Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

“Where is your husband?” Uncle Genji asked her.

“Where he always is—at the university. He even goes there on Sundays.”

“The university?” he echoed. “So he’s a professor?”

“Yes, he teaches at the medical school, but he spends most of his time doing research.”

“I see. A doctor and a teacher.”

Later, he told me, “You’re lucky he doesn’t have a practice at home. The less time a man spends in the house, the easier it is for the maid.” But I was simply impressed by the fact that Natsue’s husband wasn’t just a doctor but a university professor. It took some time before I learned that of the four little girls who were present, two were Harue’s daughters, another two were Natsue’s, and that Fuyue, the third sister, was single.

“I’m afraid we won’t be able to offer as much money as she earns at the base,” Natsue said, to which my uncle replied, “That doesn’t matter. The important thing is that she learns to behave properly.”

Just as he had finished thanking them and we stood up to leave, Harue cried out, “Oh, don’t go yet. We have something for you.”

She turned to Natsue: “What do you think about the dress with the sunflowers?”

“Oh, that would look very nice on her,” she agreed.

“Fumi? That’s your name, isn’t it? Come with us.”

I followed the two sisters along a corridor into what looked like a small, makeshift cottage. Inside was a good-sized room with a wooden floor, three dressmaker’s mannequins, a pair of black sewing machines, rows of worktables with round stools, and stacked bolts of cloth. Together, the sisters draped a dress—a white one with a sunflower pattern—over my shoulders.

“You see, it fits her perfectly!”

“She doesn’t have long arms and legs like us, so the sleeves are just right.”

At the time, I didn’t know that the cottage was the workshop of Primavera, Harue and Natsue’s dress shop and dressmaking school. They had made the sunflower dress to sell, but then someone scorched the hem while ironing it, so they were considering shortening it before putting it on sale. Never having dreamed that I would ever own anything this elegant, I was thrilled to have an outfit to wear on special occasions. Little did I know that it would be the first of many hand-me-downs.

Once we were back on the Odakyu Line, Uncle Genji wiped his forehead and said, “Whew! That was something!” He went on, “It’s great that they’re sophisticated ladies, but you’re also lucky that the wife is so good-looking.” According to him, working for a young, pretty wife with little girls was best. “If the husband’s with a missus who isn’t a looker, or if there are pimply teenage boys, there might be trouble. I won’t have to worry about you now till your wedding day.”

He seemed quite happy about my new job. Privately I was caught off guard by hearing marriage mentioned, but I didn’t say anything.

TWO WEEKS LATER, on a Monday afternoon, I went on my own to Natsue’s house. (For a long time she was Madam to me, but now that so many years have passed and I don’t even work for the family anymore, I will simply refer to her as Natsue and to the young Dr. Utagawa, her husband, as Takero.) I got off the Odakyu Line at Chitose Funabashi station, crossed the footbridge over the tracks, and came out at a small plaza in front of the station. Ahead was a cluttered shopping street that looked nothing like the area around Seijo, the station near her parents’ place. In one hand I held the map Natsue had drawn for me, and a small cloth bundle in the other. I walked along the street beside the train tracks. There was a small assortment of the usual shops—a greengrocer, a fish shop, a stationery store, and so on. I followed the map to the right at one point and found myself on a road lined with sad little houses like snaggleteeth, some jutting out, some set back. I began to see a vegetable patch here and a field there, but nothing like the bright, refreshing scenery of Seijo. If anything, it reminded me of the fields back home, which smelled of manure. My heart sank. It was even more depressing—no, shocking—when I came to the house itself, marked on the gate with a nameplate reading UTAGAWA.

Since that afternoon in Seijo two weeks earlier, I had been expecting my future place of employment to be almost equally imposing, but in front of me was a house that even I could tell was nothing out of the ordinary.

Though a little less modest than the place Uncle Genji rented, it was basically your standard two-story house, with gateposts made of stacked concrete blocks and what could hardly be called a front garden. Still, at a time when so many people were reduced to living in houses no better than shacks, even a nondescript building like this one ranked pretty high. Also, as I learned shortly, behind the main house were two small rental properties they owned, so they were doing fairly well for themselves. At the time, however, I was so disappointed I just froze in my tracks. I stood in front of those gateposts with my little bundle clutched to my chest. My new master might be a doctor and a professor, but that did not make him rich.

I was still a child, really. If I was to be a maid, I felt it would be more respectable to work for a family of some consequence. The work would be more important; I’d learn more. I didn’t aim as high as the Shigemitsus—that family seemed too grand and even frightening, with the son’s death hanging morbidly over them the whole time. But why hadn’t I been sent somewhere glamorous like the Saegusas’? Why? I felt betrayed, almost as if the adults had all conspired to send me to this house.

The door opened, and there was another disappointment: an old woman who was as far from being fashionable and modern as you could imagine. Wrapped in a dark kimono like something a man might wear, she had her hair—which was streaked with gray—severely pulled back in a bun. Besides the grim clothes and hairstyle, I noticed two medicinal patches for migraine on her temples. The lady looked me over without so much as a smile or civil greeting.

Though it was hard to believe, I was told later that when she met the senior Dr. Utagawa, she’d been a geisha. She was only his second wife, thus a stepmother to Takero, my new medical-researcher master. Perhaps she was dressed so somberly precisely because she’d been a geisha.

“I’ve got a terrible headache,” she told me, to account for most of the shutters still being closed. She took me into a tiny, dank, three-mat room next to the front hall. The room faced north, and the tatami mats felt horribly cold under my feet. There in the middle of it sat the woven bamboo trunk, still tied with a cord, that I had sent ahead.

“Here’s the closet. This is the chest of drawers. I’ve cleaned them out. The toilet’s over there,” she told me. “Would you like some tea? Or would you rather unpack first?”

I said that I’d like to attend to my trunk first. I needed to be alone, even if it was just for a few minutes. The moment she left, I plopped down in front of my trunk. I could feel the damp, cold tatami right through my whole body. So this was where I’d be spending my days? I didn’t even want to start untying the cord around my luggage.

“Grandma!” came the piercing voice of a little girl.

“Coming!” I heard slippers patter past my room.

So there was a girl in the house, not just the grandmother. I decided to unpack later. I changed into work clothes, put on a crisply starched smock, and stepped out.

The voice came from a room whose sliding doors had been left open, and I could see the old lady sitting in there, her back to the door, her obi casually tied. Beyond her at the far end of the room lay a futon and, on it, a small, hardly raised bump under the covers. Here too the shutters were only partly open, but the room faced south, so there was a sharp contrast between blocks of sunlight and the areas in shadow. The bedding looked eerie in the semidarkness.