Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

Yusuke had left the armchair a while before and was sitting on the floor, hugging his knees, his hands looking abnormally white. For some time, I’d been sitting with my legs to one side on the couch, and was now gazing at those pale hands, close enough that I could reach out and touch them. They were bony men’s hands, not unlike Taro Azuma’s. As it grew lighter outside, it seemed that the rain, like the darkness, was easing up a little.

“Want to get some sleep?” I asked, speaking to him more casually than earlier on.

“No, thank you. It’s time I went home.”

“You can’t drive in this weather. It’s not safe.”

They would have closed the highways with this rain.

I tried to convince him that in a few hours it would probably let up, but he insisted on going home. I told him again that it wasn’t safe to drive, promising I wouldn’t try to seduce him or anything. He said he didn’t want to be a bother. Finally, after this predictable tussle, the couch was turned into a bed and a toothbrush and clean towel were produced. I then got ready to go to bed myself, brushing my teeth, washing my face.

I walked back into the living room, drying my face with a small towel, to find him sitting on the couch—now a bed—staring at the wall. “Good night,” I said.

He shifted his blank eyes toward me.

“Will you be able to sleep?” I asked.

“I hope so,” he said, his eyes focusing on me as I stood in the doorway. “You must be tired too.” He seemed to take in my physical presence only now, when he’d finished telling the story.

“I am tired, but I still feel too worked up,” I told him, folding the face towel in half, conscious of the way he was looking me over. “I’ll take a double dose of sleeping pills.”

“You take sleeping pills?”

“Yup. Halcion. Always.”

Yusuke stood up and said, “I could sit by your bed and read to you … till you fall asleep.”

He obviously was thinking of the people in the tale he’d told me.

“Don’t be silly.”

“No, I’m serious,” he said, coming forward.

Was it because he’d been able to talk to his heart’s content? Or just because he was young? His face looked clear in the first gray of dawn, though he had stayed up all night. And on that face was an expression I hadn’t seen there before—an unexpected gentleness. Maybe he thought it would be rude to quickly fall asleep if I was still awake. What an offer, so sweet and ridiculously thoughtful … Smiling widely despite myself, I thanked him but told him his presence would certainly keep me awake. Then I turned and escaped to my bedroom. The sooner I could be alone to savor this extraordinary night, the better.

WHEN I LAY down on my bed, the tips of my fingers and toes were cold while my forehead and cheeks felt almost feverish. My nerves had been wrought up by the hours of blustering rain. They were wrought up too from being trapped by that rain in a room with a stranger. And there was the tale that stranger told. Yet all these things by themselves could not account for what I felt. I felt that providence was working behind the scenes, and with it rose a sense of elation that made me want to run out into the night. One coincidence had followed another to make a young man come from far away to deliver “a story just like a novel”—and this to me and me only. It was as if, echoing in my ears, a voice from on high was telling me that I really had been placed on this earth to be a writer.

A miracle, I thought.

There was another way too in which the gift Yusuke had brought was providential. I had been struggling to write a third novel, drawing on my childhood. The Japan Taro Azuma grew up in was the Japan of my own childhood, the place to which I had returned again and again in my memory after we moved to the States. Picturing Taro as a child, I heard the high note of the horn in the chill morning air as the tofu seller passed through the neighborhood. I saw my grandmother in her smock crouched outside the kitchen as she fanned life into the coals in the clay stove, the white smoke rising into the twilight sky. I played outdoors forgetting what time it was, the red sun setting behind me as a yellow streetlight came on overhead. The Taro I had known in New York faded and, before I knew it, I was a little girl again with bobbed hair, watching as he ran past me, his neck grimy with dirt.

If the true story I’d just heard could be turned into a true novel, I might finally be able to set free a time in the past that had been locked away inside me for so long.

With sunlight coming through gaps between the curtains, I went on staring at the ceiling.

BY THE TIME Yusuke and I sat down for breakfast, it was bright midday. The news on the little radio reported that both highways to San Francisco had been closed all night and had just reopened. I reached over to switch it off and said triumphantly, “See? You wouldn’t have made it home anyway.”

Yusuke simply smiled. His face, smooth and without any overnight stubble (this being an Asian face), looked much less troubled, in fact refreshed.

I soon learned that the night’s rain was record-breaking. When I opened the door to see Yusuke out, my neighbor Jim was standing in front of his house, talking to a man in rain gear and boots, holding a hose. It seemed some work had just been done there. Seeing Yusuke behind me, Jim looked faintly surprised for a moment, then smiled and in his usual bashful way said “ Hi ,” vaguely directing the greeting at both of us. The storm had been the worst in several decades in northern California, he told us, causing flooding and landslides over large areas; a number of people had even died. Workmen had been in Jim’s place since early morning, as his house too had been flooded. The two of us agreed that the noisy pump in my front yard, whose effectiveness we’d doubted, had, after all, saved my house from disaster.

ABOUT TWO WEEKS later, a letter arrived from Yusuke.

That morning after the storm, as he was leaving, I had told him I wanted to turn the story into a novel. His face showed first surprise and then unease. But, after all, he was the one who had delivered it to a person whose pursuit was writing novels: why be surprised, I said to myself defiantly, though I perfectly understood his reaction. It was natural for him to be concerned about the person who had passed it on in the first place. Suppressing my own sense of propriety, I assured him that, to avoid any trouble, I would change the names and settings in the written version so that it would be difficult to tell the identities of the actual people involved. Yusuke simply said, “I wonder,” and pursed his lips. Neither of us spoke for a while. I remembered the sense of elation I’d had the night before and struggled against my own ambivalence, though I didn’t want to push him. Yusuke watched me for a while. Then he seemed to have second thoughts on the matter and said more positively, “I suppose it would be all right. In fact, I can see that it might be interesting.” And he promised to send me a map of the locale.

When the envelope arrived, inside were two hand-drawn maps and several pages printed from a computer. One of the maps was labeled “Oiwake” and the other “Karuizawa,” and each indicated the location of the relevant summer houses with the word “here.” The text had the title “Notes on the Story as Told by Fumiko Tsuchiya,” though they weren’t notes so much as a chronology. A brief letter was included in which he said that, whereas the cottage in Oiwake had been torn down, the villas in the historic part of Karuizawa (Old Karuizawa) were probably still standing. His email address was given at the end. I typed the “Notes” into my computer, adding them to ones I had already made.