Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

Sometimes he took the local train to Oiwake. Many of his friends who’d died in the war had spent their summers there, at the Aburaya Inn, so his memories of them were bound up with the place.

“Maybe we should build our own summer house in Oiwake,” he’d tell his stepmother.

“It’d cost too much.”

“No, actually it’s rather cheap. Many of the owners are academics.”

“It’s still too much money.”

FOR ME THE summers in Karuizawa meant that I was almost next door to my childhood home in Saku. It gave me an odd feeling. The older generations in Saku knew that Karuizawa, which had once been a fairly active post town on the highway, had fallen into decline afterward. With a colder climate and a soil of volcanic ash, hardly any crops grew well there. Saku farmers used to believe the area was cursed. When foreigners and then wealthier Japanese started arriving and turned it into a summer resort, it became a place full of strangers who had nothing to do with them. And now I myself was staying there, in the household of some of those strangers.

I had been used to seeing Mount Asama from Saku, but that first summer I discovered that the mountain looked quite different from Karuizawa. In fact, Mount Hanare—a lower mountain shaped like a steamed bun—obscures the view, so one can barely see Asama at all. This too felt strange to me.

Those of us working for the Saegusa sisters usually took our vacation in spring or fall instead of during the Bon festival, the traditional time for maids’ vacations, since summer was the busiest season for us. But because I was so near my own family, they let me take a few days off after the festival, when their husbands went back to Tokyo and things slowed down. My parents had told me I didn’t need to send them any money after my job at the base ended, so I was saving my monthly pay, but I handed over my summer bonus when I came home. I also gave my little sister some of the hand-me-down dresses from Primavera that I thought would look nice on her. She had just started working at a transistor factory that was a little distance from our place but an easy commute by bus. While I was with them, she and I slept on futons side by side. Since she could live at home, she wasn’t having a hard time of it, and so, for better or worse, she remained as immature and innocent as I remembered.

Once the Bon festival draws to a close in mid-August, you start to get the autumn winds in Karuizawa. It was a mournful group, with the summer now over, that left for Tokyo the day before the children’s classes were due to begin.

MY LIFE IN the Tokyo house was the same as ever. We would be making breakfast when we’d hear the high note of the tofu seller’s little bugle, hawking his wares. The morning meal that old Mrs. Utagawa put together looked like something out of a home economics textbook: rice, miso soup, natto sticky beans, and grilled fish. After the family had breakfast, everyone rushed off in the usual order. Only Natsue took her time getting ready; she sat in front of her three-way mirror, leisurely putting on the finishing touches—lipstick, earrings. Not long afterward, the fish seller, who wore a twisted headband around his short, spiky hair, would appear at the door, carrying a shallow wooden bucket full of water and fresh fish. If he saw that Mrs. Utagawa wasn’t around, he’d sit himself down on the raised kitchen floor and start chatting me up—“Hey, how about going out with me sometime?” or whatever. There was also a butcher who wore a white apron and kept a pencil tucked behind his ear. To my amusement—it somehow corresponded with his newfangled trade of selling meat—he looked far less Japanese than the fish man did. The laundryman dropped by nearly every day too. Sometimes even door-to-door women peddlers came, with heavy bundles on their backs. Mrs. Utagawa proved to be a much kinder lady than I’d thought: she listened with some sympathy to their little sob stories, then bought a few small things like silk thread or elastic bands. Farmers from nearby used to come by with a yoke on their shoulders, dangling two buckets, and collect night soil. One time, we saw a trash collector with a handcart trying to steal an old bicycle from the garden shed; we chased him and made him give it back.

When I went upstairs to clean the master bedroom, Mount Fuji would still be faintly visible across the broad Kanto Plain.

It wasn’t long before we heard the boom of the big drum for the autumn festival echoing through the neighborhood. By the time we made a fire of fallen leaves or went out somewhere to pick up chestnuts, we could feel winter creeping up on us. Then you’d hear the sweet-potato seller—“Hot roast pota-a-a-to-o-oes!” He’d be pulling his cart around, with smoke puffing from the little chimney. And late on cold nights, nothing sounded better than the simple notes of the ramen vendor’s wooden charamela pipe. And, before we knew it, it was time for Christmas.

I’d never known any Japanese who celebrated Christmas before. The Utagawas put up a small Christmas tree strung with tiny electric lights in one corner of the main room. Takero and Natsue would take the children, wrapped in matching red coats (not many people, even adults, could afford coats back then), to the Ginza for Christmas shopping. On Christmas Eve, everyone would sing “Silent Night,” with Yuko playing the piano, and on Christmas day, shortly after noon, I went with old Mrs. Utagawa and Yoko to Seijo, carrying presents in both hands. There, the Shigemitsus came over from next door for the celebration, which did double duty as a party for Fuyue’s birthday, also in December. By the evening, even Takero would drop by. It was always lively. As if in exchange, in the period before New Year’s, when other people put pine-and-bamboo decorations on each side of their front gate and prepared a traditional Japanese feast, the Utagawas did nothing. Theirs wasn’t a Japanese New Year’s—a day that was, for everyone else, traditionally the most auspicious of the year.

At the end of December, I went home again. Even more than I had the time before, I felt the distance between us. My sister, next to me on the futon, didn’t feel it from her side, but when she chattered on about the same silly things as ever, I felt alone there in a new, starker way.

In the middle of February, there was a party for the Shigemitsu, Saegusa, and Utagawa children, whose birthdays all happened to fall in the first three months of the year. The party linked up with Yayoi’s birthday too, since her name was also the word for March in classical Japanese.

Then in April, the new school year began.

To my surprise, the family decided to send Yoko to the local elementary school rather than to Seijo Academy. Health reasons, they said: she was asthmatic and too prone to fevers and colds. True, Yoko was not physically strong, but it seemed to me that Natsue used her health as an excuse for letting Yoko keep her mother-in-law company. It could have been Harue’s idea. It allowed Natsue to continue spending most of her waking hours in Seijo without feeling too guilty, since old Mrs. Utagawa would still have Yoko. Takero himself didn’t oppose this unequal treatment of the girls, apparently because he always believed public schools were perfectly good anyway, though he must also have realized that it would keep his stepmother from being too lonely. For Yoko, however, it was not welcome news. She’d been excited about going to school with her elder sister and staying in Seijo till after dinner. When she was told, she became hysterical, and her face turned bright red from crying. She ended up on her futon with a fever. “See, there you go, getting a fever again,” Natsue reminded her. Yoko, unwillingly, conceded her mother’s point. Naturally, sending her to the local elementary school must also have saved them quite a bit of money.