Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

“I majored in physics in college.”

I glanced at his face again; he looked somehow brainier than before.

“I didn’t know publishers hired people with science degrees.”

“They do.” He smiled, showing white teeth. “I was an editor on their science magazine. But then it went out of circulation, and I was transferred to their literary journal. I wasn’t too happy.”

“You don’t like literary journals?”

“It’s more that I wasn’t cut out for it.”

I waited for him to elaborate, but he said nothing more about it. The dismay I’d felt at his lack of interest in my writing dissolved. I was relieved to know of his indifference to contemporary Japanese literature, since that meant he wouldn’t expose my ignorance by rattling off names of up-and-coming writers, who popped up like bamboo shoots after a shower. At the same time, I felt even more mystified about why he’d come to see me. If it was just a matter of missing having a conversation in Japanese, San Francisco was full of people who could oblige.

After saying so little about himself, Yusuke proceeded to ask when I had arrived, where I lived, whether I had a car, and how I was getting Japanese food in town. He did not seem to be particularly enjoying the conversation, or my company, for that matter. Even so, he appeared to be prolonging his time with me. I couldn’t think what I ought to do. Silence fell yet again. I sat fiddling with the empty mug in my hands.

It was getting dark outside.

I furtively glanced at my watch and saw it was a little past six.

The rain that had begun pouring down that afternoon was now heavier still, and, with the night approaching, everything around us seemed to be dissolving, blurring—a world drenched in water.

I remembered a time when I often encountered new people in unfamiliar places and spent hours with them. Who it was or where the place was did not matter; what mattered was that those hours cut off from routine could be as intoxicating, as blissful, as time spent drifting on the surface of a deep sea. But after I reached my mid-thirties, this happened less, and I began to feel that new encounters were often just repetitions of old ones. I hadn’t experienced meeting a stranger as a pleasure for a very long time.

“Would you like to have dinner with me?” I asked.

“Are you sure?” His tired face brightened. When I saw this, that sensation of cutting some time off from everyday life, of being set pleasantly adrift, began to revive. Life was again something to celebrate. Though still clueless as to why this nice young man was here in the first place, I at least felt sure that he wanted to spend more time with me. I couldn’t help smiling.

“If you happen to be too busy …,” he ventured.

“No, no. I happen to be not busy at all,” I answered, laughing.

WE HEADED OUT in Yusuke’s Volkswagen to one of his favorite Chinese restaurants, which turned out to be in Mountain View, the next town. The place was gaily lit, with ceiling lights and red Chinese lanterns decorated with tassels, also red, hanging from the ceiling. After we were seated, Tsingtao beer arrived, followed by plate after plate of Chinese food served American-style—haphazardly but generously. Yusuke gradually relaxed and started talking about how the sunfish at the Monterey Bay Aquarium were grotesquely big, and how he’d visited a resort area just across the Golden Gate Bridge.

The previous fall, he had driven around Napa Valley, the wine country nearby, where grapevines hung low in perfect order like soldiers in line. There, the bigger wineries competed for visitors by offering tours and providing free tastings to lure them into buying wine by the case. At one of these, he saw an exhibit that included an early twentieth-century ledger listing payments to workers. The left-hand column showed wages in dollars, and in the adjacent column were the laborers’ signatures verifying receipt. Together with signatures in English, he spotted some characters for Chinese names like Wang and Chang, clumsily written by obviously illiterate hands. The Asian workers were paid from fifty cents to a dollar a week, while the other names all had wages of eight, ten, or even fifteen dollars a week alongside them.

“They made twenty or thirty times more than the Chinese,” he said, sounding less scandalized than amazed—or even slightly amused.

“Maybe the Asians were day laborers, the ones called coolies .”

“Probably.”

About a quarter of San Francisco’s current population was Chinese-American. Some of those people had to be descendants of men who worked in the wine country. Some of the Asian-American students I saw on campus might also be their descendants.

“I understand the Japanese-Americans had a rough time of it too. I heard they weren’t allowed to own land.”

I nodded, appreciating his interest in these Asian immigrants. Most of our fellow countrymen were too smugly occupied by the here and now of contemporary Japan, their interests confined within its boundaries. But I also appreciated the absence of any too-easy outrage or sympathy in his voice.

“And yet the American dream can actually be more than just a dream.” Saying this, he looked at me intently again, as if searching for something in my face. Then he said: “I believe you knew Taro Azuma when you lived in New York.”

This was not a name I was expecting to hear.

“You mean the millionaire?”

“Yes.”

He was watching my reaction carefully.

“Do you know him?” I asked.

“I met him three years ago. Actually, two and a half.”

Then it might have been just before Azuma disappeared, I thought. Yusuke continued to watch me with his long, narrow eyes. I stopped eating and stared back.

That this person had met Azuma did not sink in. Not easily. The name itself evoked memories—happy memories, I suppose, now that I thought about them—of the white Colonial-style house on Long Island, of my father and mother in the breakfast nook , and of me in a miniskirt, my hair in long bangs, primping and daydreaming endlessly in front of the mirror. What could the Taro Azuma I’d known then have to do with this young man from Japan?

“In New York?” I asked him after a pause, still nonplussed.

“No, it was in Japan.”

Another surprise. “Oh? Where?”

“In Nagano.”

I was at a loss. Of course, I’d heard of Nagano. There would be the Nagano winter Olympics this year; the place was known for miso and soba noodles. Yet all that came to mind was a vague, idealized image of the “Japanese countryside,” with its mountains, streams, and fresh air, as it might be represented in a grade-school textbook illustration. I was unable even to locate the place on my mental map. I remained silent.

Yusuke continued, “I was in a place called Oiwake, in Karuizawa.”

It was a relief to hear the name “Karuizawa” mentioned. At least I knew about Karuizawa from the old novels I used to read, and of its association with foreign words that had entered the language at the dawn of Japan’s modernity, and still sounded Western and evocative: “highlands” and “horseback riding”; “birch” and “larch” trees; “barons” and “counts.” Yes—there was even a novel set in Karuizawa whose title, The Wind Is Rising , was taken from a poem by Paul Valéry: “ Le vent se lève, il faut tenter de vivre .” But what did this literary Karuizawa have to do with the Taro Azuma I knew?

“It was pure coincidence that I met him,” Yusuke said quietly, almost to himself, and picked up his chopsticks, only to lay them down a moment later. “I understand you knew him personally,” he said.

Could our relationship be described as “personal”?