Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

“How old is he?” I asked as I put the glasses in the sink.

“Twenty or twenty-one, I’d guess.”

“That young!” I was surprised again. It was the first time since coming to New York that I’d met a Japanese man that close to my own age. I had lumped him with other adults, not only because he had a job, but because he seemed to lack the freedom from care that typified youth.

“Yes. He started working without finishing high school.”

“That’s not something you see much anymore,” my mother commented.

“That’s what I thought at first, but then I realized some of the people at the office don’t have a regular high school diploma either.” He was counting those in question on the fingers of one hand.

“So it’s not that unusual.”

“No. But they all went to night school after they started working. Some even kept it up as far as a college degree.”

“Is that right?” She sounded impressed.

I took a seat at the table and asked, “How about Mr. Azuma?”

“What about him?”

“Did he go to night school too, to get a diploma?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t mention it.”

“So you think he didn’t try to graduate?”

“Couldn’t, more likely—probably had no chance.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, not entirely convinced.

It was still a time in Japan when going to college was a privilege even for men, a stark social reality that hit me only after our family moved to the States. I gained this insight partly because I was growing up, but also because my father started working for the company that he did. Something of a maverick, he had changed jobs often back in Japan before opening his own import business, an attempt that, after a couple of years of unexpected and bizarre success, ultimately failed. Then, fortunately, a manufacturer of optical devices, best known at the time for making compact cameras, hired him; it was rapidly expanding its export business and had been on the lookout for someone fluent in English to head its U.S. office. The branch office was small in the beginning, and with my family entertaining the employees on weekends and holidays, I got to know nearly all of them. They were mostly repairmen—politely called technicians . I suppose they found it easier to open up to a young girl, like me: through mixing with them I got to know the feelings of men whose background and education limited their prospects in life—their frustration and bitterness, their resignation and pride.

But Azuma was too close to my own age for me to group with those men.

A memory floated hazily into my mind of a black-and-white photograph I’d seen once in a magazine back in Japan. My sister and I were forbidden to read magazines meant for adults, and so it was with a guilty conscience that one day when no adults were around I sat down on our couch—a fake leather thing bought secondhand from the Occupation authorities before I was born—and was leafing through one of them when I came across a certain photograph. It showed a group of young people lined up on a dingy station platform, dressed in dark school uniforms, the boys with high stiff collars, the girls with pleated skirts, their faces tense. They were recent graduates of middle school—the end of compulsory education—who had just arrived at Ueno station from northern Japan to work in Tokyo. In large letters on one side of the page, the headline read “Our Golden Eggs”: these boys and girls were to provide the much needed, yet increasingly scarce, cheap labor as Japan entered a new economic age. The boys all had buzz cuts, while the girls wore their hair either in a short bob or in braids. The picture reeked of the dismal poverty of the snow country and the endurance of the children who lived there: looking at it, I could practically smell the miso and soy sauce, the wooden pickle barrel and the iron cooking pot, the straw and firewood of their lives. Perhaps because they were not much older than I was, the photograph left a strong impression on me.

Yet just as I found it difficult to connect the uniformed young man I’d just met with the company repairmen I knew, I also found it difficult to connect him with those boys with their shaved heads.

“Do you think his family was poor?”

“I’m sure they were.”

“But he’s very well-spoken, don’t you think?” my mother said.

“That he is.”

“Then how did he manage to get to New York?” I asked, all ears. This was before the age of inexpensive international travel, when you didn’t dare ask your parents for a return trip home during summer breaks. My father’s position as a branch director allowed him to go back occasionally, but others hardly ever received the privilege. No one thought of sending their families home. I was less concerned with Azuma’s poverty than with finding out how someone like that could make his way here.

“Apparently Atwood managed to get a work visa for him.”

My father, with the visa on his mind, had missed the point of my question.

“So Mr. Atwood paid for the ticket?”

“No, he wouldn’t have gone that far.” He added, “Oh, yes, now I remember. Azuma told me he came by ship.”

“A ship?”

Given my infatuation with old novels, literary scenes set on ships immediately sprang to mind, especially scenes from Takeo Arishima’s A Certain Woman , a novel that reworked Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina in a Japanese setting. Having read it over and over again, I dreamed of growing up to become someone like its heroine, a woman named Yoko traveling alone on a voyage across the Pacific. I would dress in an elegant kimono, and my sudden but carefully timed entrance into the ship’s dining room would make everyone turn to admire me.

Naturally, I would travel first-class.

“He came on a freighter,” my father said.

“On a … freighter?”

“That’s what he told me. By the southern route.”

Confronted by the word “freighter,” my imagination failed me. I couldn’t recall ever reading a novel in which freighters appeared.

“But even traveling that way would be pretty expensive, wouldn’t it?”

“I guess so. Especially for a Japanese.”

“So I still don’t see how he managed to get here.”

“Oh, if someone really wanted to come to the States, I’m sure he’d find some way to scrape together enough for a ticket. Besides, Azuma was already working before he came here.”

I was still not fully convinced.

“You know,” he now said to my mother, “I get along all right with Atwood, but I know that he basically looks down on us Japanese.”

Since Azuma didn’t have a car of his own and was stranded at the Atwoods’ on weekends, they evidently gave him odd jobs to do around the house, and even set him to mowing their extensive lawn. His job title may have been chauffeur, but he was more like a manservant in reality.

“And then there’s that young lady friend of Atwood’s.”

This was news to me but apparently not to my mother, who nodded as she reached over to take a toothpick from the small container on the table.

“Azuma said that he sometimes drives her in the limousine. Atwood of course is careful not to let his wife find out.”

“Oh, my.”

“Azuma doesn’t seem to quite get it. He asked me what Miss Rogers does! I wasn’t sure how to answer.”

My mother smiled a faintly sardonic smile.

“Besides, Atwood himself told me that just the other day when that dumb son of his was home on vacation with his girlfriend, he let him use the limo. So the boy has plenty of liquor and a girl to play with in the back, while Azuma does the driving. That must have been a bit hard on Azuma. He’s a healthy young man himself.”

To an adolescent girl who’d only just met the person in question, these words were uncomfortably suggestive.