Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

I was dismayed to hear about this irregular behavior, but the real story, I found out later, was more devious. With the sales of endoscopes doing far better than originally expected, the company wanted to reduce the commissions of all their salesmen; management took advantage of the widespread resentment of Azuma’s situation to implement a more general readjustment. Lowering his commission would pave the way to lowering that paid to other people in the next round of contract negotiations.

I don’t know how they justified the reduction to Azuma. I only heard that he signed the contract without a flicker of emotion and, by redoubling his efforts, managed to make as much money again as in the previous year—something generally seen as an extraordinary achievement. The next time his contract came up, management offered him 6 percent, perhaps thinking that he wouldn’t dare bite the hand that fed him. Besides, 6 percent still added up to a very large sum. This time, though, Azuma asked for some time to consider the offer. Three days later, he returned the contract unsigned.

Not only did he walk away from the company, but it was soon known that he had signed with a rival American firm. It was a flagrant betrayal. Azuma had by then been granted a green card, with the right to permanent residency, having hired a lawyer and prevailed upon his medical connections to act as guarantors; he was free to do as he pleased. The company retaliated by restoring the commission level of the other salesmen, with whom the initial cut had obviously been unpopular.

ON MY VISITS home after this episode, I sometimes heard my father describe Azuma as “shrewder than a Jew,” an unexpected phrase from someone who prided himself on his liberalism. After helping Azuma get hired, and thinking that he’d done a favor both to the man and the company, he must have felt personally betrayed. Still, I don’t think he was really shocked, because he had long since stopped mentioning him at dinner anyway—a sign of the distance he felt between them. My father could understand and relate to the old Azuma, yet he could neither understand nor relate to the new one who “rode around in a big Mercedes.” Whatever Azuma did now had no power to upset him; he even took some pleasure in seeing his initial reading of the man confirmed in such a spectacular way. Once in a while I’d hear him mutter a comment like, “The guy’s really put down roots.”

My father was not the only one who had mixed feelings about Taro Azuma.

Yaji, who had returned to Japan and married, had then been transferred to the Los Angeles office and came with his family to visit us at Christmas. We were reminiscing about the old days, and the topic eventually turned to Taro Azuma.

Evidently a more doting parent than his wife, Yaji sat bouncing his baby on his lap before saying to my father, “That Azuma’s really something, isn’t he?” I thought he was just being generous, as he always was, but he added, “A lot of people are impressed.”

According to him, not every colleague who knew Azuma from the New York days was critical of him.

“What about Mr. Irie?” I asked. I clearly remembered him saying to my mother, “I just don’t like that kind of guy.”

“Yes, well, even he said the company was in the wrong,” he replied with a little laugh. The baby on his lap, his spitting image, laughed too, wriggling his body.

I saw in their reaction the ambivalence peculiar to Japanese workers who remained a long time in the States. Living year after year in the land of immigrants, they all must have had a moment when they wondered what would happen if they too cut their ties with their own country. The ambivalence would have been all the more strongly felt by those who had only limited prospects after their return to Japan.

That said, Azuma’s betrayal was censured by most Japanese. The news of his behavior, that he had “traded Japan for America,” spread like shock waves in New York’s Japanese communities, where he soon was widely reviled.

Around the same time, we began hearing peculiar rumors about him: that he wasn’t Japanese, he was Chinese; no, Korean; no, he’d got Vietnamese blood in him—no wonder he didn’t care about sticking it to a Japanese company. We even heard that back in Japan he’d run off with the daughter of a family who’d been good to him, and then dumped her …

These rumors all had an oddly jingoistic tone to them, and they bordered on slander. That Azuma hadn’t even once been back to Japan, when anyone else that successful would have returned to parade his fortune, only incited nasty comment too.

My own memories of Taro Azuma faded—it was ages since I had even seen him. Though we’d hardly spoken more than a few times, I had always felt a certain warmth for the man I knew. But now everything I heard about him made me imagine someone different. His so-called treachery didn’t bother me. Traitors, like escaped convicts, were quite romantic. But he was a nouveau riche! I imagined the Azuma who “rode around in a big Mercedes” as some kind of yakuza figure, with dark glasses, a Rolex, and a gold chain hanging down his golf-tanned chest. If corporate employees were boring, nouveaux riches were worse. My recollection of his expression when he flipped through the pages of that volume of the Girls’ Library of World Literature , of his dark stare as he gazed at the crystalline water, of his rigid face as he danced slowly to “Blue Moon”—all this now seemed like tricks of memory. Fortunately, those past scenes were by now too remote from my own life to evoke any lingering sentimentality.

As the years went by, he continued to grow in stature. He eventually went into partnership with a former client, American and Jewish, to set up a firm to develop medical devices. In the same wealthy suburb he’d been living in, he moved up to a penthouse with a large terrace. We heard rumors that he was dating a doctor, then a lawyer. He was spotted a few times at the Metropolitan Opera, though whether he liked opera or was just accompanying an opera-loving girlfriend, no one knew. I remember thinking that a man with that kind of physical presence would have no trouble dating American women.

THINGS CONTINUED TO change. Taro Azuma had become a stranger who led a life in another world, and we had no occasion to meet. What’s more, my family’s circumstances declined in almost comically inverse proportion to his rise, though on a much smaller scale. As my father’s health got worse, my mother fell in love with a Japanese man she’d met at work, more than ten years younger than her. By the time my father’s illness forced him into retirement, she was only coming home to sleep. He spent his days at home staring at the ceiling, where cobwebs started to appear.

As for us sisters, the “good marriage” everyone expected for us—and which we ourselves took for granted—never took place. We wasted our youth. Suddenly we realized that the time was gone when people said, “You’re so lucky. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.” Nanae abandoned her piano playing, on which our parents had spent a fortune (even buying her a Steinway). To our mother’s fury, she decided to become a sculptor instead and was living in Manhattan, holding out on her own by taking odd jobs. The men who dated her became fewer (and poorer), and, as if to compensate, she got herself two cats, littermates whom she addressed in English as “ my babies ,” purring like a cat herself. As for me, after living as a student all those years, I ended up doing more of the same by going to graduate school, in French literature—out of pure inertia and without any desire to become an academic. For years I had had a dream of returning to Japan to write novels, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Instead I just dreaded the day when my scholarship would run out.