Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

I soon began to pay special attention to the youngest boy.

O-Tsune was an ill-natured woman. She was born that way, and her character had been further soured by the endless misery she’d experienced: defeat of her country on foreign soil, long internment, and difficult repatriation. She said very little and kept her head bowed low in front of the Utagawas, who gave her things they no longer wanted—pots and pans and bits of fabric—but she was far from docile. Since I spent much of my time in the kitchen and back yard, I quickly learned what she was really like. Her voice was loud. Sometimes I heard her laughing, but more often she would use her deafening voice to yell at her boys. When she took it out on the smallest one, there was such spite in her voice I wanted to block my ears.

This boy, Taro, was not like the rest of them. His brothers had rather dull, commonplace faces, while Taro had surprisingly mature, well-defined features and darkish skin. His arms and legs were thin and long, his movements quick. If you looked closely, you realized that he was the best-looking among them, but he was by far the most shabbily dressed, in clothes that must already have been handed down a few times before they reached him. It also seemed as if they hardly ever took him to the public bath: his neck and hair were always grimy. And though he was the youngest, O-Tsune had only him doing chore after chore.

There was something odd as well about the way the older boys bullied him. I couldn’t bear to hear their shrill, not-quite-young-men’s voices howling at him; even worse was the sound of punching and kicking. The middle-aged couple in the other rental house were always as quiet as mice, which made the ruckus that much harder to bear. Sometimes I would hear Roku telling them to break it up. They were only mean to Taro when Mr. Azuma wasn’t home; once their father returned, the place usually fell quiet.

I wondered whether the boy was a stepchild.

Taro not only went to the same local elementary school as Yoko, he was also a second grader like her. And he was placed in the same class. Yoko, already embarrassed that this scruffy little boy lived just behind her own house, avoided him on the way to school.

One day, Yoko arrived home from school, kicked off her sneakers in the hall, and, without even taking her red backpack off, came running to me.

“Break the circuit! Quick!” she said.

Forming rings with the thumbs and index fingers of each hand and then joining them like links on a chain, she held them up in front of my face.

“What are we doing?”

“Just break it.”

“How?”

“Just break it with one hand like this,” she said, demonstrating a karate chop with her right hand and then returning her fingers again to their original position. “One of the girls touched Taro by accident, and she gave his cooties to another kid, but then I got them. So I have to get rid of them. You have to break the circuit.”

I’d never played this funny game before, but I did the cutting motion with my hand as I was told to do. Yoko let out an exaggerated sigh of relief, and slowly lowered her backpack to the floor.

I could picture Taro being bullied at school.

I felt sorry for him, but even I was reluctant to go near this grubby child with the snot from a perpetually runny nose on his upper lip. And those glassy eyes of his made it difficult even to greet him. One morning, I opened the kitchen door to take the bottles from the milkman and heard a shrieking voice say, “Why the hell do you keep wetting your futon?” followed by the sound of someone being whacked. With the boy getting that kind of abuse, it was no wonder he wet his bed. After then I noticed that whenever I heard a really nasty dressing-down and a beating in the morning, there would be a sad, thin cushion hanging in the veranda, its dirty gray cotton batting showing from torn seams. It was never an actual futon drying outside, only this square cushion. It turned out they made Taro sleep on a row of worn-out cushions on the kitchen floor.

Taro, I eventually learned, was the son of Mr. Azuma’s younger sister. What’s more, he wasn’t entirely Japanese. The fish seller—the “Hey, how about going out with me sometime?” one—told me this, stealing a moment when Mrs. Utagawa wasn’t around. He sat down on the raised kitchen floor and, grinning at me in his rather dirty-minded way, told me the story in a lowered voice. The Utagawas didn’t have a lot to do with their neighbors—obviously—so even I only knew people to say hello to as we passed. We were probably the last to learn about Taro and his storybook history.

When Mr. Azuma and his wife moved to Manchuria, his sister went with them, earning her keep by working in a Japanese restaurant. Right after the end of the war, she was kidnapped. This was done, apparently, by the head of a gang of bandits up in the mountains. He was neither Han Chinese nor Manchu. Rumor had it that it was in revenge for the killing of the man’s wife and children by Japanese soldiers. Soon afterward, the kidnapper himself died of some illness, and, incredibly, with the help of an elderly Chinese, Mr. Azuma’s sister found her way back to her brother. She then gave birth to a baby boy, but died from complications.

“And they say she was a real looker,” the fish seller told me, “but completely nuts.”

“Who, the sister?” I asked.

“Yeah, that’s what I heard,” he said.

Even as a child, apparently, she had been odd; some thought she was possessed. Once, when she put a curse on a stray cat, the cat died. People were afraid of her. As she lay on her deathbed, she’s said to have stared into space, pointed upward, and declared, “If my brother and his wife fail to raise this child and see him grow up as one of their own, I’ll curse the lot of them. And they’ll burn in hell!” With that she expired.

I wondered how much of this was made up by O-Tsune, but one thing was certain: the Azumas had brought Taro all the long way back to Japan with them. I would guess that O-Tsune probably tried to get rid of him along the way, but her husband stopped her. After hearing this story, I felt at least a touch of sympathy for her, despite the way she treated the boy. Trying to travel with two children must have been hard enough, but she was saddled with someone else’s child on top of it, and a nursing baby at that, in circumstances where every bite of food was vital for her own family. Why not leave the baby on the road? Why not just dump him? It wouldn’t have been at all unnatural for her to think of doing this, and it was no surprise that her anger and resentment had lasted so long.

A few weeks after this, the story reached the Utagawas’ ears.

On Sundays, in the morning anyway, Natsue’s husband took time off from work and relaxed. Natsue would tie on her apron rather purposefully and make everyone a Western breakfast. Even on my biweekly Sunday off, I had this breakfast with the family before I went out. The house filled with the smells of coffee perking and pancakes or French toast sizzling in the frying pan. When it was cold and the stove was lit, Takero often used to melt some chocolate for the girls. Even old Mrs. Utagawa had a Western breakfast on Sundays.

On that Sunday morning, he wrote the girls’ names in melted chocolate on their pancakes. To make it even more special, he did it in English instead of Japanese. “Here’s yours,” he said, passing a pancake with the large chocolate letters Y-U-K-O on it, and then did the same for Y-O-K-O .

Yoko eagerly reached out for her plate, saying, “You know Taro, the boy in our back yard? The other kids say he really should be one grade higher up, ’cause he’s a year older than us.”

After coming from the mainland and the chaos of moving around, he was inevitably behind in school. Afterward I learned that the public record showed his date of birth as May 5—Boy’s Day, a national holiday—1947. This seemed to me an indication that the Azumas couldn’t remember exactly when he was born and chose the date out of convenience when they finally got to register him as their third son. With the school year starting in April, it was more likely that he would have been in the same grade as Masayuki, Mari, and Yuko if he had been born a bit earlier than what the record showed.