Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

After he died, Yayoi and two of the sisters got married in quick succession. His death impressed on them the reality that time waits for no one. Harue and Natsue would soon be past the most eligible age for marriage in those days. And, besides, with each passing day young Japanese men were dying by the thousands. They must have been terrified of becoming old maids.

Yayoi married Masao, the third son of the Andos in Koishikawa. Because her only brother was gone and her parents had no male child to inherit the family name, he took the Shigemitsu name as their adopted son-in-law; it was a common practice at the time. The two had grown up in the same neighborhood, and they’d also spent time together on the ship back from Europe, the one my uncle worked on as a purser, so the Shigemitsus knew him very well. Unusually enough for someone from Tokyo, Masao had attended Kyoto University and studied something called “aesthetics.” He continued his studies after graduation—he even got apprenticed to a potter and dabbled in painting. When he was drafted by the Imperial Navy, he didn’t last long: he fainted while swabbing the deck of a battleship, developed a high fever, and got sent straight home. He had a sweet disposition, like Yayoi, but seemed so unworldly that one wondered whether he survived on mist alone, like the legendary Chinese sages in the mountains. He was thought to be a very suitable son-in-law, not so much because they could depend on him but because they felt comfortable around him. I think they also took some consolation in his physical resemblance to their lost son. Even the Demon could find no fault with the match, Masao coming from what was unquestionably a good family.

Around the same time, Harue married a man who also took his wife’s family name. Her husband, Hiroshi, was the second son among six children of a cotton merchant in Yokohama. After graduating from Keio with a major in economics, he was hired by Mitsubishi, and it was through Mr. Shigemitsu (who also worked for the company, of course) that he was introduced to the Saegusas. I understand that at the time he was tall and slim, with slick black hair. In contrast to his younger brother, whose political affiliations had meant trouble with the law, Hiroshi preferred just to have a good time. He often visited the Saegusas in Karuizawa, where he would dance and chat away happily with Harue, but he was never taken seriously as a possible contender until Noriyuki died. He too was drafted and called to the front, not once but twice; the second time, he was lucky enough to come down with pleurisy before he even left the country. Grampy and Grammy questioned the match, saying that Hiroshi seemed too lightweight to adopt into the family. Harue prevailed with her usual stubbornness. The fact remained that fewer and fewer young men were available; her parents did not object too strongly. Hiroshi was never on quite the same wavelength as the Saegusas, though. He may have looked cultivated enough, but he always seemed slightly bored when the family started to chatter about this work of art or that piece of music or those books, and would take every opportunity to go out and practice his golf swing.

Three months after Harue, Natsue married. She was passionately wooed by Takero, the only son and heir of old Dr. Utagawa, who ran a clinic in Kichijoji. Takero and Noriyuki had been preparatory school classmates. Once, when he was staying in Oiwake at the Aburaya Inn, where many Imperial University students used to spend part of the summer, he came over to Karuizawa to see Noriyuki, met Natsue, and fell in love at first sight. Being modest, he was convinced that with someone like Noriyuki around, he hadn’t the slightest chance with her. But then Noriyuki died. Takero persisted with the same singleness of purpose that he gave to his research, and his devotion paid off. Natsue, who for years had been overshadowed by her elder sister, was flattered at being pursued by a graduate of the elite Imperial University, a man who also happened to have been a friend of Noriyuki’s. Takero, with his poor eyesight, didn’t pass his physical and was able to stay on at his university throughout the war; he worked on the staff at the university hospital and sometimes helped out at his father’s clinic.

Yayoi’s husband Masao got on well with both the Shigemitsu and the Saegusa families, while Harue’s Hiroshi was the odd man out, to some degree. But this young Dr. Utagawa was another case entirely. It was like putting an unglazed rice bowl in with fine porcelain teacups and saucers. When Takero was around, the whole family seemed at a loss, though he was surely the one who felt it most keenly.

Luckily, for the weddings, both families had some white satin they’d bought before the war, but they had nothing for trousseaux, and, because of wartime shortages, store shelves were empty. Trucks and gasoline for civilian use were now out of the question, so the Saegusas had to hire a man pulling a trailer when the time came for Natsue to move her belongings to her temporary home in the Utagawa house, next to the clinic.

Fuyue never married.

After Natsue’s wedding, the fire bombings of Tokyo intensified, and the Saegusa sisters and their mother evacuated to Karuizawa. Yayoi, although her family had country houses elsewhere, joined them, along with her mother, despite the fact that Karuizawa wasn’t the ideal refuge, being freezing cold in winter. The war finally ended not long after they got there, but they all stayed on anyway. Then, with their husbands visiting them whenever they could, Yayoi, Harue, and Natsue all became pregnant around the same time, in the following year. The families spent that winter in Karuizawa too: food was more available there than in Tokyo.

They had their share of hardships, and they loved telling stories about it, over and over, in fact. Luckily, the kimonos they sent ahead before leaving Tokyo arrived without being stolen, so they had something to trade for food. But they still had to grow cabbages and potatoes in their own vegetable patch, travel as far as Komoro to buy rice, and somehow manage to get hold of heating fuel. These heavily pregnant women ended up experiencing much of the same deprivation as everyone else. Naturally this strengthened the bond between their families.

All three of them had their babies between January and March of 1947. It was only natural that, though he wasn’t related by blood, the Shigemitsus’ boy Masayuki seemed like an actual cousin to Harue’s Mari and Natsue’s Yuko when they were growing up. After they returned to the city, Harue had a second daughter, Eri, and Natsue had Yoko. Yayoi had only the one boy.

THE DEMON’S TALES always turned into pure lamentation as soon as she started talking about the postwar years. Mr. and Mrs. Shigemitsu lost a great deal—and they had a great deal to lose. What they could never get over, of course, was that their only son was gone. The couple were never quite the same. To make matters worse, during the war, Mr. Shigemitsu had been asked by an acquaintance to do some work for the Ministry of Information, which led to his being purged by the Occupation Forces. This meant that he couldn’t get any serious work afterward. In the hope of somehow restoring the family’s former glory, he made some risky investments and ended up losing most of what they had left. After a spell of unemployment, at least Masao got a teaching job at the Tokyo University of the Arts, and a prestigious one too, since that’s the only national university for the fine arts and music. But during their leanest years, the family only managed by selling their belongings, including that tea set of matching cups, saucers, and cake plates which I saw on my first visit to the Saegusas—the one with the gold-and-blue design and gold rims. The Saegusas thought it was just too awful for the set to fall into other hands, and offered to buy it. They bought a number of other items from the Shigemitsus too, which ended up being one of the things the Demon held against them. Yayoi couldn’t afford to send her son to Seijo Academy, so he had to go to the local public school.