Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

“But why …?” he murmured.

For the first time I realized what he had been thinking about in the waiting room below. Sick as she was, Yoko had known.

“Why?” he said again.

“Because if we both die first, how would poor Masayuki feel?… It would be as if we’d left him behind, alone.”

Yoko shifted her gaze to me, where I stood behind Taro, and let her arm drop listlessly before addressing me in something like her usual tone, half demand and half plea.

“Fumiko, this is my last request. Watch over him and keep him from ever doing that.” Then she looked back at Taro, deep purple shadows around her fever-moist eyes. “Swear it now, in front of Fumiko.” Her lips were dry.

“Why should I?”

“Come on, now. Be a good boy.”

She said this with great tenderness, as though comforting a child, and tried again to reach out to him. He pressed her hand gently and laid it on the bed.

“What if Masayuki dies?” he asked.

“He can’t. He’s got Miki to take care of.”

Taro looked straight down at her hollow eyes and inhaled deeply, breathing them in. He let his breath out slowly. “But if he does?”

She thought for a moment, then looked away. Eyes on the ceiling, she gave a little nod. Her throat was even thinner than it had been when she was in the hospital after their “elopement.”

“It would be all right then.”

“It would?”

“Yes.”

For the first time, he seemed almost happy as he took another deep breath.

“But …” She looked at him firmly. “You mustn’t die in a strange way. I would be too miserable.” She frowned, as if she were seeing things that frightened her. “Die in a way that would make me think you had a good life.” A few tears rolled down her cheeks.

Taro groaned. “You call this a good life?”

“I do.” She rocked his hand back and forth on the sheets as if to soothe him. That was all the strength she could summon. With the ghost of a smile on her dry lips, she told him, “It’s been perfect. Couldn’t have been better.”

Taro jerked his hand away. “Couldn’t have been better?” he protested, shoulders heaving. “The hell you say!” He fell silent. Then in a low, mournful voice he said abruptly, “You wouldn’t marry me. You didn’t want me. You said if you were with me, you’d be so ashamed you’d die.”

After a brief pause, she said without a flicker of expression, “You still can’t forgive me, can you?” She seemed to be looking somewhere far beyond the ceiling.

He too was expressionless. “No, I can’t.” He picked up her hand again. “I never could. You don’t know how deeply someone like me can hold a grudge. You just don’t know.”

He wrapped his man’s hand protectively around her small one.

“I don’t care. I don’t want to know.”

“I wanted to kill you, the whole time.”

She showed no surprise. Her hand still tucked in his, she continued to stare into space. “Starting when?” she asked. “After I said those terrible things?”

“No.”

“Before that?”

“Long before.”

She turned her head toward him. “You mean from when we were kids?”

“Yes.” After a moment’s hesitation, he went on, “From the very first time I saw you in the yard of the Chitose Funabashi house.”

“Okay.”

Still no surprise. She looked back up at the ceiling, out of breath, and that was all. When she regained her breath, she spoke, less in answer to Taro than to release her own emotions.

“I was always afraid. From the time I was a little girl, I always felt afraid … When I was with you, it was like the rest of the world was rushing away from us … as if we were getting farther and farther away from it … and it scared me.”

Taro just went on with increasing vehemence. “I always wanted to kill you.”

“I felt so lonely I was scared.”

“I should have done it.”

They each seemed lost in their thoughts. The silence grew, and then Yoko cried softly, “But we were happy, so happy.” Clutching his arm, she raised herself slightly and looked up into his face. “Don’t ever stop wanting to kill me—even if I die.”

“I never will—even if I die.” And he laid himself over her, as he’d done before.

“It’s crazy how happy I am,” I heard her say, then she whispered, “Take care of Masayuki …”

For a moment there was silence. She had slumped back on the bed. Then she gave a low, soulful cry: “But oh … I don’t want to die yet … and let it all go to waste.”

Clutching his arm again, she tried to lift herself a little, but she no longer had the strength. All this talking seemed to have exhausted her.

While I don’t believe that without the disturbance she could have survived, I do think it shortened the little time she had left. As Taro and Masayuki switched places, her breathing became more labored and she drifted in and out of consciousness. It was nearly ten at night when the three Saegusa sisters and Miki arrived from Tokyo, driven by Nimbo, and by then she was in a coma. She stayed that way for an entire day. In the middle of the night she had greater trouble breathing, and her legs turned purplish from lack of circulation. Her dry lips became white.

Her poor daughter was stunned by the suddenness of it all. Harue looked angry and for once was close-lipped. Deep down, I think she too was stunned. Natsue shed tears continually from those large, round eyes of hers, but the sight of her daughter lying so near death seemed to make her queasy, and instead of moistening Yoko’s lips herself, she asked me to do it. Fuyue alone looked calm; she behaved with even greater self-possession than she usually did.

Taro waited in his car in the hospital parking lot, out in the freezing cold. When everyone arrived from Tokyo he’d left the waiting room, not wishing to be seen as they came and went. He asked me to let him know if she regained consciousness, but she never did, so I had no occasion to go out to him. I only looked down at the parking lot from the window at the end of the hospital corridor. It seemed to me that Masayuki did the same every time he passed that window. Taro didn’t leave even to eat. On the evening of his second day there, the car still hadn’t moved.

She died just after two in the morning.

When the doctor pronounced her dead, his words were mingled with Natsue’s sobs. I slipped out of the room by myself, pushed the elevator button, and went downstairs. I headed for the emergency exit, the only one usable at night. I felt no emotion. I was numb. I propelled myself forward mechanically, thinking only one thing: Taro would never forgive me. He would never forget how I failed to look in the attic room that day. And I had spent decades—no—virtually all my life thinking only about how I could make him happy. Now at the end of it all he would resent me, hate me. The thought went around and around in my head. I did not feel in the least remorseful; only stunned by life’s cruelty, when all along I had been doing my best. I felt almost more like laughing wildly than crying as misery and derision roamed the emptiness inside me. If only Mount Asama would erupt now in bright red bursts and bury us all in ashes, the living and the dead.

I went out by the emergency exit. I saw the wintry sky filled with stars, and from among them fell shards of moonlight, glittering on the asphalt parking lot. That’s when it sank in. Yoko was dead. The sheer, harsh fact of it struck me with full force. The ground rocked, and the firmament with its countless stars started to revolve around the moon, and I had to cover my face with my hands and crouch on the ground from vertigo.

I heard the sound of a car door opening and closing, and footsteps coming toward me over the asphalt, but I didn’t have the courage to raise my head and look.