Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

“He can’t even read properly, and he’s supposed to be in third grade soon,” Yoko said scornfully, licking chocolate off her fingers. “He just sits there, so our teacher reads for him, and then he tries to repeat it. Kewpie is the only other one who can’t even read a sentence.”

“Yoko, you mustn’t say things like that,” her mother told her. Kewpie apparently was the name the children gave to a retarded girl in the class.

“Is he actually backward?” asked Takero.

Mrs. Utagawa answered this. “It isn’t likely. He seems to be the brightest of those three children.” This was the first time I was aware of her taking an interest in him.

“He’s not Japanese, that’s why he can’t read. Anyway, that’s what everybody says,” said Yoko.

“Not Japanese?” her father asked, puzzled.

“Yeah, they say he’s really Chinese.”

“So his mother is Chinese?”

“No, they’re all Japanese, but not him.”

At this point I decided to speak up. “That’s what the fish seller told me too.” I told them about Taro’s being the son of Mr. Azuma’s sister, about the Chinese bandit, and the sister’s death.

“There’s a Chinese girl in my class at Seijo,” Yuko said. “Her name is Ko. Written with the character for ‘high.’ Her family’s really rich, and they even have their own cook at home.”

“That’s different,” her mother said.

I rarely spoke to Takero, but that day I asked him, “Are there people in China who aren’t in fact Chinese?”

“Certainly there are,” he said, peering at me over his glasses. “It’s such a vast country. There are people who aren’t anything like the ordinary Chinese we know. And in Taiwan too.”

“It seems his father wasn’t one of those ordinary Chinese.”

“I see.” Then nodding to himself, “Amazing what can happen in life.”

Natsue pursed her lips and said, “I wish Mr. Azuma had told us that one of the children wasn’t his own.”

“Now that I think about it, there is something about him that doesn’t seem very Japanese,” Mrs. Utagawa murmured.

“What is he like?” asked Natsue, who hadn’t been paying much attention to what was going on in her back yard because she was always in Seijo. Mrs. Utagawa looked at me, and I did my best to describe him.

“Oh, I know who you mean,” Natsue said, nodding. “I thought the same thing when I saw him—a really dirty boy, but what an interesting face. So his father is Chinese?”

“Who cares where he comes from, anyway?” Takero said and turned to Yoko. “If anyone ever brings that up again in school, you tell them it doesn’t matter whether he’s Japanese or not. No, tell them, it’s better not to be Japanese.”

“Darling, I do wish you wouldn’t always be so extreme in your opinions.”

“Well, I wouldn’t have to be if we hadn’t started that stupid war.”

That was the end of the discussion.

THE FOLLOWING SUNDAY, Natsue made breakfast again; the smell of coffee filled the air. Yoko asked her father, “Papa, what’s a stepmother?”

Before he could reply, her sister piped up, “I know. It’s somebody who isn’t the real mother, so she’s mean to the kid.”

“Not all stepmothers are mean,” their father said, as evenly as he could. “There are plenty of nice stepmothers.”

Both of the girls seemed aware that Mrs. Utagawa was not their father’s biological mother, but they hadn’t figured out that this made her a “stepmother” herself.

“But I heard that Taro’s mother is mean to him because she’s a stepmother.”

“Who said that?”

“Kids in my class.”

“They’ve been spending too much time reading manga.”

“But it’s still true that she’s mean to Taro.”

Yoko was clearly enjoying having all of her father’s attention for the time being. She seemed resigned to the fact that Yuko was her mother’s favorite, so she tried hard at least to get some of her father’s affection.

“You always see Taro’s brothers out playing, but he never gets to play. He’s always made to do chores.”

“But isn’t he too young?”

“Maybe, but he’s one year older than me,” Yoko said with great seriousness, holding up her index finger.

“How much housework can a child that young really do, anyway?” Takero asked in my direction. I replied that I too had rarely if ever seen Taro playing outside. Usually I’d see him scrubbing laundry at the well, or heading out, a cooking pot in his hand, on his way to pick up some tofu from the store.

“Still, when you think about it, in the old days, it was common to make children work, looking after the younger ones in the family,” he commented, apparently hoping to put a stop to this subject. But Yoko had something more to say.

“And they beat him all the time.” Her cheeks colored a bit, perhaps because she felt that her grandmother wouldn’t have wanted her to know something like this.

Her father was obviously disturbed. “Is that so? I’d have thought Azuma wouldn’t allow it.”

“No, it only happens when he isn’t there. Mrs. Azuma and his brothers slap him around.”

I myself was surprised how much Yoko knew about what was happening in the back yard.

“And where is Roku the whole time?” Takero asked, turning to face me.

I told him that for one thing, Roku wasn’t the kind of man to take a stand against that sort of thing. And since he hadn’t been feeling well lately, he needed O-Tsune to look after him, which made it even more difficult for him to speak up.

“Well then, what’s to be done?” he said.

The conversation ended there, but the boy’s predicament continued to weigh on my mind, and I couldn’t get over it.

A stone’s throw from the well out back was a large tree stump. Once in a while, I’d see Taro standing there, facing it, with a big, sturdy stick in his hand, always the same stick, so he must have kept it hidden somewhere. It was about as long as he was tall. He would raise it above his head and bring it crashing down on the stump, first with his right hand and then with his left. He was fairly small, so it looked almost as if the stick were the one wielding him rather than the other way around. I assume this was his way of taking revenge on the various people who had mistreated him. Oddly enough, his face remained expressionless throughout. He would only do this when his stepmother and brothers were not around; I’m sure he never dreamed that anyone from the Utagawa house could see him. It wasn’t a time of day when someone might be cooking in the kitchen, and, besides, the kitchen lights were off, so it wouldn’t have occurred to him that I might be watching from the window. Sometimes he’d scare a poor cat that happened to wander by. When he got tired of it, he just sat on the stump, hugging his knees. But not for long. He would bring out a basket of laundry, a washboard, and a washtub. I suppose he’d been told to finish the laundry before O-Tsune got back from work.

Rumor had it that when the family was living down south in Shimonoseki, at O-Tsune’s parents’ house, he ran away once. He was only seven at the time. Three days later, he came back. This was a story that O-Tsune had told in her usual mocking tone to the other women at work, which then circulated around the neighborhood and eventually reached the fish seller.

One day, Yoko’s father asked her, “That boy, Taro, does he go to school every day?”

“Yeah, he does. But he’s so dirty that some of the boys threw chalk powder over his head and said, ‘We’re cleaning you up with DDT!’ ”

This silly prank made her father start laughing, but he quickly stopped himself. “Listen, Yoko,” he told her firmly, “I don’t want you bullying him too just because other kids are. In fact, if you see them being mean to Taro, you should try to stop them.”