Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

“But, then …” She took a breath and continued hesitantly, “It turned out he’d disappeared.” She sounded incredulous herself.

“Disappeared?”

Yes, Azuma had abruptly dropped out of sight. The estate on Long Island that had stunned everyone when he bought it had already been sold. She heard rumors about his moving to California. People were baffled, stupefied. There wasn’t any nasty gossip, only various theories, but he had disappeared so completely that all conjecture seemed futile.

I didn’t know what to think. I was so used to hearing the latest development in his success story from Mrs. Cohen and crying out in amazement, each time I returned to the States, that it never occurred to me that this pattern might stop.

“But what about his work?” I asked.

She had no idea. She had heard that he’d stopped working with his partner of all those years and was just managing the fortune he had made for himself. The U.S. economy continued to grow, and stock prices continued to rise while the rich were taxed less and less. Even if he didn’t actively invest, his worth could only increase.

“Maybe he retired to somewhere like Beverly Hills, with all the other rich people,” Mrs. Cohen wondered.

Beverly Hills would be perfect for him, I thought, since he would be new money, like everyone else there.

“Or maybe he started a venture-capital business with young people in Silicon Valley,” she continued. “Anyway there are lots of Japanese-Americans in that area.”

For a few moments, neither of us spoke.

Her mention of Japanese-Americans made me wonder whether he was still a Japanese citizen.

“I wonder what his nationality is now,” I said.

“I’m not sure,” she replied, tipping her head to one side. But then, practical as always, she made a likely-sounding guess. “In terms of tax-planning, sometimes it’s better to remain a foreign firm. That can apply to individuals too.”

Later that evening, I called Nanae from the hotel.

“What! He’s moved to California?” she said.

“That’s what I heard.”

“Huh … To California.” Her tone was relaxed, which I put down to her now being settled in her own country. She had, in the end, returned to music and was teaching, eking out a living. Framed in the rectangle of my hotel room window was the night-lit, big-city scene outside, skyscrapers standing shoulder to shoulder yet solitary, each of them.

SOME MONTHS LATER, in January 1998, I was in California.

At the center of Stanford University’s campus was a quadrangle, a courtyard surrounded by a cluster of Spanish Colonial–style buildings with orange-red tile roofs and colonnaded arcades. The campus extended in all directions from the quad and was dotted with picture-perfect palm trees, just as you see them on postcards. Instead of East Coast–type professors with tweed jackets and old leather briefcases, Stanford professors could be seen pedaling their bicycles and wearing colorful helmets and shorts, legs tanned and muscular. And, as if to compete with those bicycles, motorized wheelchairs whizzed about, making me jump whenever they passed. Asian-American students were everywhere. Sometimes I saw nothing but black hair and Asian faces, yet everyone spoke Californian English.

The novelty of the West Coast made me feel like a tourist for weeks.

It seemed strange that once off campus, I saw hardly any high-rises. Palo Alto, where the campus was located, was the heart of Silicon Valley, and a few minutes’ walk took me to a street lined with computer-related companies whose names even I knew. The one- or two-story buildings with spacious parking lots stood as if in quiet disdain of the bustle of New York City. The neighborhood residents must have included some who had made fortunes while still quite young, but all I saw were incongruously modest houses.

California sunshine was another source of surprise. I arrived during the rainy season, so the sun shone rarely, yet when it did come out it burned, no matter how low the temperature. I learned that here the sunlight, when rain didn’t intervene, hit the earth without anything to filter it: the air itself was perfectly dry.

PACKING AND TRAVELING across the Pacific was becoming more and more of a hassle as the years went by, and returning to the States, therefore, less and less attractive. I had forced myself to accept this short-term teaching post at Stanford because I had the feeling that it might be the last time I’d come back for anything but a visit. I had no professional obligation that bound me to Japan; my mother and Nanae were learning to tolerate each other a little better and could manage in my absence for a reasonable length of time.

My teaching at Stanford was hardly what one would call work. A weekly graduate seminar was all that was asked of me, and I was even allowed to do it in Japanese. I planned to use my free time to write a third novel, whose odd-sounding title I had already decided on: An I-Novel from Top to Bottom . The project—a memoir of my childhood—made slow progress, though. As I had left Japan just as my childhood was ending, my memories of those years were locked away in a magic chest deep inside me. When I moved back to Japan and faced its day-to-day reality, my desperate longing for my home country quickly dissipated into thin air. But the locked chest remained. When, once in a while, some random happening pried the lid up, I would be overwhelmed by the bright jumble of things inside—by their aura, sounds, and smells—qualities that only childhood memories possess. By bringing out these memories in the form of a novel I felt I could atone for all the time that had passed, time that weighed on me. I just didn’t know why I had such difficulty writing it. Was it because I felt uneasy writing about my life in such an unmediated way, uneasy writing in the “I-novel” tradition of Japanese literature, where the author is too readily forgiven for—no, indulged; no, not only indulged, actually encouraged in—wallowing in his own life? With plenty of free time and abundant memories, I made hardly any progress.

My laptop on the small desk was often in sleep mode, a picture of falling cherry blossoms on the screen, while I spent most of my time curled up with a book or doing chores around the house.

And the house gave me plenty of chores to do.

Built in that same Spanish Colonial style with orange-red tiles on the roof, it certainly looked splendid, though it was as small as the gingerbread cottage in the Grimm’s fairy tale. Right next door was another little house, the mirror image of mine, which was occupied by Jim, the young Japanese-literature teacher who had invited me to Stanford. Jim’s life in the twin house seemed to be perfectly civilized, but my German landlady—nice but evidently extreme in her environmental concern—was opposed to all modern conveniences. The lamps might as well have been candles, with their low-watt lightbulbs, and the “fully furnished” place had no microwave, no vacuum cleaner, no washing machine. And no television. Listening to National Public Radio on the little transistor I bought, I spent a great many of my waking hours doing housework—cooking, mopping the floor, and washing laundry in the kitchen sink. I didn’t have a car this time in America either, and the supermarket was some distance away, so there were long walks with groceries in a backpack.

When there was no shopping to do, I took walks around town, weather permitting. It rained a lot, though—maybe every three days. Sometimes I was shut up in the house for days on end. The rainy season that year, apparently, was particularly sustained; some thought the reason might be El Niño. Sometimes even the highways were closed off because of downpours.