Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

“I only knew him a little,” I answered.

“When was it?”

“A long time ago.”

“How long?” he persisted.

“Just after he came to America.”

“Really? That long ago?”

Yusuke’s reaction pushed my girlhood much further into the past than the way I experienced it in memory. But, for the person in front of me, it would inevitably have seemed “that long ago.”

“Yes, way back then.”

“So, before he got rich?”

“Long before.”

“If you don’t mind my asking, how did you happen to meet him?”

Yusuke didn’t seem to realize that he was doing all the questioning.

“My father knew him much better than I did,” I answered and briefly explained their connection.

“I see.”

He was quiet for a moment. His smooth face, so typical of East Asians, showed no emotion.

“What did Mr. Azuma say about me?” I asked.

“He mentioned your name and that’s about it. When I told him that I worked for a publisher, he asked me if I happened to know a novelist named Minae Mizumura. All he said was, ‘She’s someone I used to know.’ ”

Still in some shock, I was in no mood to find anything funny, but the phrase “someone I used to know” sounded like a line from an outdated pop song.

Yusuke hesitated. He turned his eyes away and reached out to pick up the metal teapot—the kind found in every Chinese restaurant in America—and poured some more oolong tea for both of us. It was more lukewarm brown water than tea, with no smell or taste.

The restaurant was not all that big and, this being Friday evening, it was almost full. Waiters hurried back and forth, balancing large, round trays heavy with plates of food. The rain must have been sheeting down, but all we could hear inside that brightly lit place was the orders being shouted in Chinese to the kitchen and the conversations of diners enlivened by alcohol and hot food.

Yusuke did not go on, so I took the lead.

“I heard last fall that he no longer lives in New York.”

The unspoken words “he’s disappeared” made an ominous echo behind this. Yusuke gave a faint sigh and nodded, apparently aware of the fact.

“Yes. He seems to have disappeared.”

It was then that I remembered he might be in California. When I first arrived at Stanford, the idea that Azuma could be somewhere in the area had occurred to me, but I hadn’t given the possible coincidence much thought.

“Someone told me that he might have moved here to California.”

Yusuke nodded again.

“Oh, so you already knew that too?”

“Yes, I heard something of the sort.” He looked at me directly. As if he’d at last made up his mind, he enlarged on this a little. “In fact, that’s why I decided to come here.”

It all became much clearer now.

This young man had not wanted to see me; he had appeared because he’d heard that I knew Taro Azuma. Nothing in his attitude had suggested that he was interested in meeting me personally, yet I still had the nasty feeling that I’d somehow been deceived. At the same time, a renewed interest rose in me. Nursing my bruised feelings, I asked in the most natural way I could, “Are you looking for Mr. Azuma, then?”

“No, not really.”

He seemed not to know the answer himself.

“Ah, I know! He told you to go to America and make your fortune!” I said with a little laugh.

He smiled. “I’m afraid not.”

Still laughing, to sound less accusing, I said, “Then you came to see me because you wanted to find out more about him.”

The smile faded from his face. After a moment, perhaps searching for the right way to put it, he replied: “I didn’t want to know more about him. I wanted to talk to somebody about him.”

I gave him an encouraging look.

“It was in the summer, two and a half years ago.”

“Yes?” I nodded and kept my eyes on his.

At that moment, a couple sitting next to us, an Asian man and a white woman, burst out laughing. It was obvious that they’d recently fallen in love: I’d been monitoring their lively interaction out of the corner of my eye. On the other side was a big Chinese family sitting at a large round table, talking loudly in Chinese. Among them was a man with a thick neck, red and creased, looking like the illustration of the pig character I remembered from the famous Chinese classic Journey to the West I’d read as a child. He was almost spitting out his words, speaking excitedly and swinging his arms around. Farther away, at a table against a wall, sat a middle-aged, very shortsighted American who never raised his face from his newspaper as he ate by himself.

Under the red-tasseled lanterns, a colorful collection of lives was on display, but Yusuke seemed impervious to his surroundings, too preoccupied apparently with his own memories.

“That summer, I needed a break from work, so I went to Nagano, and by sheer coincidence I met Mr. Azuma there.” With a long sigh, his face looking more worn out than ever, he told me, “Even now, I have a hard time understanding what happened that week.”

I nodded again.

“It was during the Bon festival …”

I waited for him to go on, which he did, with that tired face of his.

“It’s hard to explain. It’s not that anything special happened. Basically, I just listened to a story from the past.”

“Whose past? Mr. Azuma’s? He told it to you?”

“Not exactly. The woman who was there with him told it to me. She’d known him since he was a little boy.”

I tried to come up with an image of this woman, but all I got was a vague shadow—no face, no age, nothing.

“It was such a strange week. I wasn’t feeling too well, so that probably made it feel even stranger than it really was. And I’m not over it yet.”

He spoke less hesitantly now.

After he returned to Tokyo, he tried to talk to the friend who went to Nagano with him about what had happened, but doing so only deepened his feeling that the whole thing might well have been a hazy dream. A year later, he came to the States, still haunted by the memories of that week. Then, just a few days earlier, he’d seen my name on the university Web site and decided on the spur of the moment to contact me, for the chance to talk to someone who also knew Taro Azuma. The decision had become an obsession.

“I thought that talking to you might help me get back to normal.” The bright lights in the restaurant seemed to emphasize the exhaustion on his face. His eyes wandered over the table, strewn with plates of uneaten food.

The couple next to us burst out laughing again.

“Is that why you had to quit your job?”

“I would have preferred not to quit, but I ended up having to.” He glanced over at the lovers, then asked, changing the tone of his voice: “I’m sure you’re familiar with it—the lottery for green cards?”

“Yes, I am.”

Even people who have lived in America for many years can have trouble obtaining the official right to permanent residency. Yusuke had decided to enter the green-card lottery, a program created by the government to encourage ethnic diversity among those entering the country, giving all nationalities an equal chance of success in America. A surprising number of Japanese enter the scheme, though few people are even aware of its existence.

“After I met Mr. Azuma, I began to think that going to America might not be such a bad idea—or, rather, just leaving Japan for a while. So I applied for a green card, though I didn’t think there was any chance I’d get one.”

“And?”

“By some fluke I got it on the first try.”

Not wanting to let the card go to waste, he asked for a year or two of leave without pay, but his employer refused on the basis that it would set an undesirable precedent. Yusuke decided to resign. He put together all the money his work had made him too busy to spend, and moved to California.