Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

Just then the neighboring door opened, and an anemic-looking woman of around thirty stuck her head out. Her hair was in curlers and she had a pink nylon scarf wound around her head like a turban. “Looking for Miss Tsuchiya?” she asked. Fuyue said yes.

“She’s not here. She went out shopping for supper with her kid brother a while ago.”

“Her kid brother?” Fuyue repeated, puzzled.

The woman, with her head sticking out at an angle through the half-open door, let out a dirty laugh. The indecency of the sound was startling. She opened the door wider, and Fuyue saw that she was wearing tight mambo pants, her bare feet stuck in high-heeled plastic sandals.

“Some kid brother!” the woman sniggered. She sized up Fuyue, who was dressed in a summery linen suit and carrying a shopping bag from an exclusive department store. “She acts all la-di-da, then brings home that sexy piece of work. Dark and kind of different, but a real hunk, all right.”

Fuyue was speechless.

“I live right next door here, you see,” the woman said, leering.

There was no escape.

“Every night they do it. Two months, and they’re still doin’ it every night! Hot and heavy, night after night, hours at a time. Today too. Like all Sunday mornings, they’re at it first thing. Her voice carries right through the walls, know what I mean?”

To get away from that clinging gaze, Fuyue turned on her heel and headed down the corridor toward the staircase, hearing the woman’s shrill laughter behind her.

“So that’s how I know.” She was still swiveling the whiskey glass in her fingers. After the “elopement,” she’d been so worried about Yoko’s condition that she hadn’t had time to think about Taro, but she had assumed he went back to the Azumas. Everyone had been at such pains to keep the young pair from exchanging secret messages, the idea that Taro might be staying with Fumiko never crossed her mind. Once it became clear that he was in her apartment, however, it all fitted together: Fumiko’s more than usual reticence when she came to help at the hospital; her occasional guilty looks; the alacrity with which she left for home as soon as she was done with what she came for. That summer, Fumiko had stayed away from Karuizawa, using work as an excuse. To Harue and Natsue it hadn’t made sense, but to Fuyue it had. Then there was Fumiko’s phone call months later reporting Taro’s departure for the United States. After Taro had informed her about it, she thought she ought to let them know as well, she’d said, as if talking about a distant relative.

Fuyue had known Fumiko since she was seventeen, and over the years their relationship had developed more or less into a friendship. Besides being uncommonly bright, Fumiko was absolutely reliable. More than that, she was a woman of such moral integrity that Fuyue, with those two elder sisters of hers around, often felt embarrassed. The fact that for six months she had lived with Taro—slept with him—could mean only one thing.

“She fell for him. As he grew up, somewhere along the way she became deeply attached to him.” Fuyue paused, then added, “Which was hardly unnatural.”

And then he had gone off and left her.

The following spring, when Fumiko came to pay her respects in Seijo after Harue got back from New York, it was Fuyue’s first encounter with her in a year, Harue’s first in four years. As soon as Fumiko left, Harue had started.

“Did you see? That is a woman who has taken a lover, no mistake about it. And the look on her face has changed too. There is something positively degraded in the way she looks now—not like the Fumi I remember. You know, it would not surprise me one bit to find out she has a secret private life, the sort she can’t let on about to anyone.”

Fuyue understood then for the first time why the sight of Fumiko had made her so uncomfortable. “How long has she been this way?” asked Harue. “Hmm, I wonder,” Fuyue had said, pretending to have no interest, but deep down she was disturbed. When the “elopement” scandal first broke, Fumiko had still been her old self. In the period after Taro left, however, maybe loneliness had made her misbehave. Maybe, in the words of that woman in Evergreen Apartments No. 2, she had taken to bringing other “hunks” home. Suspicion grew in Fuyue’s mind. Again that summer Fumiko had stayed away from Karuizawa, adding to the impression that she was leading the sort of life that would make her want to keep her distance from them. Natsue, who came down from Sapporo for the summer, hadn’t seen Fumiko since the “elopement” and so didn’t believe it at first when Harue insisted that she was definitely “leading a strange life”—but after having it drummed into her, she began to change her tune. What could have come over her, a serious girl like that? It was, after all, a bad idea, letting a single girl live on her own in Tokyo. When she divorced, we should have taken her up to Sapporo with us. Heaven knows, we could have done with her help. Natsue started saying things like this, frowning as she did so.

So when Fumiko sent out a wedding announcement the following spring, and especially when they learned something about her new husband, the three sisters had rejoiced for her and for themselves as well. If she had agreed to marry a man who had spent decades working at the Miyota town hall, in other words someone as solid and far from any nonsense as a man can possibly get, she must have every intention of finally settling down. Moreover, since she would be living nearby, she might be able to come and help out in summer at Karuizawa again. And, as it turned out, when Fumiko responded to everyone’s pleas and returned to Karuizawa for the first time in three years, she had seemed refreshed, free of whatever had made her different from the young woman they had always known.

Harue’s dim suspicion that she might have had a relationship with Taro took shape more than ten years later, after his return to Japan. Her instincts in such matters were weirdly sharp. She based her theory on the observation that Fumiko had a subtle way of avoiding all discussion of Taro. Yet for years it was impossible to say whether she avoided the topic because of his involvement with Yoko or for some less mentionable reason, and probing into it was out of the question. Then today the lawyer had revealed that Taro had given the villas and land in Karuizawa to Fumiko, someone who wasn’t a close or even a distant relation. Such generosity was completely unwarranted, however you looked at it. Harue’s old suspicions had resurfaced, darker than ever.

“After the lawyer left, that proud sister of mine broke down. ‘So there must have been something going on between Fumi and that boy Taro after all,’ she sobbed. Since this wasn’t really anything to cry about, it just shows what a shock it all was to her.” Fuyue’s tone was sympathetic, surprisingly full of sisterly affection. “But it wasn’t only that …” She faltered for a moment.

“My sister may have her faults, but you know something, Mr. Kato? As we age, we all become much sadder, no matter what. You’re obviously too young to know, but it simply happens. When my sister heard that Fumiko was the new owner of the property, I suspect that all this sadness came welling up at once. She just couldn’t stop crying.”

Watching, Fuyue had been swept by the urge to tell them what she’d discovered that day twenty-plus years before when she visited Fumiko’s apartment.

“But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I knew Fumiko would not have wanted anyone to know—especially us—so I held my tongue. I too didn’t want my family to know about that side of her, either. But I was bursting to do it … which is another reason why I left the house tonight.”