow.

Someone shouted in the distance, and Azuma stood up. I watched until he disappeared, and then followed.

IN SEPTEMBER I left for Boston. A totally different world did indeed open up for me. I lived on the third floor of an old brick apartment building where I had cockroaches for neighbors and smelled garbage whenever I opened the back door that led to the basement. Dinner often meant opening a can of tuna or Spam at home or ordering a Big Mac at McDonald’s. Dirty clothes piled up, as I was too lazy to go to the laundromat just around the corner. A poster with a red clenched fist urging revolution hung on the wall. Even someone as out of it as I was somehow got caught up in the times: I grew my hair long and wore jeans; I drank beer straight from the can and, if offered a joint, took a puff, trying to fit in. Though a foreigner, I suppose I began to live a life like any ordinary American student’s, which was far from anything I had read about in my beloved old novels but at least satisfied my curiosity. Lost in that new world, my horizons widened without my being aware of it.

I only became aware of the change when I went home to Long Island for Thanksgiving. Though I had been away for only a couple of months, the place seemed duller than I’d ever realized. The impression was even stronger when, several weeks later, I came home again for the winter break and went to the New Year’s party my father’s company threw.

Christmas was something Americans celebrated fairly soberly at home. New Year’s, in contrast, was anything but sober. Men and women let themselves go, partying till late at night, the liquor flowing freely. My father’s branch had kept growing larger, and so that year they held the event in a local hotel ballroom for the first time, inviting American employees and their families, doing everything the American way, establishing it as a new custom. My mother, with both her daughters gone, was becoming daily more involved with colleagues at her office in Manhattan and was just as glad not to have to host the office party anymore.

Nanae, at this point a junior at the conservatory, had broken up with her highborn boyfriend and brought home someone else, not only less respectable but rather cocky and worldly-wise. They left for the city in the afternoon to spend the night on their own, probably to avoid going to the party, but I was looking forward to it. There would not only be drinking but dancing; and the prospect of dancing with Japanese people and speaking in Japanese was appealing. I also looked forward to seeing all the familiar faces from the company.