Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

Her younger sisters exclaimed in agreement.

“It’s true. It’s all in the faces.”

“Isn’t it odd how you can tell?”

“I know. You can tell immediately that they were all dirt-poor peasants once, walking around with buckets of manure.”

“Such horrid faces.”

“And that’s how all our politicians look these days too.”

The three old women were talking as if they had forgotten their guest, with a frankness a person would normally reserve only for family or very close friends. Yusuke seemed hardly to exist to them. And yet, for all that, he sensed that this particular conversation did in fact require his presence as audience. Indeed, he felt it was only because they happened to have him as audience that they had revived an old, worn topic. Yusuke wondered what they thought of him. Did they take him for one of their own kind because he’d graduated from an elite university and worked for a well-known publisher? Or did they enjoy daring to be outspoken, not caring even if he happened to be on the wrong side?

As Yusuke sat mulling this over, an old memory floated into his mind. It was from shortly before his parents separated, so he must have been in third grade. His father’s parents, who lived in Susa, had come on an extended visit to Tokyo, taking him along. One day, Yusuke was with his grandmother on a suburban train as they headed back to the house where they were staying with relatives. The train was not too crowded, and the two of them had found seats diagonally across from each other. When the seat next to Yusuke emptied, he cupped his hands around his mouth, called out, “Grandma! Grandma!” and pointed at the empty place beside him. His grandmother answered loudly, in her country way, “Alrighty, I’m a-comin’.” She took hold of the bag on her lap with fingers rough and swollen from working in the fields, and stood up. Just then he noticed that the other passengers were looking on curiously. Though he was fond of her, he’d felt acutely embarrassed at the time.

But it had happened ages ago. The embarrassment was long since gone. There was only warmth in his memory of her now.

He wondered how the three sisters would have reacted to her.

The three rattled on, mixing that inhibiting formality of theirs with deliberately blunt asides for theatrical effect.

They lamented how, once the Bullet Train station was completed, the old station, with all its charm, would be torn down; how the large-scale shopping mall planned for the south side of the new station would necessarily attract even more out-of-towners; how the Kinokuniya food store, where they had been buying things for ages, would soon be taken over by one of the local chains of giant supermarkets—in other words, one story after another about how the world was going to the dogs.

Yusuke listened to their talk with a certain interest, only adding an occasional accommodating word or two.

With the conversation so lively, none of them had noticed the sound of slippered feet pattering toward the porch. Abruptly, as though fallen from the sky, a girl appeared from the dining room. Yusuke caught his breath; the old women also stopped talking.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” the girl said, ducking her head in a quick bow. It was as though the Present had suddenly appeared to banish the Past. Skinny and long-limbed, she wore a navy-blue apron and cotton work gloves. Her black hair was straight and shoulder-length. Yusuke realized that the girl must be Ami, that she had been cleaning somewhere in the house, and that the gong Fumiko had rung was meant also to summon her.

Putting her knife and fork down, Harue let the vivacity in her voice fall away.

“You cleaned inside the closets too, I hope?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“In all three rooms?”

“Yes.” The girl glanced briefly at Yusuke, apparently curious about who this stranger might be. “I also took a look up in the attic, and found a dark stain on the ceiling of the west room. There might have been a leak when it rained. The floor looked a bit stained too.”

“Oh dear,” Harue exclaimed with a frown. “The west room—which room would that be?”

Fuyue promptly told her, “The one we kept as a maid’s room.”

“Oh, that one. Fumi used to use it. Tell Fumi about the leak, and ask for a big bowl or something to put under the water stain.” After a pause, she murmured as if to herself, “There’s no point in getting it fixed. This might well be our last stay.”

While Yusuke was puzzling out the significance of this remark, the girl excused herself with another quick bow. She headed toward the kitchen, where he supposed she and Fumiko would have their meal. The three sisters watched until she disappeared.

“An admirable girl,” Harue said, returning to her brunch, the tone in her voice suggesting little admiration.

“She is Fumiko’s granddaughter.”

“We’ve known her since she was a tiny baby,” Fuyue said, holding her hands apart to indicate how small she’d been. “They’re not related by blood, but Fumiko has raised her like her own child.”

“The girl has always been very good at drawing, even when she was little.”

“And recently she’s been doing strange pictures—like something by de Chirico. I suppose she likes that kind of style.”

“She’s still a student.”

“At Waseda University, in the Department of Science and Engineering. Studying environmental something or other.”

“She’s very smart.”

“She plans to go on to graduate school.”

“Is that what she said? I thought she wanted to study abroad.”

“She’ll probably do both.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.”

After a short silence, Harue said pensively, “As we were saying before, I suppose you must admit that young people these days have become quite pleasant to look at—Ami included.”

“I agree. They all look the same, but they’re much prettier than the past generation.”

“And taller too.”

“Yes.”

“It used to be that all the locals really looked like peasants.”

“It’s so true. When we were young, it was hard to believe they had anything in common with us.”

“And it wasn’t just us. Do you remember that scene in Tatsuo Hori’s novel The Beautiful Village ?”

“Which one?”

“Where the man hands out money to the children in the village.”

“I don’t remember it.”

“You don’t? Well, it didn’t leave much of an impression on me when I first read it, but then I reread it about ten years ago and was quite shocked. The children didn’t run errands for him or anything. The man just gives them baksheesh.”

“As in India.”

“Exactly.”

“We’ve come such a long way.”

“That’s right. Now you have country children going to graduate school and studying abroad. Amazing.”

“And I’ve seen local people driving around in Mercedes-Benzes.”

Realizing once again that they had started to talk amongst themselves, Natsue the middle sister turned to Yusuke and asked: “Have you read The Beautiful Village ?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“I’m not surprised. The younger generation doesn’t read novels like that anymore now, do they?”

Her elder sister, ignoring this attempt at courtesy, continued her line of conversation: “But, you know, Fumi has always been presentable. She cut a nice figure too.”

“Well, of course. She’d worked for the Occupation Forces,” Fuyue remarked. “Besides, with the war over, it was the new age. Everything began to change.”

“She didn’t have any accent either.”

“At first she did,” Natsue pointed out. “But, being her, she hardly said a word when she first came to work for us. At least, not until she got rid of her accent.”