Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

Contemporary Japanese Literature that was a farewell gift from my great-uncle. Despite the title, they were all old, since the collection was published almost two decades before the end of World War II. They filled my head with quaint Japanese phrases, and my heart ached for a Japan I had never actually lived in. I dreamed day and night of returning to a country that no longer existed. There were, of course, other things besides those old novels that made their way into this second world: a fair number of Japanese translations of classical European novels, for example, the paperbacks so aged that the pages had turned a dull brown. We also went to American movies at a pair of nearly empty movie theaters across from the town’s train station, though they never made complete sense to me since my English wasn’t good enough. There were occasional ballets and operas at the Metropolitan Opera House as well, for which my mother and I made a great fuss of dressing ourselves up. I even listened to LPs of sentimental oldies my father brought back from his trips to Japan, along with 45s of silly pop songs that somehow ended up in our house. On weekends, when my parents were home, I holed up in my small bedroom upstairs and let my mind wander, sometimes spending hours on end looking at myself in the mirror, dreaming of a beautiful, enthralling, dramatic future—all that life could promise a girl. This second world of mine was probably no different really from the inner life of any adolescent given to those flights of fancy that are shaped by encounters with “art” in its various forms. But because I had been removed from my own country, that world of mine was steeped in nostalgia, and because I had no friends from my own generation, it was anachronistic to the point of comedy, and because I had made myself so isolated, it was unusually intense. I became more introverted than it was in my nature to be, and I lived unrepentantly engrossed in that world.

All this might have been unhealthy if these two worlds were the only ones available to me. Fortunately, I had a third one, a world I shared with my parents. This was populated mainly by Japanese adults, people from my father’s office, he being the director of the small, fledgling American branch of a Japanese optical instruments company. Since I was the boss’s daughter, every one of those people treated me with indulgence. And, what gladdened my heart even more, they all spoke in Japanese. The trouble was that their world was so banal I couldn’t believe it had anything to do with me. The air teemed with terms like “retail,” “customer service,” “head office,” “accounting,” “business trip,” and “local hire”—terms that were familiar yet unappealing to a girl like me whose head was filled with novels. My heart sank on hearing them. My father didn’t relish being a corporate employee, and his distaste must have passed on to my sister and me like an infection. Although that world provided me with all my material comforts—three fine meals a day, clothes that passed muster among my well-to-do American classmates, and a Colonial-style house that was easily twice the size of our house in Tokyo—I looked down on it unawares. To the Japanese adults inhabiting it, I may have seemed only a chatty schoolgirl; I may even have seemed cheerful. But for me that world was commonplace, mediocre, a drag.

IT WAS IN that third world that I first came across Taro Azuma.

One evening, my father mentioned his name when we were having dinner in what Americans call the breakfast nook , an alcove attached to the kitchen. I remember the occasion because of an unfamiliar expression he used: a private chauffeur . Apparently Azuma was a driver for an American my father knew.

Intrigued by the expression, I looked up from my plate at my father’s familiar face against the familiar wallpaper.

“ Private chauffeur ?” repeated my mother, apparently as intrigued as I was.

“Atwood found him, and he’s staying at their house.”

He pushed his plate away to show that he was finished with his meal; in the narrow space this created, he would spread out the New York Times or line up a variety of small bottles, some brown, some transparent, containing digestives and supplements whose benefits his teenage daughter definitely didn’t want to know.

The words private chauffeur stuck in my mind.

Unlike California, New York—the whole East Coast, for that matter—had never seen an influx of East Asian immigrants. As the daughter of a Japanese expatriate posted to New York, my main image of Japanese people abroad was of company employees dressed in dark suits, their ties carefully knotted and their shiny black hair neatly parted on one side. The only others I could picture were those who catered to their needs, such as chefs in sushi restaurants or girls in piano bars. I had never heard of a private chauffeur . What’s more, this man didn’t even shuttle executives around for a Japanese company: he worked for an American, in whose house he lived.

“Well, Mr. Atwood seems to be doing all right for himself,” my mother said as she poured some tea over the rice in her bowl. Despite her marked preference for the Western way of life, she didn’t feel a meal was complete without this final touch: a small bowl of rice with green tea poured over it, and pickles on the side.

“Someone introduced the man to Atwood, and he gave him the job,” my father explained.

My mother sounded skeptical as she asked, “So he hired him out of kindness?”

“Oh, no. Atwood’s not as generous as that. He must have thought he could actually make good use of the guy.”

“That makes more sense,” she said, nodding. “That’s the way rich people are.”

“I’m guessing that it’s also a way to get a tax break. Atwood’s own business is making big bucks these days. If you examined the company’s books, they would probably show that they’re paying Azuma a pretty hefty sum.”

“My, my! A driver making good money?”

“Just on paper. They probably list him as an export manager or something. Besides, if they said he’s a chauffeur, they couldn’t get him a work visa. Driving isn’t exactly what you’d call a special skill.”

While working as an executive at a major broadcasting company, Atwood also had a small business of his own, and it was apparently as its boss that he sponsored Azuma for a work visa.

“What’s he like, Papa?” I asked him, pouring tea over the rice left in my bowl, just as my mother had.

“Who?”

“The chauffeur.”

“I have no idea. I haven’t met him yet.”

“Has he been abroad for a long time?”

In my mind was an image of a man, deeply tanned, who after wandering around California or Latin America had wound up in New York with nothing but the shirt on his back.

“No, he only arrived recently.”

“So he’s just an ordinary Japanese?”

“It seems so.”

“Why would someone come all the way to the States to work as a private chauffeur ?”

“Well …” My father seemed at a loss.

“You’ve got it backward, Minae,” my mother broke in. “Nobody would come just for that. People take that kind of job because it’s the only way for them to get into this country.”

“Hmm.”

I felt put out. My homesickness had turned me into a little patriot. The popular portrayal of Asians in the American media at the time was offensive to me. In movies and on television, they were nearly always cast as vaguely Chinese live-in servants, whether cooks, gardeners, or maids; they appeared onscreen with inscrutable smiles on their faces, bowing with an obsequious “Ah, so,” all the time. My ears burned whenever I came across such scenes.

I later came to realize that the image of Asians as live-in servants wasn’t that far removed from reality, given the history of immigrants on the West Coast. But in my ignorance, I took it as undue prejudice. My own family had arrived on the East Coast and lived comfortably in a suburban house surrounded by a well-kept lawn—thanks only to Japan’s economic growth, though I wasn’t conscious of it then. How could anyone allow himself to leave Japan, with all the neon delights of the Ginza and the fastest train in the world—a country in every way as good as America—to take the kind of job that would only reinforce the popular prejudice against Asians?

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