Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

After the meal, we felt washed out—it was like the mood after a festival. In a completely different voice Yoko said, “Taro, you’re tired.” This wasn’t a question. She said it in the gently scolding tone a mother uses to a child.

“No, I’m not.”

“Oh, yes you are.”

In fact, instead of his usual direct flight from New York he had come on a long, roundabout route, stopping on business in Tel Aviv, The Hague, and London before arriving in Tokyo. He had bags under his eyes.

“While we do the dishes, you take a little nap.”

“I’m not sleepy.”

“Now, now. When we’re finished I’ll bring you some nice cherries for dessert, so go ahead and lie down, close your eyes and get some rest.” She twisted around and patted the sofa they were leaning against. They were sitting on the carpet with their backs against the sofa and I was across from them, also on the carpet, my back to an armchair.

“I’m okay.”

“Be a good boy.”

“I’m okay, really.”

“Come on. Be good.”

Tipsy as I was, I listened to this conversation with my ears pricked up. Yoko spoke to him in a way I had never heard her do before, a gentle, soothing way. Did she speak to him this sweetly as a child when the two of them were alone? I wondered. Or had she picked it up only after they met again as adults? Taro looked embarrassed. He shot me a glance and told her a little gruffly, “I said I’m okay.”

Yoko wasn’t bothered by this and simply said, “What am I going to do with you?” She got up and knelt down on the sofa, placing herself directly behind Taro, then reached up and flicked the switches on the wall to turn off the lights. The soft recessed light that was trained on the coffee table went dark, as did what looked like some antique Chinese lamps on the end tables. The big room was lit only by one dim lamp, made in a modern style with handmade Japanese paper.

“What are you doing?”

“If you won’t sleep, I’ll ‘grandma’ you.”

What she said made no sense to me. I thought I must have heard it wrong, but she said the same thing again.

“Okay? I’ll ‘grandma’ you.”

Taro seemed to know what this meant, since he tried to sit up and get away, but she was already holding him down by the shoulders. While she tapped them lightly and rhythmically with her fingertips, she leaned forward and whispered, “Good boy, sweet boy,” breathing the words in his ear. Whether it was the effect of her fingertips or her whispering, Taro soon lost the power to resist, his whole body unable to move. The moment this happened, she slipped her hands around in front of his face, fingers together, and blindfolded him.

For a bit there was silence.

Then—how on earth was she able to produce a voice so haunting? The sound of an old woman whose lilting voice was a memory; the voice of a woman twice her age, low and broken. She sang a lullaby, a song full of sadness, the kind of song a woman who never bore a child might sing to a child who never had a mother.

Nennen korori yo okororiyo

Boya wa yoi ko da nenne shina .

(Hushabye hushabye

Good little boy, go to sleep.)

She sang it slowly, very slowly, with her eyes closed, rocking slightly forward and back. When she had sung it three times, she gently lifted her hands from his face. For a time no one spoke. Taro’s eyes were still closed. I was sitting with my arms around my knees, staring into the darkness. I felt transported into the past—a past beyond their childhood and deep into my own—a time before I could remember, though one in which a vague sadness had already taken root.

SEEING YOKO AND Taro as children, I never imagined that one day the kind of serenity I saw that night would ever come to them. Adulthood alone could not have done it. I believe the delicate balance they achieved was thanks largely to Masayuki. An outsider like myself was unable to see this till the very end, and yet even so I must have begun to sense something as the years went by. That would explain why an exchange between Yoko and me that took place not long after their curious three-sided relationship had begun often came back to me later.

“What Taro does is actually helping humanity,” Yoko declared one day, out of the blue. “That’s what Masayuki says.”

She said this expecting me to approve. But at the time I was still unused to their relationship, and my first reaction was the usual mixture of skepticism and dismay: just what was going on with these people?

It could have been her father’s influence. Yoko always did like to go on about what would or would not be of service to mankind—the prerogative, or possibly the sheer nerve, of someone who has enjoyed a privileged upbringing. The amount of money involved was never very much, but she joined a program called the Foster Parents Plan that helped educate poor children around the world; she also responded to the year-end appeals for donations to charity by NHK, the national broadcasting service; and she regularly contributed to Doctors Without Borders. I’m sure she didn’t think for a minute that any of this alone qualified her as a benefactress herself—but benefiting mankind was a principle she believed in. The richer Taro became, the uneasier she undoubtedly felt about his wasting his life making money when by rights he might have been doing something more humanitarian. But Masayuki made her see how wrong she was. Raising capital to mass-produce newly developed medical devices allowed them to become widely available at affordable prices, thereby directly benefiting humanity; so, ironically enough, Taro was useful to a far greater number of people than he could ever have been by merely becoming a good doctor. Her husband’s comment helped soothe Yoko’s conscience, and Taro’s too.

“That’s what Masayuki says,” she repeated, in the same reverent tone she had always used in childhood. She made it sound as if whatever he said was the pure and simple truth. “He says Taro’s work is in a completely different category from a useless field like architecture.”

Hearing this overstatement attributed to Masayuki, I felt obliged to protest. “Architecture is a form of art, so why should it be useful?”

“Yes, but he doesn’t mean ‘useless’ that way, he means it really has no value.”

Back when he was studying in America, Masayuki had still believed that architecture could be used to beautify the world. But as time passed he increasingly felt that the more architects went on designing buildings in their own styles, to suit their own tastes, the uglier the world became. He had come to think that in a country like Japan, where history and tradition got thrown out the window and architectural principles were lost, the architect was a blight on society.

As I listened to Yoko prattle on enthusiastically about his way of thinking, it slowly dawned on me how unconventional, despite his mild exterior, her husband really was. He was someone willing to go to extremes. In his effort to be fair to his wife’s lover, he was willing to be unfair to himself. A faint sense that this idealism of his was what held the three of them together occurred to me then for the first time.

Whether it was because Masayuki was like that or because Yoko trusted him so completely I don’t know, but over time, as the threesome continued, I could clearly see Taro beginning to change. The intense gloom that used to come over him sometimes began to dissipate. The clearest indication of this shift in character was a different attitude toward money.

“I was such a money-grubber, I’m still an uneducated boor.” The first time I saw Taro after he came back from America, he said this with a dour look on his face, mocking himself. In his eyes the funds he’d gone to such trouble to accumulate weren’t something to be proud of but actually had a certain taint to them. Yet gradually he found a way to “sanitize” them, at least in his own mind. It’s apparently an article of faith among rich Americans that charitable donations are a way of returning a portion of their wealth to society. Perhaps because of something Yoko may have said, at some point he started donating money to charities left and right. When I heard about this, I thought of the old Buddhist term for pious donations: jozai , “purifying money.” Taro’s wealth also gave Yoko’s family a good deal of financial leeway, and from little remarks she let drop I got the impression that money was freely available to her. Taro’s money was his, but it also belonged to Yoko and Masayuki and, even more so, to society in general. I think this generous attitude benefited Taro most of all.