Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

It wore him down. Taro Azuma, who by then was well acquainted with this device, stood on the sidelines, ready to step in, and increasingly it was he who went on these hospital visits. Ono had lifetime job security but no true career prospects, not having a college degree—thus little incentive to push himself—but Azuma had energy to spare, and ability in spades.

His new role was sealed by the arrival of someone from Japan who specialized in repairing compact cameras, not endoscopes.

“Azuma has officially been confirmed as a member of the endoscope division,” my father announced rather proudly one day.

I have no idea exactly how much influence my father brought to bear on his behalf. I imagine the people back home were reluctant to recognize Azuma’s role. The first steps are always critical in building a foundation for any venture, and the endoscope business was still in its infancy. The company had no choice but to rely on local sales representatives to break into the American market, but they must still have wanted to restrict the core of the endoscope department, including the repair personnel, to their own people. This was long before the days when Japanese firms built factories in the States and hired Americans even for management positions. Back then, you were hired in Japan or you were nothing. The head office back then only trusted its homegrown employees, and Azuma, however capable, just wasn’t one of them. So it isn’t unreasonable to think that my father played a key role in convincing them.

With the official seal of approval on him, the other Japanese employees began to treat him almost as an equal. In retrospect, however, I can see that a far bigger development was already under way. Azuma, an Asian, was now in a position where he was in direct contact with a section of the American establishment, promoting a product it highly appreciated. Commerce, as history confirms, is the best way of building a trusting relationship between people of different cultures. By visiting hospitals and selling endoscopes to American doctors, Azuma was establishing, as a matter of course, personal relations with some of the cleverest and most innovative individuals in America.

In fact, some of them apparently mistook him for a doctor himself and began calling him Dr. Azuma.

“If they call you that, let them,” my father cheerfully told him. “Too many Americans don’t take us seriously, so let them believe you went to medical school. They’ll trust you more.”

Rather than remove the misunderstanding, my father actively encouraged it. When I learned this, I realized he had more than the man’s welfare in mind; it was also his own little bit of mischief. It tickled him that Azuma, who was at the bottom of the company’s hierarchy, who was never included in meetings, and who was virtually ignored when top management came to visit, had been transformed into the most qualified employee in the firm. This deception must surely have helped Azuma put down deeper roots in American soil.

I ONLY HEARD bits and pieces about this when I came home on vacation. Though Azuma still came to our house once in a while for company gatherings, I have little memory of him on these later occasions. Then things happened that spelled the end of my own family’s close relationship with the company. The New York branch had grown so big that they made it a separate American corporation, with one of the directors from the head office brought in as its new president. My father, who was hired in midlife and was never really one of them, was demoted to executive vice-president—a logical enough decision for the company. He was never willing to behave like other corporate employees, submitting to orders, returning home or transferring elsewhere at someone else’s bidding. Besides, he was unsuited not only to obeying orders but to giving them too. So it was just as well for everyone involved that he no longer headed the company. But he didn’t welcome his new position. Even when his colleagues reached out, he pulled back, remaining a bystander. It didn’t help either that my mother was now more inclined to socialize with her own colleagues than with his people. My father was to spend long years out on a limb at his office until, eventually, the diabetes he had developed worsened and he was forced into retirement. When I think about his relationship with Azuma, though, it was perhaps best that things worked out this way.

Azuma’s meteoric rise coincided with my father’s withdrawal. Demonstrating endoscopes at hospitals led directly to sales almost every time. Before long, Azuma proved himself better at selling the devices than the local reps. The day came when he told the new president he wanted to work independently, like the American salesmen. He had a strong case: he was making the company far more money than the average sales representative did, but earning far less. The president no doubt was shocked, probably angry: a homegrown employee would never have dared make this request. Nonetheless, he gave in. He must have realized the potential benefits of a man like Azuma putting all his energy into selling a product that had already shown great promise. Moreover, given the paternalism pervasive in Japanese corporate culture, it’s possible he felt a certain sympathy for Azuma, a local hire with no high school degree and no future in a Japanese company. With Azuma’s departure, another technician was sent in from Japan to replace him.

“He’s quite a guy,” Mrs. Cohen said, admiration mixing with a touch of irony in her voice. By that time, she was virtually the only company member whom I still saw at my parents’ house. Many of the ones I knew best had completed their tour of duty in New York and been called back to Japan or transferred to other locations. I, meanwhile, continued living away from home. After I realized I had no gift for painting—something I probably knew all along—I quit art school in Boston and asked my parents to send me to Europe to learn French (yet another attempt to escape from English), and on my return I had resumed the life of a student in a town away from Long Island. Like any American student, I came home every year for Christmas and New Year’s. Since Mrs. Cohen, very much the traditional daughter of the head of a Tohoku fishing village, faithfully came by on New Year’s Day, seeing her became part of the annual ritual for me. And because she and her husband apparently still played an occasional round of golf with Azuma, she remained fairly well informed about what he was up to.

From her we learned that Azuma had broken up with the bouncy Cindy long ago and that he no longer lived in the garrulous old lady’s basement. He had sold the beat-up yellow Corvair and was driving a red Mustang, brand-new.

“He’s the top rep, you know,” Mrs. Cohen told us.

As soon as he started working as an independent agent, he sold more than anybody else. He had the advantage of being in charge of the New York metropolitan area with the greatest concentration of hospitals. And he had the specialist’s knowledge of the product no other salesman could provide. He also worked with singular discipline. Every day, he woke at four in the morning and headed down the highway for the hospitals alongside early morning delivery trucks. If he had a moment to himself, he hit the library and read everything on the human digestive system he could find, keeping abreast of research. Luckily for him, the endoscope was such a superior product that his efforts were richly rewarded.

THE PROVERB ABOUT nourishing a serpent in one’s bosom might be how the company would describe Taro Azuma’s conduct from this point on. His record as a salesman soon led to his moving into a smart apartment in a discreet neighborhood of velvet lawns, and buying a big, shiny black Mercedes. In the States it wasn’t unusual for successful salesmen to have a tony address and drive expensive cars; living well was not necessarily an extravagance but a ploy to earn the trust of clients. If Azuma had been an American rep, the Japanese men in the company might have felt a tad envious but not said much about it. But he wasn’t American; he was a fellow countryman, who had worked alongside them all these years. And he now appeared to be pulling in huge sums of money—seventy thousand, even a hundred thousand dollars a month, rumor had it. Whatever the amount, it was likely to be more than the company’s new president earned in a year. Before long, some began demanding that Azuma’s commission be lowered. Whether this move was driven by jealousy or by a desire for a fairer balance among the wage earners is difficult to tell. What seems unjust from the outside is often a change for the better from the inside. But the next time his contract came up, the company lowered his commission from 10 percent to 8.