Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

Fuyue briskly seated herself in a black armchair. “You sit there, facing the door, will you? I’m more comfortable with my back to it.”

Yusuke sat on the sofa she indicated, inquiring as he did so whether she came there often.

“I did until twenty years or so ago. These days, hardly ever.”

A young waiter with an oval face came over and handed Fuyue a heavy leather-bound menu, which she passed on to Yusuke without a glance. “Whiskey for me,” she told the waiter. “Straight. Make it a double.”

“What label would you prefer, madam?”

“Ballantine’s.”

“We have everything from seven-year-old to thirty-year-old.”

“Right. Well, I’ll be extravagant and have the seventeen-year-old. There is such a thing as Ballantine’s seventeen-year-old, isn’t there?”

“Yes, madam.”

Very well, she would have that, she said, and looked at Yusuke. “Have whatever you like. Wine, cognac, a cocktail.”

She flung her head back and leaned back in the armchair. Maintaining this reckless-looking pose, she fixed her gaze on Yusuke. Flustered, he turned the pages of the heavy menu, finally ordering the hotel’s own original cocktail, named after what Westerners once called the surrounding area, Happy Valley . The words printed on the beige paper in bold type were “ Happy Vally ,” which Yusuke, dredging up his high school English, decided must be a misspelling. He closed the menu, wondering if there were so few foreign customers nowadays that such errors went unremarked.

“How old are you, dear?” asked Fuyue, still with her head against the back of the armchair, after the waiter left.

“Twenty-six.”

She gave a small laugh—a laugh so coquettish that Yusuke was startled.

“A fine, full-grown young man.” The eyes behind her glasses were teasing.

“I don’t know about fine, but I am full-grown, yes.” Yusuke himself was surprised by his own words. They seemed to catch Fuyue off guard too; he saw a trace of surprise in her eyes. She leaned forward, close to the table, and took her glasses off with her long fingers.

“You probably haven’t heard that Taro and Fumiko had a … sexual relationship. It happened a long time ago, before he left for America.”

She folded her glasses in a leisurely way and laid them on the table as she spoke, all without raising her eyes; she seemed purposely to be avoiding the look of astonishment on his face. Only after playfully lining up the shiny silver-framed glasses alongside the ashtray did she look up at him. She let out a quick burst of laughter.

“Imagine telling a perfect stranger a thing like this—you really must forgive me.” She laughed again.

But the next moment, just as she opened her mouth to go on with the story, she gave a little cry as she seemed to remember something. Reverting instantly to her usual brisk self, she reached for the glasses beside the ashtray and put them back on, then laid a hand on her purse and stood up.

“I forgot all about my sisters. I need to go and call them. I’ll be right back.”

As he watched her impressively erect figure pass through the room, Yusuke let out a long breath. What she said had taken him by surprise, but having once heard it, he had no doubt it was true. What an idiot he was for never having suspected that they had once been, if not lovers, physically intimate. Was he too naive a listener or was Fumiko too discreet a narrator? He couldn’t be sure.

Through the window blind he could see into the adjacent room, a lively dining room where white-jacketed waiters glided to and fro, candles flickered on tabletops, and couples and families, their faces lit up with an air of mild intoxication, chatted with apparent pleasure.

Yusuke recalled Fumiko’s matter-of-fact way of telling her story. She had even gone to the trouble of including words that seemed to cancel out the possibility of such a relationship. But as he thought further about it, he found her intention shifting. He began to suspect that at heart she hadn’t been so discreet after all; that rather, while misdirecting him on the surface, she might secretly have been hoping he would figure it out. With hindsight, he began to catch hints in what she’d said that pointed at the true nature of her and Taro’s relationship. He let out another long breath.

A dark figure materialized at the side of the table and laid a surprisingly stylish cocktail in front of him. The stem was green and the liquid in the transparent, conical glass was reddish violet, so that the drink looked like an exotic flower resting on a green stalk. On the table across from him, a tumbler, clear above, cut glass below, was set briskly down. It was faintly embarrassing to realize that of the two of them he, not she, had chosen the more feminine drink.

Some five minutes later Fuyue was back with apologies. “I didn’t wait,” said Yusuke, holding up his flowerlike cocktail. “No, no, of course not!” she said, sitting down. She took off her glasses again and laid them on the table. “My sisters just wouldn’t let me hang up …” She raised the tumbler to her lips and drained half its amber contents. She had evidently stopped off at the ladies’ room, for her lipstick shone more brightly against her freshly powdered skin. Beyond that, it seemed as if being away from her sisters had almost changed her physically. Altogether her appearance had an unexpected charm, something Yusuke found vaguely unsettling. This was a different Fuyue from the one who, as the youngest of the trio, was always at the others’ command. Maybe her rather mannish look in their company was a form of resistance, he thought, or a means of self-protection, to ward off their constant bossing.

Without looking him in the eye, Fuyue let her long fingers play with the glass on the table in front of her as she asked, “Were you already aware of what I told you just now?”

“No, I wasn’t.”

“I didn’t think she would tell you that part.” She looked up. “Actually, she doesn’t know that I know.” Her eyes were now on the tumbler. “Thank goodness.” She murmured this last almost to herself. “My sisters don’t know that I know either. But they grew suspicious long ago, and today, after the lawyer left, they brought it up again, saying there must have been something like that going on after all. I didn’t tell them anything, because I thought it wouldn’t be right, for Fumiko’s sake.” She raised her eyes again.

“But when I went to Oiwake and saw your face through the glass door—remember?—I felt immediately I could talk about it with you, that no harm could come of it. To go my whole life and never mention it to anyone would just be too hard.”

She downed the remainder of the amber fluid, turned toward the counter and held up her empty glass for the bartender to see, then turned around again. “A subject as improper … or as adult as this, I should say … is nothing to talk about sober.”

Fuyue had learned about their relationship more than twenty-five years earlier, she said, when, after the “elopement,” Yoko was released from the hospital and taken home to Sapporo by her mother. Though no longer in the Utagawas’ service, Fumiko had involved her own family in the search for Yoko and generally been such an enormous help that Fuyue had wanted to show her appreciation. That was how it started.

An ordinary thank-you gift of cash had seemed a bit too impersonal, and so one Sunday when she was out shopping at Mitsukoshi department store in the Ginza, she’d splurged on a black pearl brooch as a present for her. Wanting to see the look on Fumiko’s face when she opened the box, and curious besides to see where she lived alone in the city, Fuyue had gone straight from the Ginza to Sangenjaya to deliver the gift, stopping to ask directions to Evergreen Apartments No. 2 at a police box by the station. This was a time when some apartment buildings still didn’t have even a telephone in the hall, and if Fumiko was not at home she was prepared to mail the package later. After finally tracking down the address, she was surprised to find a squalid-looking building—somewhere she would never have connected with anyone as well turned out as Fumiko. Still, it can’t have been easy for a single woman to support herself as an office worker in Tokyo, she’d thought, half persuaded and half hesitating as she made her way up a steep, narrow staircase where the smell of urine hung in the air. She located the room number and knocked softly on a door marked TSUCHIYA. No answer. She knocked a little louder. Again, no answer. She knocked still louder and called out Fumiko’s name, to no avail.