Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

He looked out the window. Something in his eyes was more than I could bear.

“I am so sorry.” Before I knew it, the words had slipped out of my mouth. Words that I could never bring myself to say to Taro.

Masayuki looked at me in surprise, but seemed to realize instantly that I still could not forgive myself. He hesitated, as if unsure how to respond, before telling me quietly that it wasn’t my fault. “It was my fault,” he said.

Soon after that, we learned he had liver cancer. It was as though his loss of the will to live manifested itself in the disease. After the diagnosis he had less than a year to live.

He died entrusting Miki’s future to the three Saegusa sisters and Nimbo, but by then Miki was twenty: he’d managed to hang on until she became legally an adult. Perhaps he knew he wouldn’t live long. As it turned out, he had a substantial insurance plan, and the money from the sale of the Nogizaka condominium (luckily sold just when the economy was at its most inflated) was still sitting safely in the bank, since he and Yoko hadn’t bothered to do anything with it. With inheritance taxes for Seijo less than half what they once were, Miki was well provided for, and in due course she could rent out the house or sell it, so there were no financial problems. Everyone said it was that reassuring knowledge that must have allowed Masayuki to let go of his life in peace.

YOKO’S SUDDEN DEATH had come as a terrible shock to her sister, Yuko, in San Francisco. Since then she’d felt responsible for her niece, Miki, and kept in frequent touch with her. She even invited her to San Francisco for summer vacation, but as Miki didn’t want to go on her own, that never happened. Yuko of course had come back for Masayuki’s funeral a month earlier, and, watching from the sidelines, I could see how swamped she was with not only her niece but her own mother to watch over.

Miki flew off to the beach resort of Phuket in Thailand before her father’s forty-ninth-day service because her cousin Naomi was having a wedding there that had been planned months in advance. It would have been even harder on her if she’d been left behind, so she was allowed to leave with the other young people. Naomi’s fiancé was a fourth-generation Chinese-American she met in medical school. The Saegusa sisters may have wondered why a half-white girl like Naomi would want to marry a “Chinaman,” but times had changed, her life was overseas, and whatever they might have thought in private, they never said a word openly.

Around the time the younger ones went to Phuket, I had a telephone call from Taro saying he was coming to Japan. He was going to dispose of the Karuizawa and Oiwake properties, he said. It seemed mean of him to take the step with Masayuki barely in his grave, but after I hung up, I told myself he wasn’t a coldhearted person; perhaps he had decided that if he let this chance slip, doing it later would only be that much harder. Also, though this could be my own sentimentality, I felt as if he chose this particular week because he wanted to stay in Oiwake for the Bon holiday one more time, the way he used to when he was a boy.

And now he’s back. He was away for two years and seven months.

FUMIKO’S STORY WAS well and truly finished. Something in the way she pursed her lips told Yusuke she was done talking. She was staring down at the table. After a short silence, he asked, “What will you do now, Mrs. Tsuchiya?”

She didn’t answer. She lifted her head to reply, let her eyes stray to the window, and gave a sharp little cry.

“What is it?”

“Your shoes—they must be soaked!”

She jumped up and, going around behind him, opened the sliding doors to the porch, bent down to pick up his muddy sneakers, and put them on a mat inside the house.

“Thanks.” Yusuke, who had turned his head to watch, got up.

“Using the porch to go in and out is handy,” she said, “but when there’s a storm and the rain blows sideways like this, shoes have to be put inside. In the old days there used to be a shoe cupboard outside.” She disappeared into the kitchen and came straight back with a roll of white paper towels in one hand. Seeing Yusuke standing there she told him to sit down, then knelt by the doormat and began tearing off paper towels, crumpling them, and stuffing them into his sneakers. He watched the slight movement of muscles in her back.

“Thank you.” He went on standing, embarrassed. When he saw that it would take some time, he sat down at an angle facing her back. Raindrops pelted the bottom of the glass doors and raced down in straight lines. His bicycle parked under the porch stairs would be getting soaked too, he thought. The rain was still coming down hard. The cottage, on the edge of collapse anyway, seemed to soak up the moisture, hastening the process.

For a while Yusuke went on watching her from behind. Then he asked again, “Mrs. Tsuchiya, what will you do now?”

“Good question.” Standing up, she murmured, “What to do?” as if it concerned someone else. “I thought I’d put off thinking about the future till Taro came this summer, but now that he’s here, it can’t wait.”

She went back into the kitchen apparently to wash her hands, as he heard her running the tap before she came back. She added fresh tea leaves and refilled the pot with hot water, then poured some green tea into both their cups. Yusuke had already had more than enough and left his untouched.

“Ami graduates from college in another year and a half.” Fumiko didn’t drink her tea right away either. She wrapped her hands around the cup on the table and spoke slowly, as if driving the point home to herself. “So I’m thinking of asking Taro if he’ll let us stay in the apartment until her graduation.”

“And after that?”

“I’ll have no choice but to go and live with my son in Miyota, I suppose.” Before Yusuke could comment, she glanced up at him and went on. “He and his wife are both good people, so I don’t mind. It’s just that I’m sure they’ll feel a bit cramped and constrained, and I feel bad about that.” She laughed forlornly. It was as if what was left of her prime were a burden to her.

“Couldn’t you ask Mr. Azuma to leave this place as it is, so you could use it?”

Her reply came swiftly. “No, I couldn’t.” She let out a long sigh and looked down at her teacup. “Not just when he’s come back to get rid of his properties here, how could I?” She said this as if she had gone over it in her head many times and always reached the same conclusion. She kept staring at the cup as she went on. “I’m all right. I never expected anything, and look at the life I’ve had.”

She sounded as though she was trying to convince herself.

After a pause, he asked another question. “Will Mr. Azuma be going straight back to America?”

She looked at him and smiled wanly. “He might hang around here for a while waiting for Yoko’s ghost … You know he sleeps out in the shed every night.” She tilted her head in amusement: “Why on earth did she come to you, of all people?”

Yusuke laughed and asked, “What if she never comes to him? What will he do?”

“He’s so stubborn, he might not go back to America till she does.”

“What about after he goes back?”

“Mmm.” She sipped her tea before replying. “He’s got such a strong constitution, he’ll have a tough time drinking himself to death, no matter how hard he tries. That might not be much fun.” She smiled sardonically, then turned abruptly serious. “In any case, he won’t be coming back to Japan.”

“He won’t?”

“No, not that I can see.”

A tremor in her voice made him speak without thinking. “Then why don’t you go see him in America from time to time?”