Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

That was the first and last time I ever saw her take that tone with anyone.

O-Tsune could put two and two together as well as the next person. Once she calmed down and thought things over she must have realized it was owing entirely to old Mrs. Utagawa’s goodwill that they were able to rent that place so cheaply. With two men in the household already earning wages, the extra income to be gained by forcing a schoolboy to do piecework was next to nothing, as she well knew. It was sheer spite that made her try to keep Taro from going out to play—a way of getting even for having had to take him in. But if the old lady objected to his doing this work at home, why should she insist? And if the old lady meant to take him under her wing, then there was nothing to be gained by knocking him around. In short, O-Tsune saw clearly that it was in her own interest to avoid any friction with Mrs. Utagawa.

Soon after that, when Taro got home from school he would call out “I’m back” (not bothering, as was proper, to slip off the rough cotton shoulder bag he wore slung around his neck as he said it) and then make a beeline for the Utagawa house. I’m sure he would rather have dispensed with the greeting altogether, but Mrs. Utagawa insisted that he keep up this custom, so, reluctantly, he did. He stayed with us until suppertime. Sometimes she even gave him supper, first sending me next door to let O-Tsune know.

One Sunday morning about ten days after she’d had words with O-Tsune, Mrs. Utagawa brought her stepson up to date. “The boy will only be bullied if he’s left in that woman’s care. I am having him come over to help out after school. That way, he and Yoko can do their homework together too.”

She said it was “to help out” in case he was thought an unsuitable playmate for Yoko. In those days, there were plenty of household chores children could be expected to do, so this didn’t sound unusual.

“Fine,” said Takero. “Why not? Yoko can help him with his homework.”

“Sure, I will!” said Yoko.

“See that he gets something to eat,” Natsue told me. “That boy is as thin as a rail.”

I assured her that I would. I already was feeding him, of course, but I pretended otherwise. Mrs. Utagawa and I had become accomplices.

“Oh, and have him get rid of that wasps’ nest under the eaves, would you?” Natsue added. “If Roku got well I would ask him, but it looks as if that won’t be happening.”

Ever since Roku was laid up, heavy work that needed doing around the house had been neglected. Firewood for heating the bath needed chopping, and with the cold weather coming on, someone had to clean out the garden shed and make room for a load of coal. Just how useful the boy would make himself, I didn’t know, but I agreed that there was plenty for him to do.

This turn of events must have raised Taro’s spirits no end. But he wasn’t the only one for whom it broke new ground. I’m sure she had never imagined or anticipated this, yet as Taro began to settle in at our house, Mrs. Utagawa found it gave her a pleasure she had never known before: the joy of raising a boy she could spoil and scold to her heart’s content, knowing that she personally was indispensable to his happiness.

In the course of my years with the family, I came to realize that after Mrs. Utagawa married, she had raised the doctor’s son Takero from infancy, not as her own but as someone left in her charge, to be treated with special care. She couldn’t have done otherwise, for he truly was the family’s only, precious hope. Congenital syphilis had carried off two other sons in a row, so everyone feared for this baby’s life, though he eventually survived with nothing worse than a slight disability in one eye and one ear. When, soon after giving birth, his natural mother died of the Spanish flu, he was coddled by wet nurses and maids anxious to ensure that he would live to carry on the Utagawa name. At that juncture Mrs. Utagawa came into the picture, no longer a mistress but a wife. It was her job to raise Takero as the future head of the family. That responsibility would affect her to the end of her days. As far as I knew, she was always extremely respectful toward him, beyond what you’d expect just from not having a blood tie.

Late in life she was given Yoko to raise, but in the end Yoko was still Natsue’s daughter—once again, not Mrs. Utagawa’s own but a child entrusted to her keeping. Taro, who had come to her out of nowhere, was nobody’s child, someone she could do with as she liked. And he was a male child too. Since she belonged to the older generation, you could see in her treatment of him as he grew older that this mattered to her. Added to this, I’d guess that, because he was an outsider not only in the world at large but even in his own family, she could identify with him, she herself being something of an outsider.

The closer she got to him, the more she took on the role of his protector. She was so retiring by nature that, had she known how heavily involved with him she was to become, I doubt whether she would have taken those first steps at all. But after six months, then a year, she had gone too far to turn back. At first she gave Natsue and Takero sketchy reports on the boy, thinking he was scarcely worth bothering them about, but before she knew it things had progressed to the point where she dared not do even that, fearful of revealing what a fixture he had become.

Of course, she would not have grown so involved if Taro had not proven to be such a surprise, demonstrating far greater potential than anyone could have suspected. That he could hardly read before was strange, given that brain of his. Perhaps it had been impossible for him to learn anything with his brothers always filching his pencils and notebooks, and with O-Tsune giving him endless chores to do. It could be that he wasn’t even sent to school before they settled in Tokyo. Or, since he had been an outsider from the beginning, he may simply have thought the letters on the pages had nothing to do with him. Once he started to look at the textbooks with Yoko, he quickly learned to read, and before long he was at the head of the class.

Between school lunches and the snacks we gave him—and, believe me, we saw to it that he ate as much as possible—Taro’s skinny frame soon filled out. He became scrupulously clean too, not wanting to disappoint the girl who on that first day had leaned in close and said, “Mm, you smell nice!” When I offered to run a bath for him, unlike most boys he never objected, but rather nodded, a bit bashfully. In the bathroom, he would fill the wooden basin partly with running cold water, then add hot water from the kettle and work the soap into a good lather before scrubbing himself from head to toe. Yoko used to make him mad by peering in and asking, “Aren’t you done yet?” When his nose ran or he sniffled, she would make a face and point, so he took to using the tissues Mrs. Utagawa gave him. Over time, his way of speaking also became less rough.

The Azuma family let up on their abuse. O-Tsune knew it would do her no good to have old Mrs. Utagawa find Taro being mistreated, so she persuaded his brothers to lay off. “That’s enough, you two,” we would hear her snap, her voice purposely loud enough to carry. The occasional gift of sweets, soft drinks, or used clothing from Mrs. Utagawa also had an effect. Of course, his brothers were unimpressed and went on tormenting him behind their mother’s back—but since O-Tsune was home most of the time and Taro spent long stretches at the Utagawa house, they had less opportunity to bully him, however much they may have wanted to. The usual uproar fell off considerably.

FOR TARO, THE next two years—the years from age ten to around twelve, when he first went off to Oiwake—were surely the happiest of his young life.