Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

The woman spoke in an emphatic tone, as if quietly declaring war on the man.

Later, when Yusuke looked back on the evening, he realized that was the crucial moment. He wasn’t sure whether, at that point, she had already decided to let him stay the night. But he was certain that the woman had made up her mind to be nice to him, if only to defy the man. Before Yusuke could say anything, the man wheeled angrily around and vanished into the rear of the house again.

Yusuke still felt at least as much at a loss as before. Although he was the obvious cause of the confrontation he’d just witnessed, he also knew that he had managed to get entangled in something complicated between the two that had nothing to do with him. He was bewildered, but also curious. He would have liked to know more.

Acting as if nothing were amiss, the woman carried a handful of fabric in from the tatami room and dropped it on the table. The smell of camphor wafted through the air. As though on cue, the wall clock began to chime ten.

When the last chime faded, the woman said, “Sit down and make yourself at home.”

“Well …”

“You can try calling again in thirty minutes.”

Her voice remained decisive.

“Well … Thank you.” Persuaded, Yusuke finally sat down. He kept wondering about the man, but the house was silent after the clock stopped chiming.

“Perhaps you’d prefer green tea,” the woman said as she reached again to pour hot water into the teapot.

“Either is fine with me.”

Though Yusuke’s voice revealed his lingering discomfort, hers was calm, in keeping with the matter-of-fact look on her face.

“People around here let children drink strong green tea even before bedtime. And they always have pickles with it. But I’ve spent so many years in Tokyo that I’m not used to it anymore.”

Yusuke felt mildly surprised to learn from this that she was not from the big city. He had assumed he was in the company of a person born and bred there and wondered how it felt for a local to return to the area in the summer.

“So you’re from this area?” he asked.

“Yes, originally. I grew up in Saku, which is just over that way,” she said, gesturing with her hand. “Nowadays, it’s turned almost into a city, but it used to be real country.”

Yusuke was not sure if the area where he grew up was “real country” too, yet it seemed appropriate to say, “I’m not from Tokyo either.”

“Is that so?” She smiled lightly and, after putting her reading glasses back on, asked, “Where are you from?”

“Matsue.”

“Matsue, in Shimane Prefecture?”

“Yes, near Izumo.”

“Ah, Izumo, as in the Grand Izumo Shrine,” she said, nodding.

The woman picked up some fabric and scissors and began taking apart what looked like a yukata , a summer cotton kimono. The veins on her hands had started to become prominent, as one would expect at her age.

His eyes followed the movements of her hands. Perhaps it was the expression “real country” that revived a distant memory. Unexpectedly, those slender hands had conjured up another pair—a very different pair, with sturdy fingers rough from working in the fields. They belonged to his grandmother, his father’s mother.

When he was in his first years of primary school, he used to spend his summers with his grandparents, who lived deep in the mountains of Susa. His grandmother’s knees hurt, so she no longer worked in the fields; she spent the entire day on the sunny wood-floored veranda outside the tatami room. She always sat there, her back bent, her legs tucked under her, stitching, undoing old seams, and stitching anew. He liked watching her wield the tiny sewing scissors with her thick, reddened fingers as she targeted one thin thread after another, snip, snip, snip .

A whiff of camphor would drift in the air, and he could hear the sound of the annual high school baseball games coming from the corner of the room nearby. The television was always left on. When he dozed off, he would wake to find she had covered him with a light blanket. After his last summer there, his parents got divorced, and for Yusuke, who went to live with his mother, the memories of summers far up in the mountains eventually grew hazy. Only fragments remained, like dreams from a previous life: large clay stoves on the earth floor of the kitchen, the cows and goats they kept, the old house with nothing but tatami rooms. Nonetheless, his memories of his grandmother were embedded in him, and even now he found it soothing to be in the presence of a woman who was no longer young.

Eyes still cast down, the woman asked, “Are you a student?” He could see that she didn’t dye her hair. There was quite a bit of gray.

“No.”

“Are you working then?”

“Yes.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m an editor on a literary journal.”

“Ah, that’s why you’re so well-spoken for a young person,” she said.

Older people often complimented him like this.

The woman’s Japanese had become much more familiar than it had been. Perhaps she always spoke rather formally when she met people for the first time. Once she decided he probably wasn’t a blueblood, she too seemed to feel more at ease. Yusuke thought he even detected a trace of condescension in her voice.

“Have you been working long?”

“This is my fourth year.”

“Still pretty young then. In what year of the Showa period were you born?”

“The forty-fourth. Nineteen sixty-nine.”

“So presumably your parents are still in good health—in fact, they must be younger than I am, aren’t they?”

For a brief moment, he didn’t know how to properly respond.

“They’re both alive and well. They got divorced when I was small, though, so my present father is not my real father.” But why was he telling a stranger such personal things? By the time he realized what he was saying, the words had already slipped out. What’s more, the tone of his voice made it clear that he and his stepfather were not on the best terms.

The woman stopped her needlework, lowered her glasses, and looked at him. She parted her lips as if she meant to make further inquiries but checked herself. After a moment, she remarked instead, “It was like that with me. I also had two fathers.”

This time it was Yusuke’s turn to take a good look at her.

“My father died during the war, and then my stepfather came along. We didn’t get on very well, so I went to Tokyo.” She shrugged her shoulders and smiled. “My younger brother and sister had no problems,” she added.

“It’s the same with my younger sister and my stepfather. They get along fine.”

The two shared a soft laugh, and a new sense of intimacy. With a smile still in her voice, the woman said, “Life is funny that way,” and then returned to her sewing. It looked like a summer kimono for a girl, an older one, with bright scarlet koi, like giant goldfish, swimming this way and that against a white background.

Yusuke observed her quietly as she worked with her fingers. In his job as an editor, he had more than enough opportunities to meet people where his role was to listen patiently to what they had to say. Usually, he found himself looking forward to the end of the meeting, so that he could be by himself again. Yet tonight, perhaps because he was so startled by the man he’d just seen, he couldn’t help taking an interest in the woman as well and in how they were connected.

She was obviously an accomplished homemaker, but there was a certain briskness, an efficiency in her manner, that seemed to set her apart from women who had always stayed at home. For one thing, her clothes—a simple cotton T-shirt and cotton slacks—looked far smarter than anything his own mother would wear. Maybe she’d had a career. At the same time, he found it puzzling how she somehow evoked an older style of life as she sat with her head bowed, taking apart an old cotton kimono, reminding him of his grandmother.