Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

FUMIKO STOPPED TALKING.

It had started to rain a little while before. What began as light drizzle turned within minutes into a torrential downpour. In the sudden absence of any talk, the noise made by the rain was even louder. Yusuke, seated directly across from the now silent Fumiko, listened absently to the sound of millions of raindrops landing on the roof. He remembered that half an hour earlier there had been a distant chime followed by the voice of a woman speaking over a loudspeaker, warning that a storm was on its way. When he’d asked about it, Fumiko had explained that someone from the town hall drove around making these announcements for the sake of local farmers working in the fields.

The hands of the pendulum clock on the wall pointed to six-thirty.

Pale yellow light shone through the milky glass shade above them, showing a fairly bare tabletop. Today he hadn’t been sitting there listening to her talk from morning till late in the evening as he had the other day, and yet he felt that a vast amount of time had elapsed, as though there had been no interlude.

She was looking down at the table, still silent. She seemed so withdrawn that he wondered if she even registered the sound of the rain on the roof. It might have been the light, but her cheeks now looked hollow.

He let his eyes wander over the low wooden shelves on his right, behind her. On the top shelf, amid the jumble of cotton work gloves, a trowel, candles, coils of mosquito repellent, a disposable lighter, and other things, he noticed two bundles with rabbit-ear knots, the ones he’d seen the other day in Karuizawa, containing the urns. While he’d sat listening to Fumiko during the past few hours with his back to the porch, more than once those two small bundles had caught his attention. Now that she was silent, their presence asserted itself more insistently.

She picked up her story again after serving a fresh pot of tea.

AFTER JANUARY 1993 Taro stopped coming back to Japan, even when he had business in some other Asian country.

With Yoko gone, making money no longer meant what it had, and with the economy in the doldrums, there was no point in coming here in search of investors. I stayed in touch with him and his lawyers, and took care of unfinished business, but once I’d canceled the rental contract on his luxury apartment in Yoyogi Uehara, there was little or no work for me to do anymore. Yoko’s teasing me about being a real career woman seemed a thing of the distant past. About a year after she died, I floated the idea to Taro of my packing up and leaving Tokyo to go home to Miyota. He answered that he still had some ongoing projects involving Japanese investors and would like me to remain in the city if there was no particular reason why I had to leave. Of course there wasn’t, so I took advantage of his generosity and stayed on. This was partly because after Yoko died I was at loose ends, and partly for a more practical reason: I had taken my granddaughter Ami under my wing in Tokyo.

From the time she was in middle school, Ami had wanted to attend college in Tokyo someday. But in the fall of 1992, about three months before Yoko disappeared, just as Ami was preparing for the spring entrance examination, her parents told her to apply to a local prefectural university, for financial reasons. The sudden decline in the economy had taken quite a bite out of my son’s salary at the local bank, and with two boys to educate besides her, the plan made sense. But when I heard about it, I felt I couldn’t just sit back and do nothing. I offered to take her in for as long as my work as Taro’s assistant continued—they may even have been quietly hoping I would do exactly that. Since I was quite willing to help the family, and Ami and I had always been close, it only seemed natural. Then that January Yoko died. I told Ami’s parents that the situation had changed; that if Taro’s interest in Japanese investors dried up, my work might end at any time. But they had their hearts set on sending her to live with me in Tokyo. I said to myself, if I lose my job, I’ll worry about it when the time comes. So after Ami, a bright student, was admitted to Waseda, she started living with me when classes were in session. She was usually out of the house, either at school or at a part-time job, and when she was home she generally stayed in her room, the only tatami room in the apartment. As a little girl, she had been like a daughter to me, but now it felt more like having a lodger I could be comfortable around, which was fine. Knowing how I regretted, and would go on regretting to my dying day, not getting the education I wanted, I just hoped that I would continue to be subsidized by Taro so that she could go on living in the Gotokuji apartment and keep up her studies.

TARO STAYED ABROAD, and during the next six months, then a year, then two years that I lived in Tokyo, one by one the elder generation began to slip away.

In late 1993, Harue’s husband died of diabetes. After rising to an executive position in the Mitsubishi Corporation, he had become president of a subsidiary, resigning that position a few years before the end. Fortunately, his eyesight didn’t fail him, and with insulin injections, he went on playing golf to the last.

My mother died in the spring of 1994. She always blamed her poor health on the strain of the war period, but whatever the reason, she became prone to illness around the time I left for Tokyo. In middle age her heart weakened and she often had to take to her futon. She finally began to open up to me after my stepfather died some years before this, though no doubt she’d have said it was I who finally opened up to her. Her failing heart kept her from getting around, but even other people in the country no longer walked anywhere much, every family now owning two or three cars; so at New Year’s, though my aunt O-Hatsu lived only a stone’s throw away, we drove over to pay our respects. The talk turned to the past. In my mind’s eye I saw my mother the way she was on those winter nights long ago when she sat by the hearth and pulled a cloth from her waistband, then covered her face and sobbed out her troubles. And again I saw the blank look on her face after she was told that my father had taken his own life.

As usual, O-Hatsu, now living in a house with an up-to-date kitchen, bustled around making green tea that she served with pickles—though, unlike in the old days, the pickles came factory-sealed in a plastic bag. My mother was a good fifteen years younger than her, but she seemed so frail I was afraid she might not last much longer. Sure enough, she died last spring after two heart attacks. Having rushed home after the first one, I was able to be at her side from then until the second one came and carried her off. Providing this final care helped remove a weight that I’d long felt pressing on my chest.

I should perhaps mention in passing that the husky-voiced woman who was my uncle Genji’s companion for so long had the good fortune to be targeted by a land shark during the “bubble” era, which resulted in her selling the small property in Soto Kanda for enough money to let her live out her old age in comfort after the bubble burst. At the time of my mother’s funeral she sent a telegram and a generous sum of condolence money, and when I went to call on her to thank her after I got back to Tokyo, I found her living in a cozy, brand-new apartment on the Marunouchi Line. She had given up her little restaurant, now pinned her hair up at the nape without any hairpiece, and was dressed in Western-style clothes, though she had the round shoulders you often see in women who are accustomed to wearing a kimono. She seemed glad to see me. They had never had any children and she lived alone, but she was continuing her lessons in Japanese dance, a hobby she’d taken up again back when she was living in Soto Kanda. This provided her with friends from that circle, and she wasn’t lonely at all. In a sunny tatami room was a little Buddhist altar decorated with a picture of my uncle, one he’d chosen himself to be shown at his funeral, taken when he was “the Valentino of the Orient.” She kept flowers and incense in front of it, along with offerings of water and white rice. I couldn’t help feeling happy for him when I saw what care she took for the repose of his soul, with the old-time conscientiousness that’s so typical of people in the entertainment trade.