Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

It was my impression anyway that Yoko was at a disadvantage, partly because she was seen as belonging, in a sense, to old Mrs. Utagawa, and was clearly the old lady’s favorite. Yuko, the elder sister, was Natsue’s firstborn. Also, she was born in Karuizawa just after the war, when old Mrs. Utagawa was not there, feeling her place was in Tokyo with her stepson. I believe she held back with Yuko in deference to Natsue, who doted on the girl. To make up for it, she showered her affection on the second child, who’d been put right into her arms by the midwife in Chitose Funabashi. Natsue always seemed less attached to Yoko, so that the girl became “Grandma’s child.” It would have been different, of course, if Grandma had been someone whose authority was never called into question. Mrs. Utagawa, however, was slightly looked down on by both the immediate and the extended family. Being the favorite of this person, Yoko inevitably got bracketed with her and suffered for it.

Gradually I learned about Mrs. Utagawa’s history, overhearing fragments of the three sisters’ endless chatter: that she’d been a geisha and the late Dr. Utagawa’s mistress. She only became his second wife after the first Mrs. Utagawa, Takero’s mother, died of the Spanish flu. She was from a samurai family, but when her parents died (young, of tuberculosis), she was passed around among her relations and ended up being sold as a geisha to pay off a family member’s debts. Nothing about her suggested her past, though; she was determinedly unforthcoming and withdrawn. Once, there was a moment when I thought I saw a glimpse of her geisha days, but even so, it was that one time only. Takero did his best to give Mrs. Utagawa the respect a stepmother and grandmother was due, but her merely being in a position where her stepson had to make an effort to do this was in itself unfortunate. A three-stringed shamisen , wrapped in cloth and collecting dust deep in her closet, was the only reminder of her past; maybe she couldn’t face letting it go.

As if it weren’t bad enough being the protégée, so to speak, of this grandmother held in lesser esteem, Yoko failed to inherit the “Hirano face.”

Elegant Grammy’s maiden name was Hirano, and the Hiranos prided themselves on having produced beautiful daughters for generations. Harue’s children Mari and Eri, and Natsue’s daughter Yuko, all took after their mothers and had the Hirano face, making three out of four: only Yoko was different. She had frizzy hair, dark skin, and a round face. For some reason, she didn’t look like her father or anyone else in the family. Among people who thought that having the Hirano face was the best thing in the world, Yoko, naturally, was seen as being a little defective. When she gashed her forehead, you could just feel it, the way everybody was relieved that it was her and not one of the other girls. I should have objected to that relief, but my first reaction was the same. Besides, the three sisters, having grown up as a close trio, probably felt that Yoko, a fourth, was the odd one out.

Perhaps because my first impression of her had been so disconcerting, I was never able to feel any deep affection for Yoko. Still, I realized that instead of going to school in Seijo and having lively people for company, she was stuck here with an old woman and a housemaid. I had seen the way her eyes sparkled when her mother and sister came home in the evening, and how animated she became when her father was in the house on Sunday mornings. I did feel sorry for her. So I was happy for her sake that when she started elementary school, she also began piano lessons with Fuyue on Saturday afternoons. That way, she at least spent part of one day each week in Seijo. On Saturdays, she came back from school at midday, changed into better clothes, and left the house with her piano books, looking slightly nervous. At night she came home with her mother and Yuko—happy.

ONCE AGAIN, SUMMER arrived—time to put up the mosquito nets!—and again we made the big move to Karuizawa. After another season there, we came back for autumn in Tokyo, got through another winter, and started a second school year in April. Not much changed in the Utagawa family. As for me, Mrs. Utagawa taught me enough about Japanese dressmaking for me to sew together a yukata , and, thanks to Natsue’s coaching, my knitting improved. What I appreciated most, however, was that the family gave me time to read every day—about an hour between the mid-afternoon snack and dinnertime. Mrs. Utagawa, seeing that there was always a half-read book on the dresser in the maid’s room, and that some mornings my eyes were bloodshot from staying up late reading, told me, “If you like books that much, by all means take some time off for it. We’re not that busy during the day.” Takero also encouraged me to read any of the books around the house. Even though, at the time, I didn’t fully appreciate what an unusual family they were to give me this kind of break, I did know enough to feel grateful. Once every two weeks, when I had my day off, I’d go to the local library and sit surrounded by high school students studying for college entrance exams. Somehow I couldn’t help feeling more guilty than embarrassed about pretending to be one of the crowd. Luckily, since they were close to my own age, I knew at least that none of them would suspect it was a maid sitting in their midst.

ANOTHER YEAR PASSED. It was now 1956, the year that the Shigemitsus and Saegusas both sold off part of their land in Seijo, and the Shigemitsus’ Victorian house was demolished. In the fall of that same year, Fuyue went to study in Germany.

Around the time the air began to have a tang of autumn to it, the Utagawas’ old rickshaw man, Roku, appeared at our back door, with a solemn look on his face. That was the prelude to our having Taro involved in our lives.

It took me a while to understand the relationship between the Utagawas and Roku. I assumed in the beginning that he was simply some old man who used the common well out back and did odd jobs around the neighborhood to earn some extra cash. I also thought of him as a very humble man, unusually deferential to the Utagawas. Only later did I learn that he had been employed by the late Dr. Utagawa for years as his rickshaw man, and that the little house he lived in and the identical building next door were rental properties owned by the Utagawas.

According to Mrs. Utagawa, one of the trickiest problems after the doctor’s sudden death was what to do about Roku. The Utagawas had taken him in when he was just a boy, from a poor family with too many children. He’d worked for them from then on, and the clinic grounds became his home. In the early years, he ran errands. As he got bigger and stronger, he was given the job of pulling the rickshaw when Dr. Utagawa made house calls. After cars replaced the rickshaw, Roku stayed on as a handyman, helping around the property with work like pounding sticky mochi rice, splitting logs for firewood, and mending fences. In return, he was given a hut on the clinic grounds. Apparently he lived with one of the scullery maids for a while when he was the rickshaw man, but they never had any children and the woman eventually moved on. By the time the Utagawas sold the clinic, Roku was quite elderly and without anyone to look after him. The family couldn’t bring themselves to let him go, so they brought him along when they moved to Chitose Funabashi.

“A loyal servant to the bone,” everyone said of him. He was so devoted to the family that when his young master became disillusioned for some reason with the Buddhist establishment—“All those damn monks care about is money!”—Roku took to visiting the Utagawa family grave at the temple cemetery in his place, cleaning the headstone and lighting some incense for their ancestors. He was not only a loyal servant but a sweet man—perhaps good-natured to a fault.