Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

Mrs. Cohen picked up one of the packets of rice crackers that I’d brought from Japan and held it up to the sunlight streaming through the window.

“Look at this! Japan is so rich now that every cracker comes in its own little sheath. Talk about extravagant!” She tore open the cellophane with her bright-red nails. “They say people in Japan eat things with bits of gold leaf scattered on top. Do you, Minae?”

“Of course not.”

“I’m glad to hear it.” Looking relieved, she abruptly switched the subject to Taro Azuma. “With so much Japanese money floating around, he decided to find himself some Japanese investors.”

“So that’s why he goes to Japan all the time,” I said, recalling what Nanae had told me.

“That’s right. Seems he started going there just around the time you left America. Right when Japan was beginning to get rich.”

She picked up her cup and drank the rest of her tea.

I couldn’t tell whether the touch of resentment I detected in her voice should be ascribed to his getting filthy rich —to borrow Nanae’s expression—or to the distance that might have grown between them because he was filthy rich .

“What exactly does he do? Nanae couldn’t tell me when I asked her,” I said, heading toward the kitchen to put the kettle on again.

“That doesn’t surprise me. You two girls wouldn’t understand it. I barely understand it myself!” she said with a laugh, and over a fresh pot of tea she tried to explain what Azuma once told her.

It started with the company for developing medical devices that he and the Jewish-American businessman founded. Then, at some point, they brought in an Israeli physician known for his brilliant innovations, forming the business around his creative ability. The physician, leading a team in Israel, would design advanced devices that were mostly either inserted in or attached to the body, such as tubes to prevent urinary incontinence, or miniature pacemakers. The connections Azuma had made selling endoscopes would be the pipeline for selling the new products. These were first tested on human subjects in Russia, where regulations were less stringent. Should the tests prove to be successful and U.S. official approval likely, Azuma and his partner would raise capital from investors and start a new firm to produce and market the new devices. Once one of these subfirms took off, they put the company, complete with employees, on the market and sold it, usually to a large corporation.

Naturally, the difference between the initial investment and a firm’s sale price constituted the profit. Sometimes Azuma and his partner were able to pay their investors a second million for every million dollars they put in. With such high profit margins, attracting investors from across the States was never a problem, but, since they always had a number of projects in hand, they remained on the lookout for new investors. The greater the investment capital, the more projects they could handle. Thus, when the so-called bubble economy started to expand in Japan, Azuma began going there for investors, and later, with the rise of other Asian economies, they joined forces with the overseas Chinese, and Azuma added Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong to his regular itinerary.

I listened to her story, lost in wonder. It was twenty years since I had first met him. In those two decades, he’d kept extending his range until it was almost worldwide, while I was cooped up in the insular world of the Japanese language, aside from a halfhearted detour into the declining realm of French.

I sighed, then murmured, “What a man …”

Mrs. Cohen immediately translated my admiration into numbers: “He must have made tens of millions of dollars by now. Super rich.” Her tone was detached, not showing any grudge she might bear him.

“But he lives rather simply for a man that rich, right? I heard he just saves his money,” I said, remembering my conversation with Nanae.

She put her mug down on the coffee table and looked at me pityingly.

“Honey, people that rich don’t save their money. When they’ve got some spare cash, they either invest or speculate.”

MY STAY IN America lasted almost two and a half years that time. I worked at my first novel between classes. On weekends, I drove over to the Institute for Advanced Study—a near-mythical place owing to Einstein’s tenure there—to go for a walk in the woods, wearing much-too-sturdy hiking boots from L.L. Bean. Sometimes I watched a herd of deer, clustered protectively around two or three fawns, move stealthily through the forest. Sometimes I encountered joggers, running with the faces of ascetic monks. Princeton is far enough south of New York for the seasons to shift without the violent extremes of the America I had known.

My life was relatively calm as well: I had a steady job and was happy with the progress I was making on my novel, which I was writing in Japanese. Once a week I also wrote a letter to my father, in language so simple that even a child could understand, and sent it via my mother. She was still involved with her boyfriend, but she visited my father to take care of his laundry or to pay his bills, and, every time she went, she read my letters aloud to him. I called her once a week.

“I don’t know if he understands your letters,” she would tell me, hinting at the futility of the undertaking.

“That’s okay,” I would reply. At least he knew a letter from his daughter arrived every week.

Nanae often drove down from New York to see me. She would spend the night on the sofa and, in the morning, head home, saying, “Bye! See you soon,” with a look of contentment on her face. After she waved her hand and drove off, the putt-putt-putt of her beat-up car would linger in the air; I always had to suppress a twinge of guilt about my new Civic.

THE SEASONS DULY took their turns, and when it was near the time for me to leave, I called Nanae and told her I was willing to lend her whatever I made from selling the Civic and, if necessary, would ask my mother to advance the rest, if she wanted to get herself a new Accord.

“You know, you can pay it back monthly, little by little.”

“I need to think about it.”

Perhaps she’d been shy or just reluctant to face up to her financial straits. Ten minutes after that unenthusiastic reply, she called back and said with formal deliberation, “I’ve decided to accept your generous offer.”

My motives weren’t really generous. If Nanae had a new car, she might be able to struggle on in the States awhile longer, I thought. I knew she had exhausted nearly all her options for making a living there, but, before confronting the question of what should be done about her, I just had to finish my novel—I prayed to heaven to let me finish it. Always the one to help around the house while Nanae practiced the piano, I had found my time and energy treated as common property, and that hadn’t changed. No one took my writing seriously. I myself could easily slip back into those old habits and stay away from writing—from what ought to be my calling in life—to deal with the muddle of daily life, too often trying to clear up the mess my family had become.

On the day I left, Nanae drove me to Kennedy Airport in her new Accord, its engine purring softly.

“Take good care of yourself.”

“ Yep . You too.”

I had already agreed to teach at another university in the States and was going to be back in less than a year. Maybe that was why she didn’t seem terribly down about my leaving. Nevertheless, the years of struggling had left her with a sickly look. I got onto the crowded jumbo jet feeling both exasperated and wretched, unable to erase the impression of her wasted face.

When I arrived in Tokyo, the first thing I did was visit my father. I couldn’t tell how much he was able to see or understand, but he turned toward me, smiled, and said he was glad to see me again. As he was no longer in the habit of wearing his dentures, his smile was toothless and vulnerable, like a newborn baby’s. I saw relief on my mother’s face.