Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

The lights went down. Cindy’s voice, half cajoling, half threatening, grew louder in the darkness. Then “Blue Moon” started to play, and her voice, sounding in snatches through the music, as if coming from the bottom of a well, echoed through the room—or so it seemed to me. I wanted to cover my ears, and my eyes.

Once again, Azuma stood up decisively. He reached out, took her bare elbow, and drew her close to him.

Though well into my teens, I was still an all-too-literary girl, indifferent to men’s physical appearance; neither good looks nor masculinity appealed to me. Women’s looks concerned me, and I very much wanted to be beautiful and attractive, but when it came to men I was only interested in their souls, the loftiness of their minds—though I wasn’t quite sure what a lofty mind was. I longed to see in them courage and the urge to reach for something higher. That girl couldn’t take her eyes off the scene before her.

Azuma led Cindy out to the middle of the dance floor… and, wrapping both arms around her, swayed with her to the music. In the darkness, those arms looked cruel, as if they were going to crush the soft body. I took in his angular shoulders, accentuated by his suit jacket, his sinewy neck, his rigid face. There was now a fiery anger in the face. But why was he so angry? I knew it had nothing to do with me or the woman he held in his arms. It seemed to seep out of him like something he couldn’t contain. His head tilted toward the white of the woman’s neck, but his eyes were focused far away.

When we were dancing, he had held that rage in tight control. And now, as if in reaction, he was no longer holding it back. He was alight with rage. I feared that other people in the room were as little able as I was to take their eyes off him.

The music ended and the lights came up. Azuma escorted her over to where a group of other secretaries were sitting, turned, and walked away. Dazed, she sank into her seat and made no attempt to follow him, even with her eyes.

Beneath the bright lights, everything suddenly looked wan, signaling the end of the party. I saw that my father was deep in conversation with Mrs. Cohen, and my mother with Irie, both apparently oblivious to the disturbing scene my eyes had been drawn to. Before long, everyone was standing up and saying goodbye.

That night, my sleep was troubled by dreams.

WHEN I THINK back to that New Year’s party, it must have taken place when Azuma was at his most restless. Every day, he went through the same repetitive tasks in the repair room, with all his inner power pent up. His days came and went without any promise of change.

Before long, though, a change did take place, and it transformed his life. It began in an unremarkable way: Azuma, who had been fixing compact cameras, was called upon to repair some endoscopes—gastroscopic cameras—owing to a shortage of qualified staff. I heard about it in one of the family conversations that invariably took place in the breakfast nook , during either the Easter vacation or the summer break. Although I kept as a guilty secret the image of Azuma slow-dancing to “Blue Moon,” I was too preoccupied with my life in Boston to feel more than a prick of surprised interest—I had no way of seeing that this change would have long-lasting consequences.

Azuma was the sort of man who would have eventually unlocked the way to a better future no matter how difficult his situation, I think. Yet this particular move was a sign that he was born under an especially lucky star. The events it set in motion were bound up with the nature of the product he was given to repair.

As a child, like any child, I used to think I was at the center of the universe, the moon and stars revolving around me. So it was that I naively believed that my journey to America with my family was my uniquely personal destiny, wholly unrelated to outside events, or the tide of history. Of course the opposite was true: our family was merely caught up in the tide of history and swept over to New York, riding on the crest of the economic advance that allowed Japan to become the first country in Asia to rank alongside the wealthy West. When I recall the days before we left Japan, I see them as a black-and-white newsreel with the title Japan’s Economic Miracle : my mother, with her kimono sleeves tied up, packing and trying to decide what to take and what to discard when we sold our house; Nanae and I proudly telling our classmates we were going to America; our excited relatives coming to Haneda Airport to see us off. My father was approached by the company and sent to the States precisely because, at that time, the export that was gaining star status, moving on from the transistor radio, was the compact camera his company made. Later, an array of Japanese star products followed: televisions, motorcycles, videocassette recorders, cars, video games. My father’s company also planned to diversify its exports. From early on, it laid emphasis on a groundbreaking medical device it was the first to develop: the endoscope.

I first encountered the word “endoscope” a couple of years after my arrival in the States, when a bespectacled technician named Ono made an appearance in our lives. A skillful repairman, Mr. Ono not only knew everything about endoscopes, including how to develop endoscopic film, but also spoke far better English than most college graduates. Around the same time, a new type of guest began visiting our house, people my mother addressed with the honorific Sensei, using the elegant, polite language only women of her generation knew how to speak with any skill. I gathered they were medical doctors expert in handling gastroscopic cameras, invited from Japan to demonstrate in American hospitals how they should be used.

I also encountered another new term, “sales rep.” My father’s company, which had always used American distributors, decided to hire American salesmen to sell endoscopes on commission. I remember my astonishment when I found out how expensive these endoscopes were, sold in the States at a price much higher than in Japan: two or three thousand dollars apiece. That was more than a brand-new car cost then—to a child’s mind, an astronomical amount. A sales rep earned a 10 percent commission. In those early days the monthly salary of unmarried Japanese employees was only about four or five hundred dollars, that of local hires barely three hundred, so if a sales rep sold a few units a month he could easily support a family.

That at some stage a local hire like Taro Azuma was permitted to repair endoscopes had to do with the nature of the medical supply business: a manufacturer of precision instruments used for important procedures had to guarantee prompt repairs. This guarantee was indeed critical in selling the product. When sales started to increase, the head office sent out an extra technician for repairs, and a couple of years later, another. Then, at some point the company found itself needing another technician urgently. The people in New York would probably have asked the head office to send out someone else if Taro Azuma hadn’t been there, on the spot. But he was there. Everyone knew he was capable, so they decided to use him, if only as a temporary measure.

The next time I returned home on vacation, I noticed that my father was using phrases like “business trip” and “demonstrating the device” in connection with Azuma. Again, I paid little attention to it: the more settled I was in Boston, the more distant the news about the company became. I wasn’t curious enough to ask what those words had to do with a repairman’s work, and it was a long time before I began to understand their importance in Azuma’s career.

THE TIMING COULD hardly have been better: he began working on endoscopes a few years after the visiting doctors returned to Japan, which had left our English-speaking expert, Mr. Ono, to demonstrate the use of the cameras by himself. At first he probably made the rounds of the hospitals willingly enough, but, as time went by, he clearly started to feel the strain. It was hard work. For one thing, whereas doctors got to travel with company employees as assistants, Ono had to do it alone, whether to a local hospital or one far away. Long-distance trips meant taking planes, renting cars, and driving around, map in hand, trying to locate the institutions that had shown an interest in the product. Once at the hospital, he had to stand in front of a group of attentive American doctors and make it look easy to insert the tubular camera—which used to be far thicker then—into a stomach and explain and promote the product to people firing question after question at him in English.