Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

He drank in this summer feast.

He then let his eyes wander over a different sort of feast: plates of roast ham, prosciutto, cheese, black olives, an assortment of pickles, and a tomato and basil salad. Eating surrounded by the green of the forest was already a luxury; now added to it was this fine spread, served casually to an uninvited guest. His initial impression of the woman as miserly had faded during the night and by morning was entirely gone. Moreover, he no longer felt that time had stopped here; rather, he’d begun to feel that this moment, as experienced in this place, was the only real time.

“Excuse me for asking, but are the two of you brother and sister?” he said, though he already suspected they weren’t.

“Oh, no,” she said with a low laugh, “I’m just his employee.”

To Yusuke, the word “employee” meant working for a store or a company, and her answer puzzled him.

“Employee?”

“I’m his maid.”

Yusuke looked the woman in the face, astonished. So she wasn’t the owner of a summer house. She wasn’t even a regular housewife. She was a maid … Somehow, though, the word didn’t at all suit the person who had set out this elegant Western meal for him. The revelation left him baffled, particularly when he remembered the way she had behaved and spoken the night before.

She must have sensed his confusion, for she added, “But we’ve known each other so long that I feel he’s like my little brother, or my son.”

“That long?”

“Yes.”

Maybe she was hired by the man’s parents when he was a child. Maybe that was why she called him simply by his first name, Taro, as if he were her younger brother.

Her eyes were trained on a spot far in the distance.

“We’ve known each other for a very long time,” she repeated and then pressed her lips together, perhaps to resist the temptation to be drawn into the past. Yusuke waited for her to say something more, but she did not continue.

“He’s rather an unusual person, isn’t he?” he began again.

She smiled sardonically before saying, “He’s an eccentric, all right—a genuine eccentric.”

Yusuke didn’t tell her that other people sometimes used exactly the same word about himself. The revelation that she was a maid, which still puzzled and surprised him, inevitably deepened his curiosity. The need to know more about these two only grew. Yet he didn’t want to push, not because he was ashamed of his curiosity or held back by her reticence. On the contrary, he felt that she herself wanted to tell him whatever she’d been storing up over the years; she was just unable to make up her mind and so was holding back. Still, he sensed that he had better not be the one to break the barrier. Otherwise, her need to share her story might vanish.

A vision of the man’s face rose again, making him feel flushed and uneasy; the wound on his arm began to throb.

Just then, she looked up at the sky.

“Look—a helicopter.”

Rotors pounding, a large helicopter was passing beneath the white clouds.

“We get them a lot around here. Every time I see one, I wonder what it’s doing. Sometimes I think they may be doing a story on the imperial family’s vacation. But then we’re too far from Karuizawa. Perhaps they’re military. There’s a base just over in Matsumoto.”

The helicopter spun out of sight. She continued, “Whenever I hear a sound like that, it makes me remember once during the Occupation when I saw a plane crash, out on a drill.”

“The Occupation?”

“Yes. In the old days, when I was working for the Occupation Forces, I got into the habit of looking up whenever I heard a plane fly over. One day, I looked up and flames were coming out of the plane and, before I knew it, it just fell to the ground.”

“What happened to the pilot?”

“He died, I guess,” she said matter-of-factly. “Right after the war, I was working on an Allied base.”

Then she changed her tone, as though in excuse for bringing up old memories. “Since I came here this year, all I do is think about the past …”

Once again she gazed far into the distance. “Especially today—I’ve hardly done anything since I got up.” It was virtually a confession that she had been crying. Both of them sat for a while until Yusuke broke the silence.

“The Occupation Forces,” he said, repeating the words to himself with no particular aim in mind. It felt strange to actually say the words, ones he had only seen in print before.

“A lot of things happened then,” the woman began again, possibly encouraged by this. “The first time I ever saw an American parachute close up—it was made of nylon—I was amazed how beautiful it was, what a lovely sheen the material had. When I was little, there was something called artificial silk, but it had no body to speak of, and it wrinkled easily. It was just so shoddy. We were all quite impressed when nylon came along. Everyone then thought it was much better than silk.”

For someone he’d imagined to be reserved by nature, she was getting quite talkative.

“I worked for the air force,” she added.

“What was your line of work?”

“Line of work?” She smiled as if he had said something funny. “I was a maid then too,” she said, using the English word, which must have been in regular use at the base. “At one of the officers’ houses.”

She explained that she’d been taught a few words of English and was immediately placed in one of the officers’ homes. Boys worked for the soldiers in the Quonset huts while maids worked for the officers.

“I had an uncle—my mother’s elder brother. Do you know the Mampei Hotel in Karuizawa?”

Not surprisingly, Yusuke had never heard of it.

“Well, it’s quite famous, a historic place,” she said. “My uncle worked in the restaurant there as a busboy from a young age—I’d guess he was in his teens when he started.”

After the Mampei, he worked aboard ocean liners for many years; then when the war ended, he started working for the Occupation Forces, and it was through him that she got her first job in Tokyo.

“Do you know Tachikawa station, on the Chuo Line?”

“Yes, of course.”

“There’s an American base in West Tachikawa. My uncle was working there as head steward —a manager of some sort, in the officers’ mess. It was considered a very good job back then. You see, that was where the American officers ate, so the place provided the best food to be had in Japan in those days. He was one of the few Japanese to fatten up right after the war,” she said with a laugh.

Yusuke laughed too.

“He was a little bit like a foreigner himself—I suppose it’s because he’d spent so many years on liners. Maybe a Nisei would be a better way to describe what he was like.”

Her voice changed, and she spoke of the past with a fondness that was almost longing. “He was very good to me. He knew so many things—so many different ways to fold a napkin, for example. I guess he taught me a lot about life.”

She smoothed the wrinkles in her paper napkin as she said this.

“He died a long time ago,” she said with a drawn-out sigh, and again pressed her lips together as if restraining herself, in case the many doors of her long-stored memories burst open.

After a brief silence, Yusuke said, “You mentioned you were from Saku.”

“Originally, I’m from Saku Daira.”

“You mean where the Saku Interchange is?”

“Saku Interchange …” She seemed to be savoring the sound of an unfamiliar combination of words. “Well, it wasn’t right there, but nearby. There used to be nothing but fields of mulberry bushes in that area once. Then they switched to lettuce. And now, all of a sudden, we have a huge elevated highway running through it. Have you heard that they’re building a Bullet Train station there as well?”