Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

“Since I was a science major, it’s fairly easy for me to find a job anywhere.”

“So what are your plans?” I asked. “Will you stay in the States permanently?”

“I haven’t decided. I might get more serious and look for a full-time job, or go to graduate school here. Or I might go back to Japan. As for making a living, it’s hard to say which place would be easier.”

By this time, we had both picked up our chopsticks and were eating again. There was still so much food left: chicken with cashews, stir-fried broccoli, the neat mound of steamed rice which was nearly untouched. My appetite, however, was gone, and I soon put down my chopsticks. Yusuke followed suit.

“If you wanted to talk about Azuma, I wish you’d said so from the beginning.” I might have sounded more annoyed than I intended, as he promptly apologized.

“You’re right. I should have told you right away. I’d been thinking so much about meeting you that when I actually saw you, I didn’t know how to begin.” He added quietly, “Then I realized I might be forcing my obsession on you, and you’d probably be bored.”

“Of course not. And, besides, I’m a good listener ,” I said, throwing in some English for fun, as Nanae often did.

“Well … yes, it seems like it.” He was looking at me as if trying to decide whether he should take this at face value, though he did seem relieved to have at last arrived where he wanted to. His face relaxed a little as the bustle around us began to register.

“I have time this evening, if you’d like.” I looked down at my watch. It was a little after eight.

“That’s fine with me, but …”

“Okay, why don’t I listen to the story this evening. Luckily, it’s Friday, so I guess you don’t have to work tomorrow.”

Yusuke nodded. Then, looking around him, he saw a line of people waiting at the door. He turned back to me. “Let’s go somewhere else,” he suggested.

“If you like, we can go to my place.”

“You mean your house?” His long, narrow eyes widened slightly.

“Yes.”

“You don’t mind?”

“It would be more comfortable there.” I called a waiter over and asked for a doggie bag. The waiter returned shortly with the check and a warm brown paper bag smelling faintly of grease. When I reached out to pick up the check, Yusuke pounced on it. In the end, we agreed to split it. This was the age of gender equality, as they say. Then we left the restaurant and its red-tasseled lanterns.

HEAVY RAIN CURTAINED the twin houses, with their wavy tile roofs. I saw blue light glinting between the slats of the venetian blinds at the other house, where Jim was probably channel-surfing as usual. We parked on the street and walked up the wet pathway to my front door.

The door opened directly onto the living room. In a corner sat a white plastic bucket full of tall flowers too gorgeous for their container. Nanae had ordered them from Japan for my birthday. “I specifically asked for the kind you’d find in an English garden and not the exotic ones grown only in greenhouses,” she told me on the telephone from Tokyo. “Is that what they sent?” A little corner of springtime in my living room, the bouquet seemed as much a celebration of her fresh start in Japan as my own birthday.

“Flowers! Only a woman’s house would have them.”

It may have been nervousness that made Yusuke come out with this awkward compliment.

“I don’t usually have flowers in the house,” I replied.

With the efficiency of a man who’s lived by himself for a long time, he helped me put together some drinks and snacks in the tiny kitchen. We soon had an open bottle of California red, wineglasses, a pot of black tea, two mugs, a few bricks of cheese, and some sliced dill pickles on the coffee table in the living room. Yusuke took the armchair and I chose the sofa at right angles to it. Though I liked wine, I was a poor drinker: it went to my head too quickly. I would have loved to curl up with a blanket and sip wine all night, listening to Yusuke’s story; but I had long since passed the age when a little tipsiness can be appealing—a reality that no woman is happy to face. Regretfully, I decided it would be wiser to alternate between wine and tea.

Small yellowish bulbs—ten watts, maybe less—on all four walls cast a muted light. When I had moved into the house, I changed the lightbulbs for brighter ones in all the rooms except the living room, where I never tried to read. A faint glow, as of candlelight, enveloped us and, combined with the rain and darkness outside, cut us off from the rest of the world.

Yusuke took a long time before beginning his story. Instead, he asked me how Azuma had established himself in New York. He wanted to know my first impressions of him. He spoke as little as possible but was oddly persistent in his questioning, as if he wanted to take over my memories and make them his own, distant and fragmented though they were.

As I gazed at Yusuke’s pale face in the muted light, it occurred to me that if a man were in love with another man, this is what he’d look like.

Rain beat hard on the roof. With no wind, it spilled straight down like a cascade, as though it meant to submerge the entire area.

At long last, Yusuke started to tell me his tale, beginning hesitantly but then going on as if unable to stop. I listened with the stillness of deep sleep. The present disappeared. The place where we were disappeared. Even Yusuke and I disappeared. With my sense of the solid reality around us dissolving, the yellowish glow from the small bulbs on the walls looked like will-o’-the-wisps, ghost fires. The wildness outside the little house now seemed distant, as if the power of nature couldn’t penetrate our world.

YUSUKE TALKED ON into the night.

A LOUD PULSING jarred me out of this trance. I recognized it as the sound of the sump pump buried in the front yard, chugging and spewing water into the street. The landlady had installed it to prevent the house from getting flooded, and every time it rained hard, the pump started up its loud thumping. Thinking it might be making all that noise to no good purpose, I once asked Jim, my next-door neighbor, whether he thought the thing did any good. He just smiled and shrugged his shoulders.

Yusuke also noticed it, just as he came to the end of his account.

“What’s that sound?” he asked, suddenly conscious of his surroundings. When I told him about the pump, he said in an oddly clinical way, “You’d need a generator to keep it working if the electricity gave out.”

“People have generators in their houses?”

“Apparently yes, when they’re worried about flooding and landslides.”

We said nothing for a while. We could hear gusts of wind blowing the rain in sheets across the roof; the lights dimmed and brightened several times, making a blackout seem a real possibility. The storm apparently had woken Jim up too: through the blinds in his living room I could see that the light was on. I looked at my watch. It was nearly five in the morning.

“This rain is really something,” Yusuke said, staring up at the ceiling.

“Yes, it is,” I agreed vacantly.

He murmured, “It was raining like this when I went to Oiwake to hear that story.”

“Mm …”

I concentrated on the sound of the rain.

I had entered so deeply into the world of his tale that it seemed strange to find there was another one—the real one—outside. I sat listening to the rain, and Yusuke started talking again.

“I didn’t come to California looking for Mr. Azuma, but once I was in Los Angeles, no matter where I was, I’d find myself wondering whether he might be somewhere nearby. Driving around, eating in a restaurant, shopping at the mall—I’d be looking for him. Sometimes I went out to Beverly Hills and those fancy neighborhoods, just driving around and around. Eventually, I settled in the Bay area, but I began thinking he might be in Silicon Valley somewhere. So whenever I came to this area, I’d be looking for him again. I’ve nothing in particular to say to him, though, even if we did meet …”