Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

She had barely finished the sentence before he said, “I hope you don’t mind my asking, but would you be Miss Harue?”

Everyone sitting at the table seemed startled, but I might have been the most surprised. The sisters had been introduced simply as the Saegusas, without any mention of their given names.

Uncle Genji looked around the table, proud of this little coup. Then he explained that when he was working on the ships, he’d heard from foreign passengers about three beautiful and talented sisters in Karuizawa named Harue, Natsue, and Akie. When he heard one of them here referred to as “Natsue,” he concluded that these must be the very same young ladies. He’d guessed that the one with the earlier birthday was Harue.

“You did make one small mistake. I’m Fuyue, not Akie,” Fuyue said with a little pout, pretending to take offense. “I would rather have been Akie, the autumn girl, but I was born in December.” She had assumed the duty of serving the cake, since Natsue, the middle one, was so surprised by my uncle’s story that she’d stopped passing the plates.

“I beg your pardon.”

“No need to apologize. Fuyue is a rather odd name.”

“Not at all. It’s quite a romantic name.”

Uncle Genji looked from one to the other, frankly admiring them. “I remember one passenger telling me that he wished he could take one of the sisters home with him,” he said. “He was a foreigner, with blond hair.”

“Oh, my, it might have been Peter,” Natsue, the middle daughter, said. A big dimple showed in her smiling cheek. She cocked her head to one side and looked at her elder sister.

“If it was someone blond, I suppose it could actually have been Peter,” Harue allowed.

“When did you meet him?” Natsue asked.

“Maybe 1940 or ’41. It was just before the war started.”

“Then it was Peter,” she said, laughing with delight.

“They live up to their reputations, don’t they?” Yayoi smiled as she passed a slice of cake to my uncle.

“With you among them, it would have been a stunning group of women.”

Grammy, who had been listening to the conversation in the dining room, came over, looking marvelous standing in her mauve kimono.

“Why don’t you show them the photo album, Harue?” she suggested.

“Good idea. Fuyue, go and get it for me, will you, please?”

Even then, the two elder sisters were already using Fuyue whenever they needed something. Fuyue came back with a thick, leather-bound album and put it between Uncle Genji and me. The album turned out to be full of pictures of their youth in Karuizawa. (Later, as they faded, occasional glimpses of their younger days must have seemed insufficient to them—they removed some of the pictures and had them framed, to hang near the mantelpiece in their Karuizawa house.)

At that point, I still couldn’t tell which was which. I was just fascinated by the photographs—page after page of beautiful women who looked like movie actresses. One photo had them posing in hats; in another they were clutching tennis rackets; yet another saw them sitting prettily in a field, skirts spread out around them. Some pictures showed just one of them, some two, some three, and some with other people. I could recognize Yayoi in many of them, and her brother Noriyuki too. In several of the pictures, Noriyuki was playing music with a group of foreigners. Harue reached over and pointed to someone in one of the snapshots.

“Is this the man you were talking about? His name was Peter Jansen,” she told my uncle.

“Let’s see … It was a quite a while ago. Yes, that might be him.”

Uncle Genji had known people like this since he was in his teens and he didn’t seem at all awkward about looking at their private photographs. In fact, he seemed to enjoy playing a role. He kept raising his voice admiringly: Is that right? Oh really? What a picture!

By this time the three sisters had come up behind us and were peering over our shoulders. Fueled by my uncle’s exclamations and their own lively reactions, they, and everything about them—little glances, the way they stood, their tone of voice—became more and more coquettish, if I may say so. As one of them bent to explain a picture, I could smell the sweetness of the powder or perfume on her neck. I was just dazzled by the glamour of it all.

I was probably infatuated, as Uncle Genji would not have been. He was used to these sorts of people.

One day many years later, after Uncle Genji had died, a thought occurred to me. That story he told about the foreign passengers speaking so admiringly about the sisters—was it really true? There was no evidence that it was. My uncle might just have heard Natsue’s name and made the whole thing up, based on that one scrap of information. I’ve no way of finding out now. But I do know without a doubt how aware he was of the effect a story like that could have. I saw it with my own eyes. Before that, we’d only been shown a certain politeness as the Shigemitsus’ visitors. As soon as he mentioned the foreign admirers on the boat, however, all three of them dropped their formal manner and treated him with an almost provocative familiarity. It was like a sleight-of-hand trick.

“This has been a real treat,” my uncle told them as he reverently turned the last page of the album. He then looked at each of the three sisters and said, gesturing my way, “I brought my niece along today in the hope that you might be able to find work for her. It would be a great favor if one of you would consider hiring her for your staff at home.”

All eyes at the table focused on me. The eldest sister, Harue, smiled graciously and said, “Oh dear, you haven’t been able to get a word in edgewise, with us going on about ourselves. I do apologize. Well, now that you mention it, my younger sister has been looking for someone.”

She turned to look at Natsue.

“What a happy coincidence,” said my uncle, slightly bowing his head toward Natsue. “At your place, Miss Harue?”

“I’m Natsue.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” He pretended to scratch his head in embarrassment.

“It’s quite all right. People do get us confused. Inevitably.” So saying, she gave a gracious smile exactly like her sister’s.

Apparently, in the first couple of years after the war, Natsue had two maids who, one after the other, came to work for her only to quit in favor of less savory kinds of jobs, leaving her in the lurch. After that, she found a woman who at least stayed for two years, and then one day she announced she was marrying the butcher who delivered to the house. Natsue at that point would only hire someone willing to stay for a good long time. She seemed pleased by the fact that I was only seventeen and looked, I’m sure, so obviously inexperienced.

“She certainly looks honest and diligent,” Natsue said, gazing at me with those big eyes like her sister’s. I know now that she was thinking less of my qualities as a servant than of how I would get on with her mother-in-law. For their part, Harue and Fuyue were probably asking themselves how useful I would be during their summers in Karuizawa.

When Harue piped up to say, “I think she’d be splendid!” that seemed to settle it. Natsue turned to me and said, “I think you’ll find the work is not too demanding. The house is just two train stops from here, back toward Shinjuku.”

That was a surprise. I had somehow assumed that I would be working in the house where I was sitting.

“The closest station is called Chitose Funabashi,” she said curtly, as though trying to get a bad taste out of her mouth.

My surprise grew.

“Our house is very small. My mother-in-law gets migraines, but we only have two children—the two girls over there,” she said, turning toward the group of children playing in a corner of the parlor. I had no idea which two were hers. Masayuki was the only boy among them. I counted, one, two, three, four—four girls. Like their mothers, they were all pretty, especially with the big ribbons in their hair and fancy dresses, the sort you only saw in magazines for little girls. They all looked so alike that they could have been sisters.