Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

“I’m sure it’ll work out for him eventually. He seems quite capable,” my father said, adding, half to himself: “On the other hand, without a high school diploma, it’ll be hard for him to get a job with a Japanese firm.”

With that final remark, he turned his attention to the bowl of ramen in front of him.

None of us could possibly have known how far Azuma was from finding Atwood’s treatment unfair. Though both were Japanese, he and Miss Sone had entirely different expectations of America. That was Azuma’s strength. No matter how humiliated or infuriated he might be, he had nothing to go back to.

One could even go a step further and say that it was his good fortune to have the kind of start in America that he did. Many immigrants seeking a better life never get a glimpse of how the average American lives, confined as they are to the bottom of society, rather like pond dwellers deprived of sunlight. But Azuma, hired as a driver for a rich man like Atwood—not a rich man like Goldberg—had the rare opportunity to spend his everyday life close to members of the American establishment. He observed how they talked and behaved, how they spent their time, and how they thought—even what their prejudices were. He absorbed the kind of knowledge not taught in classrooms but only available in places like the preparatory schools where the privileged send their children, and so gained an overview of American society that would have been impossible if he were just crawling around at the bottom of the pond. This “breeding” he acquired at the Atwoods no doubt contributed substantially to his later success in life.

Not that the Atwoods were that rich, since those were the years of relative economic equality in the States. Later the American economy went through years of stagnation, then made a miraculous comeback, marking record highs over extended periods and producing a new, large class of the very rich. Among these was Taro Azuma, riding the wave of prosperity and making more money than Atwood ever did. Our visit to the Atwoods took place decades before this new breed of people started to lord it over America.

IT WAS A month or two later when my father once again came home in the limousine. This time Mr. Atwood must have been in the car, for his driver did not come in. After going to greet my father in the front hall, my mother and I went back to the breakfast nook . To our surprise, he followed us directly into the kitchen still in his coat and hat and plunked a brown paper bag onto the table. This being unlikely to contain any presents for us, we peered into it dubiously. Inside were the old Linguaphone tapes.

I pulled out the thin cardboard boxes one after another and stacked them on the table.

“But why …?”

We both stared at him.

“Believe it or not, Azuma has memorized the whole set,” he told us proudly, almost as if he had done it himself, taking off his hat and starting to unbutton his coat.

“Really?”

“He copied out the whole textbook too, so other people could use the original if they wanted. When he told me, I had a hard time believing it myself.”

My mother and I looked at each other.

How could he have memorized the whole thing? Looking at the pile of cardboard boxes on the table, I felt skeptical; but as a mental picture of him came back to me, it somehow seemed possible.

“That guy is very studious.”

In his youth, my father himself had been very studious. I’d heard family legends about him carrying too many books in the front folds of the coarse cotton kimono the prewar students wore when they weren’t dressed in school uniform. If a book slipped out and he leaned over to pick it up, more came tumbling out after it. Had his parents lived longer and circumstances allowed him to continue his studies, he would almost certainly have been much happier becoming a scholar of English literature. I suppose it was natural that he quickly took a liking to anyone who was determined to study. He didn’t expect much from my sister and me, partly because he had given up on us, sensing that we resembled our pleasure-loving mother both by nature and culture, and partly because he belonged to a generation that didn’t expect much of women anyway. On the other hand, he had a firm belief that men ought to study. When he said of someone that he was “very studious,” you knew it was a high compliment, on a par with remarking that someone had “a brain in his head.”

After going upstairs to change, he returned to continue his report.

Since Azuma’s room was separate from the rest of the house, he was able to stay up till dawn to listen to the tapes on an old tape recorder borrowed from Atwood. Helpful too was the fact that his job allowed plenty of time off during the day. My father told him how impressed he was. Azuma replied that studying for the written test for a New York driver’s license immediately after his arrival had been a tougher challenge.

“He thought Atwood wouldn’t take him on if he failed the test, so he was desperate to learn all the English in the driver’s manual, looking up practically every word.”

By coincidence, I happened to be taking driver’s ed in high school and was preparing for the written test myself. For me, the textbook was a curiosity. It was the only English textbook I could understand from beginning to end, but its content was the most prosaic imaginable, featuring instructions on stopping behind a school bus or the correct number of feet before a traffic light at which to switch on a turn signal. Looking back, though, I can see that it made perfectly good sense for a person arriving in the States to start learning English with the aim of getting a driver’s license. Yet, being all too naively literary, learning English for me meant reading the classics, dictionary in hand. Not that I did this myself; I just thought it was the proper way. Learning the language by reading the driver’s manual seemed a bit ludicrous.

The way my father put it was more sympathetic.

“The guy’s never had any real education in English, so he doesn’t have a clue how to go about it. I think I’m going to lend him some of my old textbooks.”

“They’re way too old, aren’t they?” I said, embarrassed at the idea of his handing over a bunch of battered books.

“English doesn’t get old that fast,” he said.

A FEW MORE months went by. Then one day it turned out that Taro Azuma was working at my father’s company as a camera repairman. I had no reason to expect to be informed about the process leading to his being taken on, yet this abrupt turn of events just stunned me. As a director, with the New York branch still quite small, my father must have convinced the head office to go along with it and provide him with a new work visa.

“Atwood didn’t mind?” my mother asked when the subject came up.

“No. He actually wanted him out. You see, his wife found out about his lady friend, and she knew that Azuma was chauffeuring her around too. She didn’t take it too well. I guess she didn’t want someone who knew about the affair right there in the house with them.”

Far from objecting to Azuma’s departure, Atwood in private even gave him a secondhand car—a yellow Chevrolet Corvair—as a farewell gift, perhaps to keep him quiet.

“Men get away with a lot, don’t they?” my mother commented, laughing.

“In any case, it was better that Azuma left when he did. A guy like Atwood wasn’t going to care about his future.”

“Right. Japanese are better off working for Japanese companies.” My mother was playing up to my father’s cheerful mood.

“At first he’ll need some help, but I’m sure he’ll catch on in no time.”

I felt betrayed by Azuma’s sudden transformation from private chauffeur into a mere repairman in my father’s company. The life of a private chauffeur had at least some potential for mystery in it. But how could there be anything of the kind in the life of a repairman? You could turn a life like that upside down and shake it, and nothing in the least mysterious or soul-stirring would ever fall out, of that I was convinced. I remembered how indignant I’d been when I heard about his first job. Now I was indignant all over again at the thought of someone like him sitting under the glare of a fluorescent light working away with tiny screwdrivers. My father, however, believed he’d done him a big favor.