Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

Takero had used about a third of their land for the two rental properties. He let Roku live in one house and rented out the other; the little they got from this was reserved as old Mrs. Utagawa’s spending money. Though originally a geisha, she had been married to the doctor, and was the lady of the house, for nearly three decades. I imagine that her stepson, especially because they weren’t related by blood, wanted her to feel supported and at least reasonably independent.

At the beginning of each month, the middle-aged working couple who rented the other house would knock on the back door and pay their rent. I understood how money matters were settled in the family when I saw Mrs. Utagawa take the envelope full of cash and put it in her chest of drawers. Apparently, she gave a certain amount to Roku to spend on food. To their credit, the Saegusa sisters were relaxed when it came to money, and Natsue seemed to have no objection to this arrangement. For one thing, Roku was still useful around the place, and, in the end, Natsue and her husband would get all the income from both properties when Roku and Mrs. Utagawa passed on.

So—to return to the story about his appearance at the back door that day—he’d come to ask a favor of Mrs. Utagawa, after saying, “You’ve done so much for me already that I hate to be asking for more.” Roku had a nephew who had recently returned from Manchuria—the son of his younger brother, who died young. He didn’t expect the old lady to remember, but before this nephew went overseas, the late Dr. Utagawa had helped him out once as well. He was the only family Roku had left in the world. When the war ended, he’d tried to come back to Japan but couldn’t get on any of the repatriation ships. Then, finally, two or three years ago, he and his family made it back. They lived in temporary housing for repatriates for a while, but there was no work, so they were now staying at his wife’s parents’ place down south in Shimonoseki, where he was helping out with their fishing business. But it was a rough position for a man to be in, depending on his wife’s family. When he found out that Roku was living in Tokyo in a house all by himself, he asked whether he and his family could move in with him. Before he went out to Manchuria, he used to be a turner—operating a lathe at a factory—and he was sure that finding work would be no problem once he got to Tokyo. He would, of course, start paying the appropriate amount of rent as soon as he was employed.

That evening, Mrs. Utagawa discussed Roku’s request with her stepson, who eventually agreed to it.

Roku was around seventy at the time. As they saw it, the house could be rented out after he died, but if he was bedridden before that, he would need to be taken care of. If Roku’s nephew and his family were under the same roof, they could at least look after him until then. Besides, it wasn’t likely that the nephew, who was still in his thirties, would take that long to find work.

Takero asked again, to make sure, “Will he really pay the rent once he gets a job?”

“That’s what he promises,” she said. “Just because we’re Utagawas, we don’t need to take in every stray. They’re not our kith and kin. We’re not under any obligation.”

“Anyway,” Takero went on, “we’ve no idea what sort of people they are, so let’s have it in writing. We’ll feel safer. We can say: ‘They are to vacate the premises without contest should we find their stay unacceptable in any way,’ or words to that effect.”

In the end they decided that if the nephew did start paying rent, it wouldn’t be a bad deal for all concerned.

LATE IN THE year, the nephew and his family arrived. A wooden fence separated the Utagawa home from the two rentals, but the fence only extended as far as the well they all shared, so that both the landlord’s and tenants’ families could have easy access. This meant that from certain places in the Utagawas’ back yard one had an unobstructed view of Roku’s narrow veranda and front door.

That day, I was sweeping up fallen leaves in the yard when I happened to glance over at Roku’s house. What I saw made me grip the bamboo handle of my broom tight: people who looked like beggars, dirty, in rags.

More than a decade had passed since the war ended. “The postwar period is behind us” was the year’s slogan, and indeed the raw and painful memories of the days immediately after the war had mostly faded. But on that day, on Roku’s doorstep, they all came back like returning ghosts.

Roku’s nephew and his wife were each carrying large bundles in both hands and had filthy loads wrapped in ropes that crisscrossed their chests and shoulders. Roku had told us that the nephew was in his thirties, but to me he looked over fifty. They had three boys with them, all of whom had the same grimy cloth-and-rope things weighing down their shoulders. The older two appeared to be of middle school age, while the youngest was still quite small. All three of them had light reddish-brown hair, a clear sign of malnourishment. The youngest stood apart from the rest, as though to show he wasn’t one of them. They were all hollow-eyed from hunger, but his eyes had a hollowness beyond hunger, a blankness, like a pair of glass beads.

That little one was Taro.

ON SUNDAY MORNING, Roku appeared at our kitchen door with his nephew, to introduce him. I looked over and saw, out by the well, the wife and the two older boys peering intently at our house. The thought of nice old Roku having this burden foisted on him filled me with dismay. The Utagawas had built Roku’s lodging with the idea of eventually renting the place out, so it had two four-and-a-half-mat tatami rooms, a tiny kitchen with a wooden floor, and a toilet. In those days, this was a more than adequate setup for a single elderly person, but it was in no way suited to a family of five, plus Roku. Having a three-mat room of my own, I’d become positively spoiled. It was suffocating to think of them all sleeping practically on top of each other in that limited space. I wondered whether they had enough futons to go around; no one had seen any other belongings of theirs being delivered. And sure enough, we soon began to suspect that they didn’t even have their own bedding, so Mrs. Utagawa, sighing, repaired some old quilts and futons for them to use—but they still weren’t enough for the whole family.

ALREADY, THE MORNINGS were frosty; at dusk, chilly winds blew fallen leaves along the ground. Winter was drawing near. Luckily, Roku’s nephew did find a job fairly quickly. Since he’d worked a lathe when he was in his teens, it came back to him easily enough even if he was a bit rusty, and early in the new year he started working at a factory on the Koshu Kaido Road.

Once they had some income, they started to pay the rent, which Mrs. Utagawa had set well below the going rate. Being a conscientious person, she didn’t keep the extra money for herself, either, but passed it on to cover the household expenses. Before long, the nephew’s wife also got a job, at a small factory that made chinaware nearby—actually, more a workshop than a factory. Sometimes on my way to the market I’d walk past it. Out in a field, amid squawking chickens scurrying about, a group of women sat on straw mats, tying stacks of large, heavy rice bowls together with cord, chattering as they worked. But even after the wife started working, Mrs. Utagawa went on giving Roku money. My guess is that she wanted to make sure that the old man, who out of kindness had let his relations move into his house, couldn’t be treated as a nuisance once they got their life going in Tokyo.

Roku’s surname was Azuma, written with the character for “east,” and we called his nephew Mr. Azuma. His wife’s name was O-Tsune.