Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

At some point during the war, the big barrel wrapped in straw where we usually kept the sake ran dry. We were getting our ration of sake, but it never lasted long—Grandpa drank it all. The night Uncle Genji moved in, though, my mother somehow managed to scare up a bottle. And to go with the sake, she put chopped butterbur sprouts with miso on a long, narrow wooden board and roasted them lightly. Uncle Genji scooped up some with his chopsticks and took a taste.

“Now, that’s what I call finger-lickin’ good!” he said with obvious satisfaction, letting loose with a country accent—something he didn’t often do.

Just then, Grandpa, who had been trying to light his long metal pipe, choked out a cloud of smoke, and my baby brother, eyes bulging, gulped a big breath and started wailing. But instead of getting flustered as she usually did, my mother just laughed and picked him up. The whole family looked happy, I remember, almost as if my father had come home.

Uncle Genji started to help out around the place. On top of that, he was roped in on some public works projects for the military. We used to hear him moaning about how tired he was. “I don’t mean to boast, but while I was away, I got used to working with my head,” he’d say. I was still too young to be any real use on the farm; about all I could do was weed the paths between the rice paddies or gather locusts with my sister, carrying my baby brother on my back. But these little jobs gave me a chance to hang around my uncle and hear about life at sea or in places far away, when he took a break. He would narrow his eyes and gaze into the distance at Mount Asama, then sigh and talk, almost to himself. Once in a while, he would turn to us as if he’d just noticed we were there and tell us to keep these stories to ourselves.

Summer came, and we finally got a notice saying my father was a casualty. He had been wounded in the leg during the battle of Shuri in Okinawa, and, unable to retreat with his unit, took his own life—so we were told. People tried to explain to me what “a heroic suicide” meant, but I couldn’t believe that the father I knew would do such a thing. Years later, when I read different accounts of the war, I came to my own conclusion: that he was probably killed by his own side because he couldn’t walk. Back then, though, I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.

In those days, almost every family in the neighborhood had lost a husband or son, now enshrined as “war heroes” on their family altar. So there was nothing my mother and grandparents could do but quietly accept the news of my father’s death. Uncle Genji must have felt sorry for me, with my endless questions about “heroic suicides.” Of all his nieces and nephews, I was the one closest to the age his daughter had been, and the one most eager to listen to his stories. I suppose I became something of a favorite.

One day my uncle came into the house dripping with sweat after carrying a bulging backpack home. He proceeded to dump a bundle of secondhand books in front of me, tied with string. “You won’t find anything like this in Tokyo anymore! Karuizawa’s still Karuizawa!” he said. He told me he’d bought them at a bookstore near Karuizawa station. They’d belonged to the daughter of some Tokyo family, apparently, who had moved out to their villa here—so if I read them, they’d help me become a lady too. Even better, he said, the war would be over soon, and when that happened, I wouldn’t have to hide from teachers and friends to read these things. Since the only books I’d ever seen were the flimsy ones we used at school, I couldn’t take my eyes off these volumes, with their hard covers and color illustrations. Not knowing what the English word lady meant, I asked him whether he’d read any of them himself. “Not my cup of tea,” he answered, a bit embarrassed. They were books for adolescent girls, by Japanese and foreign novelists.

My mother told me sometime later that he’d gone into Karuizawa that day to find out from people at the Mampei Hotel about the new bomb the Allied forces had dropped on Hiroshima. The hotel had the Red Cross and even some embassies billeted in it. He’d taken a bag of potatoes along, to trade for butter or sausages, but on his way to the hotel, the bookstore near the station had caught his eye.

I remember some B-29s roaring overhead, on their way to drop bombs on the town of Ueda, which wasn’t very far from us; and only a few days later, the emperor’s famous radio address to say we’d lost the war. Most of the grown-ups didn’t know what to do with themselves, but Uncle Genji came alive, like a fish finding water. He got enough money together for a ticket to Tokyo—how, I’ve no idea. My mother was worried that he wouldn’t be able to find anything to eat there, but he told her, “Nah, I’ll be okay. What’s important now is to be quick and get in ahead of everybody else.” Though she was obviously unhappy about his leaving, she knew he couldn’t stay on in her husband’s family home forever, so she didn’t try to stop him.

It wasn’t too long before we got used to seeing jeeps full of GIs rumbling by in a cloud of dust. Our school textbooks were now covered with lines of black ink to hide the banned phrases, and the teachers started using the word demokurashii . Evacuated city children began leaving in droves. Evacuees in Karuizawa began coming out where we lived with bundles of beautiful kimonos they wanted to barter for rice. I loved watching the city women: even though they wore the same wartime cotton trousers as my mother, nothing else about them—their faces, their figures, their accent, the words they used—was the same. I used to hide behind a wooden post and stare at them in fascination.

Then, my father’s younger brother came home from the army, and my mother married him. She seemed to be relieved just to have a husband. But, perhaps because I was the eldest and had such clear memories of my own father, I never got used to having a stepfather, even as time went by. Reading became my refuge. I would come home after school and do my chores, now with a baby half-brother strapped to my back, but I always found time to hide somewhere and read. Unfortunately Grandma, the one person in the family I felt close to, had a bad fall around then. She’d been feeding the chickens. She died not long afterward, and I felt lonelier than ever.

When I was ten or eleven, we heard a great boom one day: it was Mount Asama erupting. The lava flowed mainly toward Gunma Prefecture, so what we got was fine ash on our village. It fell with a whistling sound. That night, we stood in the yard, holding our breath—terrified. A stream of red rocks blew out of the volcano. I must have been mesmerized by the scene. When I recovered a little and turned around, I saw my mother standing some distance away holding the baby in her arms, leaning against my stepfather and staring at the northern night sky, also mesmerized. My little sister and brother were huddled against him too. “Daddy, Daddy!” they were calling out. Grandpa was with them. I felt apart from them, alone.

From the New Year’s cards Uncle Genji sent from Tokyo, we knew he had found a job on an American military base in a place called Tachikawa and that he was working as a head steward in the officers’ mess. The family guessed from his title that he’d done well for himself. But for some years, the only contact we had with him was those cards. I could barely remember what he looked like. Then, in 1952, during the New Year’s holiday, Uncle Genji came to visit, wearing a sharp suit, his hair slicked back. People couldn’t believe it. To his relatives he handed out packs of cigarettes called Lucky Strikes and chocolate bars called Hershey’s. At this point he really did seem like a foreigner. For his part, my uncle quickly saw that I didn’t fit in in the family now that it revolved around my stepfather. He may also have remembered how eagerly I used to listen to his stories about travel and foreign countries. When he heard that I would be graduating from middle school at the end of spring, he said, “After you’re done with school, why don’t you come to Tokyo and work?” He told me I could get a job as a maid on the base where he worked, and that girls could make much more money there than they would outside.