Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

“Yes, of course.”

He waited a moment longer before saying in a strangely distant tone, “I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

He was silent.

I remembered Yoko’s ecstatic face as she said, “The sea glowing dimly, seagulls flying, the gray sky hanging low. It was all incredibly lonely and sad but at the same time perfectly wonderful.”

Without answering my question, Taro asked, “Did something happen between her and Masayuki?”

“Some kind of quarrel, I think.”

He was silent again. I waited for a response, but as he said nothing I decided to hang up so I could report back to Masayuki. “Anyway, if she gets there … if you hear from her at all, please phone here right away.”

“What about Oiwake?” Taro asked suddenly, his voice rising. Before I could say anything, he groaned. “It’s not spring now, Fumiko, it’s winter—damn it. She could be snowbound.”

I knew from the way he said this that he was remembering the “elopement,” the time she caught pneumonia. That had been in early April. Annoyed by the degree of concern in his voice, I told him it wasn’t snowing in the first place, and anyway Masayuki would surely have phoned Oiwake already. “The minute I find out something I’ll call you, so you do the same, all right?”

He seemed to be thinking. There was no response so I hung up, putting the receiver down more roughly than necessary.

I called Masayuki back. When I reported that there had been no word from her yet in New York either, he said he was immediately setting off for Oiwake. He had been phoning the cottage steadily since the night before but thought she might be deliberately ignoring the telephone, and he had already decided to go there in case she hadn’t been heard from. The scandals of the past—her “misconduct” and “elopement”—apparently made Oiwake spring to his mind too. Not knowing where the key to the cottage was, he asked if he could come to my place to pick one up. By then I had made up my mind to go with him. When I heard Taro’s despairing groan, I had balked at his suggestion, but now that Masayuki was pinning his hopes on Oiwake, the idea that she might be there seemed not so unlikely.

“I’ll go with you, if I may.”

Masayuki sounded surprised. “Oh, no, no need for that.”

He thought of me as being on Taro’s side, so it never occurred to him to rely on me in a crisis. I insisted. She might not just be ignoring the telephone, I pointed out. You never knew, she might be ill, in which case my nursing experience would be useful, and if more help were needed I could call on my son and his wife. My words evidently had an effect, as he changed his mind. “Well, all right,” he said. “Thank you, that would be a great help.” Disturbed as he was, his gratitude was clear.

“THIS IS ALL my fault.”

As soon as I dived into the car waiting in front of Seijo station, that was what he said.

I was less interested in knowing what had happened than I was exasperated with Yoko for being so impulsive and causing such a disturbance, a full quarter century after that last stupid episode, especially considering that she now had a young daughter to look out for. It was all I could do to contain my vexation—not to mention my anxiety over what it would mean if she wasn’t in Oiwake after all. What if she really had gone off to New York? If the situation was only temporary until she calmed down, that was one thing, but what if she had in fact left Masayuki? I naturally felt concern for him and his daughter, but even more, selfish as it may sound, I dreaded to think what I personally was going to do with the rest of my life. My mind was in turmoil, full of uncertainties. Since the bursting of Japan’s economic bubble, Taro’s work in Japan had fallen off, and with Yoko in America, it was all too plain that he would feel no need to return to this country anymore.

Unaware of my selfish train of thought, Masayuki kept repeating as if to himself as he drove, “I should never have said what I did.”

His handsome face, seen in profile, looked rigid.

We took Loop Road No. 8 north and then got on the Kan’etsu Expressway headed for Nagano. As the car sped along, Masayuki tried to explain what had happened. Now that I was involved, he must have felt he owed me an explanation. But this was the explanation of a reticent person holding his emotions painfully in check, and so I still had no idea what had happened, or in what order, until later when I put what he told me together with what I heard from Fuyue. Even then, there were gaps I had to fill in with my imagination.

It all started with an incident that took place the night before Taro left for New York, on Christmas Eve, when he accompanied Yoko as far as Seijo station and they were caught together yet again by the Saegusa sisters. Usually after dark Yoko took a taxi, but that day she needed to be back before six, in order not to be late for a Christmas Eve party at the Saegusa home, so she decided to take the Odakyu Line since it would be faster than traveling by car. Taro always wanted to prolong his time with her till the last possible moment, and since he was leaving the country the next day, I’m sure he was more persistent than usual. According to Fuyue, Yoko sat down on the edge of a bench on the platform. Although she was already wearing a coat of her own, Taro put his overcoat around her shoulders and wound his scarf around her neck till her face was almost hidden, wanting to make sure she didn’t catch cold. That alone was a strange enough sight, but then he crouched down in front of her and became engrossed in conversation, looking intently up at her. People hurried past them, and they were off in a corner, but the sight was so unexpected—a woman buried in a man’s overcoat and scarf and, at her feet, someone like Taro wearing a black suit and gazing upward in an ardent way—once you did notice them, you couldn’t help staring.

Then, who should come along but the three sisters. They had just emerged from the last car of the train on their way back from an expedition to Shinjuku. Their hands were full of packages—ready-made food and presents for the grandchildren—and Harue, with her rheumatism, was walking with a cane, so naturally they couldn’t keep pace with the crowd and fell behind. Soon one of them noticed the little tableau and let out a cry of surprise that attracted the attention of the other two. They walked by without a word, holding their collective breath, but this time Yoko and Taro were too lost in their own world to even notice. Yoko had said she would be out all day and unable to help with the preparations, and she too had the same kind of plastic bags from the food section of a department store on the bench beside her, their very ordinariness serving to make the rest of the scene that much more distracting.

Natsue climbed the station stairs in a state of shock, scarcely believing what she’d set eyes on—even though it was her own daughter. At the top of the stairs she came to her senses. “Honestly, that girl,” she muttered. Harue remained silent as they crossed the overpass and went through the turnstile.

This might be presumptuous of me, I know, but I think that for over fifty long years, ever since Noriyuki Shigemitsu died in the war on the threshold of his life, Harue had lived feeling vaguely aggrieved. Even if Noriyuki had returned safely from the front, whether he would have married her remains an open question, and even if he had, whether that would have made someone like her happy we will also never know. It was only his death that allowed her to go on thinking life had treated her unfairly. She had been born into such fortunate circumstances: she should have been happier. Yet somehow true happiness always slipped through her fingers. She never experienced the state of grace where one rejoices just to be alive. Seeing Noriyuki’s nephew marry not one of her daughters but Yoko, of all people, and seeing that their marriage was clearly a happy one, must have deepened her bitterness. Still, that alone she might have borne. Then Taro reentered the picture, without dimming the couple’s happiness in the least. Instead, the three of them had run off together into never-never land. Harue was a woman of keen perception, and she must have understood all this. And then came that scene on the station platform. The moment she saw it she had vivid proof of the way the two of them were wrapped up in each other, cocooned from the rest of the world—and that proved more than she could bear. I don’t consider her a bad person, but unfortunately for her, she acted on a momentary impulse and lived to regret it.