Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

During the Occupation, the authorities had requisitioned the house, so the Shigemitsus and the Demon had squeezed into the storage room and maids’ rooms in the attic. But even with the Occupation over, they still rented out part of the first floor and the whole second floor—furniture and all—to an American couple. Evidently only the Americans used the front door.

“They’re a couple of hicks,” she said as we walked down the hall. During the Occupation, they’d had a captain in the house, who had been to one of those famous American universities. The captain and his wife would invite the Shigemitsus into their own living room and serve them tea and play bridge with them. But the present occupants were a couple from Montana who didn’t even speak proper English. It was impossible for the Shigemitsus to socialize with them.

Listening to the Demon as I walked along behind her and Uncle Genji, I wondered what she would make of the pair I worked for at the base, who rarely, if ever, picked up a book.

Behind two heavy oak doors on one side of the house was a vast room with a high ceiling. Thick curtains hung from the windows, so even though it faced south, it was quite dark. In the middle there was a silver-blue rug, on which stood a low wooden table with elaborate carvings on all four sides. Around the table were delicate-looking chairs with silk cushions, the same blue as the rug. A pair of brick-colored leather armchairs were placed near one corner. The room itself left a strong impression on me, but other details are vague because just a few years later, not only the room but the whole house was demolished, so that day was my first and last sight of it. It was easy to see that its owner had a passion for architecture and all things English, and even someone like me could tell that it was of an entirely different order from the hastily built structures on the base.

There was a fireplace on the north wall. The mantelpiece had some ceramic and bronze sculptures on it, with a framed photograph leaning against the wall in the middle. In front of it was a vase filled with small, bright flowers from the garden.

The Demon lowered her voice and said, “He looks just like him.”

“Who does?”

“Miss Yayoi’s little boy. The little master looks just like his uncle.”

I was mesmerized, unable to take my eyes off the photograph. It was of a noble-looking young man, the likes of whom I had never seen before. He was a perfect example of what the scion of a distinguished family should be. They say that he deliberately chose to pose in a dress suit for this photo, taken before he left for the front, rather than in uniform. The picture seemed to say that the young man considered his own death in action a certainty, not just a possibility.

The Demon apparently noticed my reaction to the picture, but kept on talking to my uncle.

“It took them quite a while to have this child, and then look what happened. They lost him, along with everything they owned. I thought that was the end of the Shigemitsu family. But now Miss Yayoi’s little boy looks more and more like him, so …”

When Uncle Genji lit a stick of incense just in front of the photograph of the dead young man, the scent—for me, redolent of Buddhist temples—filled the air around us and mingled with the pungent, Western smell of pipe smoke and black tea leaves.

All of a sudden, she turned to me and asked, “So your name is Fumi, is it?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“How old are you?”

“Seventeen.”

“Just the right age.”

They were exactly the same words Mr. Ando had used. I had to keep myself from smiling.

She then turned to Uncle Genji and said, “The family that’s interested in hiring her doesn’t have much standing.”

“You mean the one next door?”

“It’s not a family you would have heard of.”

The coincidence between her comment and Mr. Ando’s no longer struck me as funny. It felt odd. The condescension in her voice only confirmed an impression of her I had formed then as a snobbish and rather disagreeable sort of person.

“Anyway, there are three daughters, and the middle one’s maid just left to get married. So she doesn’t have anybody right now.”

A birthday party was being held at the neighbors’ house, and they and the Shigemitsus were waiting for us to go there for tea, the Demon said. She let us out by the kitchen door and led the way through the back garden.

I heard the sound of laughter coming over the hedge, and some kind of Western classical music. I noticed that there was a gap in the hedge just wide enough for a person to slip through. The Demon explained that, in the final months of the war, everyone in the neighborhood cut holes in their hedges so that they’d be able to escape from fires by running through the openings and their neighbors’ yards. Evidently these families still had a use for the gap after the war had ended.

The shadow of the Shigemitsu house extended just to the hedge, so that the moment I passed through the opening I stepped out of shade. Suddenly, the world was radiantly filled by the May sun.

White freesias, pink tulips, yellow gladioli (I only learned their names later)—all these flowers in every color glowed in the early summer sunlight. It was a large bed; I learned that it had once been a tennis court and, during the war, a vegetable garden. On the lawn beyond this flowerbed was a scene of almost perfect happiness. A group dressed in light summer clothes was sitting on white rattan chairs while little girls with big ribbons in their hair flitted among them like butterflies. This gathering of the beautiful, the privileged, and the happy seemed to make the air shimmer.

The sense of liberation from the past I’d felt when I arrived at Seijo station swept over me again.

That moment probably determined the whole course of my life. I was still young and, for better or worse, all too impressionable. I’ve known the people I saw sitting in the garden that day for forty years now. During those long years, there were many times when I felt I couldn’t go on being with them. I think it’s only owing to that moment in the May sun that I’ve remained connected with them to this day.

A woman in that lively gathering—Yayoi, I guessed—spotted us and detached herself from the others, coming over quickly. She looked more like a young girl than a wife and mother, with her legs so slim in their stockings, below a cotton dress.

“George! How wonderful!”

“Miss Yayoi, how have you been?”

She came up close and clasped Uncle Genji’s hand in hers. I wondered whether this was a custom she’d picked up in London. Obviously she had fond memories of him from the ship, but it also seemed to me a demonstration of a singularly affectionate personality.

But I was staring at her almost awestricken—a woman who’d grown up in London! She had large, brownish eyes that curved down slightly, in a face that seemed to come out of an illustration in a young girl’s novel. She seemed almost unreal to me, perhaps because her skin was so white, or because her hair was the same brownish color as her eyes.

Just then a boy of about six or seven, with the same brownish hair, came flying over and stopped by Yayoi’s side.

“I’m so glad you’re well. You haven’t changed a bit … Masayuki, say hello to our guests.” She put a hand on the back of the child’s head and gently pushed it forward, reminding him to welcome us with a bow.

“Say hello to Uncle George. He’s the man who worked on the big ships that I told you about.”

My uncle squatted down so that he was eye to eye with him. “How old are you?” he asked.

The boy studied his tanned face for a second. Then he said in a clear voice, “I’m seven!” Though he was small, his features were clearly defined. Just as the Demon had told us, he looked amazingly like the man in the picture. As if he wanted to show off how fast he could run—you know how boys do this—he went racing off again. Yayoi called after him happily, “Masayu-u-uki! Be careful!” Then she turned her soft brown eyes on me.