Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

Partly because I loved sweet drinks and partly because it made me happy to see my mother cheer up, I looked forward to these visits. I was the perfect image of a “country girl” back then—someone I barely recognize now.

ONE THING I’VE thought about as an adult is what a boring life it must have been! You were born in a place where everything was the same as it had always been. You walked out of the house and, as far as you could see, you were surrounded by sameness: farmhouses with the same thatched roof; stretches of the same paddy fields and mulberry bushes; farmers wearing the same rough clothes, their faces all browned by the sun the same way. No matter where you went—a neighbor’s house, a friend’s place, your relatives’—the same kind of people sat around the fire, eating the same kind of food. Yes, here and there you saw prosperous-looking houses with white stucco walls and tiled roofs on top—these belonged to the landlord, the village headman, the owner of the sake brewery. But the rest were all the same. The tedium of it all could only compound the drudgery of working literally from dawn to dusk, like ants. I’ve heard that people now have a romantic view of country life, but when I think back to my childhood, it doesn’t surprise me at all that practically everyone moved to the city after the war. It wasn’t just because they needed work.

My family were farmers, but not tenant farmers. We owned our own plot, and generations back, once everyone saw the money you could make from silkworms, they stopped keeping half their land for millet and other grains and planted it with mulberry bushes. Most of the other farmers did the same. The golden age of the silk industry, however, was over by the time I came along. We lived with my father’s parents, and it was all the way back when Grandma was a young girl that the industry made real money. Grandma worked with her younger sister in the silk mills and, both being very good at it, they earned more than most men did in those days. I remember sitting by the fire with Grandma and listening to her tell stories about when she worked, while we shelled and sorted beans and kneaded dough for udon noodles. One of her favorites was about how a different factory had hired her and her sister away, treating them to second-class seats on the train—first-class seats only went to dignitaries—and bottles of beer. “They treated us like royalty!” Though her sister ended up catching tuberculosis in the factory dormitory and being sent home to die, Grandma somehow still looked back proudly on that time, when she made more money than a man. By my parents’ day, the silk mills had begun to shut down, and the government ordered farmers to cut back on growing mulberry. Times were hard for silk farmers.

The year I was born, 1937, was also the year Japan went to war with China.

That was when the grown-ups started clustering in worried groups, spending hours talking about how to make ends meet. That was when farmers in the area began pulling up stakes and moving to Manchuria. It turned out that more people emigrated to Manchuria from Nagano Prefecture than from anywhere else in Japan, because of the decline in the silk market. Luckily, I understood all this at the time only the way an ignorant girl could. My younger sister and I were close in age, and we spent our days playing together: in winter, we made snow bunnies, with red berries for eyes, and in summer we dug up wild potatoes, cooked them, and made them into dumplings. For me, the years passed happily enough; only the mood of the grown-ups cast a shadow.

At some point, the Pacific War started. As a little girl who hadn’t even started school, I had no idea what this would mean for us. I paid almost no attention when the grown-ups talked about spinning mills being turned into munitions factories. But then our men began to disappear. From my family, my father’s younger brother, who was living with us, disappeared. A year passed, two years went by, and by the time groups of children evacuated from Tokyo turned up in our part of the countryside, my own father left. The eldest sons in farming families were supposed to be exempt from the draft because someone needed to stay and grow rice, even with a war on—or so it was said, and we believed it, until the draft notice arrived for my father.

Day after day, the jacket he’d always worn when he worked in the fields hung untouched on a peg in the dirt-floored entrance. Left with no one but Grandma and Grandpa to help her, my mother worked all day in the fields, taking a break only when she needed to nurse my baby brother. Even to a child, the world felt gloomy. Japan had always been at war, ever since I was born; again and again, adults had put a Rising Sun flag in my hand for me to wave. I didn’t know that the war was something that would eventually end; I only knew we were waiting for my father to return. It was from then on, I remember, that my mother began taking me to visit O-Hatsu, where she would sit by the fireside with her and cry. Even at New Year’s in what turned out to be the final year of the war, my father had still not come home. But that same spring, my uncle Genji came back after losing his house in Tokyo in one of the fire bombings.

It was Uncle Genji who would give me my chance to leave. I had heard lots of stories about my mother’s brother, but I’d never met him. My mother barely knew him herself, since he was the second of the eight children and she was the youngest, with nearly fifteen years between them. She was still a little girl when Genji left the house to support himself so his family would have one less mouth to feed. It didn’t take him long to find work as a busboy, in the Mampei Hotel restaurant in Karuizawa. He worked there during the summer and on ocean liners from autumn through spring. Then, one year, he didn’t get off the boat when summer came around, and ended up spending the next twenty years at sea. He was a clever and capable man, this uncle of mine, and he eventually worked his way up to being a purser. Somewhere along the way, he even found himself a wife, and they settled down in Asakusa, in Tokyo. However, on March 10, 1945, he went to his in-laws’ place out in the country to ask for some fresh food for his family, and spent the night there: that happened to be the day of the worst fire bombing of Tokyo. He himself escaped what must have been hell on earth, but he lost his house, his wife, and his young daughter.

With nowhere to stay in Tokyo—and hardly any food for anyone in the city—my uncle decided to come home. I’d just started my second year of elementary school, and one day when I got home I heard the news that he was back. As the oldest of the children, I was the family babysitter, so I strapped my brother on my back, took my sister by the hand, and we hurried off to meet this character. Because he had lived so long abroad, I was sure he would look like a foreigner.

When we got there, O-Hatsu steered us into the sitting room. We tiptoed in to find only an ordinary man with a shaved head, wearing a drab wartime outfit, slumped in front of the little Buddhist altar with his back to us. I noticed two memorial tablets sitting in front of the altar. The man looked just as poor and exhausted as any of the family members I was used to seeing every day.

“I should’ve been satisfied with just paying for a woman once in a while, instead of going out with a nice girl and thinking I deserved a wife. This was my comeuppance,” was how he summed up this episode in his life years later, when I was grown up.

That day he said, “You must be Fumiko,” and stroked my hair. His Tokyo style of speaking impressed me.

Not long afterward, Uncle Genji moved into our house. Apparently he never got along with his no-nonsense elder brother. Besides, they had enough men on the farm already, while at our place there was only Grandpa hobbling about. It was a blessing for us to have any able-bodied man around, even somebody who had forgotten how to farm. Only later did I find out that O-Hatsu was the one who saw where Uncle Genji would be better off and do the most good, and made arrangements for him to move.