Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

HE CAUGHT THE sound as he drew near the gateposts—a dull, pounding sound. In the hovering dusk, the figure of Taro was dimly spotlit crouching on the porch. Yusuke did not go through the gateposts but stole past the cottage, weaving his way through the heavy growth of weeds and vines and finally stopping in the shadow of a row of yew trees that marked the former boundary of the adjoining lot. Some of the trees were thickly covered with hard-edged green leaves while others had lost most of their branches, so, depending on where he stood, he had a fairly unobstructed view. He craned his neck, held his breath, and looked in the direction the sound came from.

OIWAKE STATION

Some kind of large cloth was spread near the edge of the porch, and Taro was in front of it on one knee, swinging a hammer and making that dull sound. The railing prevented Yusuke from seeing what lay under the hammer. On the table behind Taro, he could see the tin bucket from yesterday together with the two champagne glasses and, alongside them, a pair of small white objects: the opened funerary urns. Only then did he realize that what lay under Taro’s swinging hammer were human bones.

Unaware of the intruder, Taro continued pounding away, but as the ashes had been divided to begin with, the amount must have been quite small. In no time the job was done. He laid the hammer down and sat in the chair looking dazed, staring at the pile of crushed bones. The sky still held the last light, and through the branches Yusuke could see that a pale moon had risen.

Just then a pretty woman dressed in black stuck her face out of the cottage—it was Fumiko. She had apparently been watching over his shoulder from inside and, seeing that the job was finished, disappeared for a moment and came out carrying a variety of items in both hands, all of which she set down on the table before moving toward where Taro had been hammering. There she knelt down and bowed her head, pressing her palms together.

For a time all was still.

From the moment the stillness broke, it was like watching a pantomime. When she had finished her prayers, Fumiko rose, looking solemn, and went back to the table where she put on a pair of white gloves she had laid there. Then she approached the edge of the porch and knelt down again. The first ashes that she scooped from the cloth were Yoko’s, apparently, since Yusuke saw her go and carefully set down a little red dish near Taro like an offering. Judging from its shape, the dish seemed to be a child’s plastic bowl. Next, Fumiko fetched a larger container, probably a glass vase, and set it too at the porch’s edge. The idea seemed to be to combine the ashes of husband and wife in that container, but they were evidently difficult to scrape into it. Eventually she picked up the spread-out cloth—a large furoshiki wrapping cloth patterned in arabesques. Wordlessly she signaled to Taro, and he stood up, also in silence, took the other two corners of the cloth in his hands, and helped her pour the ashes of husband and wife into the vase.

Once the task was finished, Fumiko turned her face away and flapped the square cloth in the air.

“I never knew bones had such a distinct odor,” she said.

For some reason Yusuke could hear every word with sharp clarity. Taro made no response. Yusuke could not make out his expression. He only saw him go and sit in the chair in the same way as before.

Fumiko went back into the house, holding the glass container in her arms. When she came out again she was carrying her purse and, in the other hand, a familiar-looking shopping bag. She went out onto the porch and continued down the steps, heading Yusuke’s way. He hurriedly withdrew his head. When Fumiko got into the car with the shopping bag, he understood what was happening. In her black dress she was going to Karuizawa for the ceremony of scattering the ashes. He wondered if she was wearing the black pearl brooch that Fuyue had given her.

Her car went up the narrow road without exposing Yusuke’s hiding figure in its bright headlights.

TARO SAT FACING the little red bowl.

He was dead still. The madder-red sun glowed in the western sky as though loath to yield its shortening life, while all around him, moment by moment, Yusuke could sense darkness rising as if from the ground. The mosquitoes in the shrubbery were more aggressive. Then all of a sudden Taro stood up. Carrying the red bowl in one hand, he strode down the porch steps and out to the middle of the garden. Yusuke, unable to escape, curled up behind a yew. Taro now stood there threateningly close to where he was—but his eyes weren’t looking at this world. Looking up, he hurled the contents of the bowl at the pale moon with all his might.

The dust of powdered bones flew in a misty swirl and came drifting down. Taro stood still in the moonlight with his eyes closed. As the fine white dust covered him from the head down, he never stirred.

THE FOLLOWING SPRING, Yusuke was chosen as one of the winners in the lottery for a green card, the U.S. permanent residency visa. Uncertain whether he ought to quit his job at the publishing house and move to America, he continued commuting between the office and the cheap apartment he’d been renting since he had first started working. Before long the trees were covered with budding leaves, and the smell of fresh greenery was in the air. A longing to visit Nagano again made him restless. As the leaves turned a deeper green, the lure became irresistible.

He left for Nagano in June, just before the rainy season set in.

Ten months had passed since that week the previous summer. He had waited for word from Fumiko, but none came. Assuming she preferred not to get in touch, he made no attempt to track her down in Tokyo. He undertook his trip without any hope or expectation of seeing her up there either: it was not the time of year she went to Karuizawa. But in the course of his daily commute to work, the events of that week were beginning to feel almost as if they had never happened, and the stronger this feeling became, the more anxious he was that he might be letting something precious slip through his fingers—something one was granted perhaps once in a lifetime.

At Karuizawa station he rented a car. The weekend traffic was surprisingly heavy; he realized that tourism in Karuizawa was not limited to the summer months. The two Western-style villas stood unchanged, no different from the way they’d been when he first set foot in their grounds. But whether the light was different or something in Yusuke’s mind had changed, he felt none of the deep attraction that had so affected him ten months before, though he was looking at exactly the same scene.

If anything, the memory of that summer seemed to retreat even further.

He turned onto Route 18, headed for Mitsui Woods, and dropped by the summer house belonging to Kubo’s parents. While he was at it, he visited Kubo’s sister-in-law’s place too. Summer arrives late in the mountains, and he had expected to see only the first green foliage, yet it all looked much the same as before—though, again, nothing moved him. He returned to the main road, headed west, and then took the narrow lane off to the left that led to the cottage in Oiwake. This was the track he had followed in his mind time and again since going back to Tokyo. Being pursued by the strains of the “Tokyo Ballad,” falling deeper under the spell of a fox or the moon as he pedaled along—how could he forget that first night here? But though the trees on either side remained the same, he felt none of that night’s mystery now.

Then he came to the place where the cottage had been.