Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

He took a shower. He was searching through the bathroom cabinets for tape and gauze to rebandage the scrape on his arm when the telephone rang. It was Kubo.

“I don’t know what the heck’s going on. Grandma’s a lot better now.”

“Really?” Yusuke answered, not knowing what else to say.

“I’ll go see her at the hospital tomorrow morning, and then I’ll head back your way.”

“Is it okay for you to leave?”

“Sure. They said she might even be able to go home soon. She just turned eighty, so she’s still got years to live—statistically speaking, that is. It’s a bit scary how people live so long nowadays.”

Yusuke just smiled at his end of the phone. Kubo asked how he was getting along.

“Everything’s fine.”

“I mean are you getting your head together.”

“My head’s fine too.”

The sensation that the full moon the night before had cast a spell over him still persisted. He felt as if someone else was speaking to Kubo while his own soul wandered about outside him in a different realm. He was far from feeling fine, really—yet he didn’t dislike the sensation either.

“You know what? I’m really sorry, but I wrecked your bike.”

Yusuke launched into a heavily edited version of the events of the previous night, but Kubo, after listening for a while, interrupted in an exasperated voice, “You could have just called 104 and found out the number. You know—Information.”

“And asked for what number?”

“The management office for the house.”

“I didn’t even know there was such a thing.”

“Sure, you did. We drove by it a bunch of times.”

“But I wouldn’t have known what name to ask for, anyway.”

“You just say, ‘The Mitsui Woods in Middle Karuizawa.’ ”

He now remembered seeing a sign with that name from the taxi, just at the bridge. He realized for the first time that the sign referred to the whole development. He also remembered that Kubo’s father worked for one of the companies in the Mitsui Group.

“Don’t forget the mighty Mitsui,” Kubo said with a laugh. He then said he was glad Yusuke had made it home safely, adding that he shouldn’t worry about the bicycle, which was “a piece of junk anyway.” There the conversation ended.

BY THE TIME Yusuke bandaged his arm and tossed his bloodstained shirt and jeans into the washing machine, he felt so tired that he went upstairs to his room and lay down on his bed, his eyes closed, his arms crossed under his head. Dazed from lack of sleep, his mind spun with impressions from the night before, circling in blazing colors in his head. He fell asleep amid the turmoil of those colors, only to be woken by the sound of a storm breaking overhead. It was a real summer storm, the kind one seldom sees in Tokyo. In an instant, the sky turned dark, thunder rolling just above him and farther off. Yusuke got up and planted himself by a triangle of window, watching the rain sluice down, his forehead pressed against the glass. Just in front of him, the leaves of a maple were being battered by the harshly rushing rain. Out in the yard, crevices quickly filled with water and widened into swirling, muddy creeks. It grew dark inside as well. After a while, he left the window and flipped on the light switch. With the artificial light’s reflection on the windowpane, the outside turned black, as if plunged into night.

Yusuke suddenly felt hungry, and headed downstairs to see what was in the refrigerator.

KARUIZAWA IS AN old post town, turned into a summer resort by Westerners in the late nineteenth century. Looking for a place to escape the intense summer heat of the city, a missionary discovered this locale, deep in the mountains, often veiled in mist and fog, far above sea level. One by one the expatriates came, and soon Karuizawa, after years of lying remote and unvisited following the advent of the railway age, was transformed into a bustling summer retreat for Westerners. In modern history, Japan was one of the few countries in Asia that never fell to Western rule. Yet Karuizawa became a virtual colony—no, a mini-Europe within Japan. It was a special enclave where one could hear organ-accompanied hymns, watch children with curly blond hair play, and smell ham, sausages, and cheese dangling in storefronts on the main street. In no time the Westernized and privileged of Japanese society, from the imperial family down to successful artists, followed suit, and Karuizawa came to be known as the country’s most exclusive summer resort. It was also known for its liberated atmosphere, where the notion of “romantic love,” so celebrated in the West, could blossom. After World War II, Japan rapidly recovered and even became rich—and also thoroughly middle-class. More and more ordinary corporate employees started to build summer houses in Karuizawa. It lost its aura as a place for the elite, but thanks to its history, the name still evoked that early period, and the spot began to flourish as a tourist destination for masses of vacationers from all over Japan.

It was, perhaps, due both to its history of exclusiveness and its present popularity that Yusuke had avoided visiting the area before.

The nap he’d taken the previous afternoon prevented his falling asleep until well toward dawn, and by the time he woke up, the sun was already high. He decided to walk to Middle Karuizawa station, where he boarded a creaky local train and arrived in Karuizawa around eleven o’clock. The mountain weather was apt to change without any warning—clear sky one minute, fog the next, then suddenly a few drops of rain. Yusuke, who was caught off guard by the ferocious storm the evening before, had put an umbrella in his backpack, and he was glad that he had. He walked for a while along the main street, guidebook in hand, then decided to seek out the hotel that Fumiko had mentioned, the Mampei. A right turn took him to a road shaded by larch trees and lined with summer houses on spacious lots, less crowded with tourists than he expected.

According to the guidebook, by taking a short detour he would find the tennis courts where the present emperor had met the beautiful young woman destined to be the first commoner to become empress of Japan. Feeling obliged not to miss the site of the “romance of the century,” Yusuke strolled toward it, only to find some ordinary tennis courts surrounded by a chain-link fence, just a block away from the clamor of the town. The place hadn’t even the faintest mystique, he noted with some surprise, and returned to his original route.

Before long, he arrived at the Mampei Hotel, a grand chaletlike building with a formal porte cochère. Yusuke strode past the uniformed bellhops who greeted him with deferential bows and went on in as if he were a guest. In the dimly lit lobby were some curious stained-glass panels depicting scenes of Karuizawa in different periods, always against the backdrop of the volcanic Mount Asama. There was one from a couple of centuries ago, when Karuizawa along with Oiwake and Kutsukake—now Middle Karuizawa—were post towns with inns on a major highway. Another was from the 1930s, showing golfers in an open car stopping on the same road to unload their golf bags with the help of caddies; children with tennis rackets stood nearby.

After lingering to study them at leisure, Yusuke passed on into a courtyard featuring a Japanese garden, probably created for the enjoyment of international guests in the early days.

Leaving the hotel, he turned into a narrow side street, walked along a stream rimmed by an unsightly white guardrail, crossed a bridge, and headed toward a church founded by the missionary who first chose Karuizawa as a summer retreat. The church was a small wooden building. Yusuke had read somewhere that, while the foreigners who had first come to spend their summers in Karuizawa lived in modest, Japanese-style houses, the Japanese who flocked here in their wake built more elaborate, Western-style villas. The church he stood in front of was indeed quite simple, almost primitive.