Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

ROKU’S FUNERAL TOOK place early in the new year. Toward the end, I was going over to the Azuma house nearly every day. By then he couldn’t get anything down his throat, so there wasn’t much I could do for him except to make sure he was warm and had clean underwear. After he died, it seemed that he’d managed to set aside a little money, much to the surprise of everyone in the Utagawa family.

With no need to support Roku anymore, Mrs. Utagawa herself had a little extra cash at her disposal every month. She had already been paying out of her own pocket for any expenses Taro’s presence incurred, but soon she began spending money on him more freely. The amount wasn’t much: she would buy him notebooks and pencils, and give him some money for school excursions. The Azuma family was no longer as badly off by then, yet O-Tsune was still happy to have the boy get whatever came his way. Natsue and Takero of course knew nothing about it.

Roku’s death freed up a room for the boys where Taro could have slept with his brothers, but he kept to his cushions in the kitchen, insisting—understandably—that he preferred it that way. When she heard this, however, Mrs. Utagawa got out some of her husband’s old kimonos, unstitched them, and sewed them into a narrow futon and coverlet, filled with layers of thick cotton, so that Taro could sleep a little more comfortably.

At some point he stopped wetting his bed.

IN THE FOURTH grade the two children were put in different classes, but the days went peacefully by. As the weather turned warm, once again they started to play outside. In the front yard of the Utagawa home was a concrete patio overhung with grapevines, and they would go there to draw pictures in white or colored chalk on the floor. In addition to the empty lot with its air raid shelter where they usually played, they found another close by that got more sun. They used to pick wild horsetails and bring them to Mrs. Utagawa for her to cook with sugar and soy sauce. I sometimes took them to paddy fields a little farther out, where we picked Chinese milk vetch, flowers of reddish-purple and white that grew along the paths in between. As with the acorns in the autumn, we wove them into necklaces—again, just as I used to do when I was a little girl.

Weekends were dreadful for Taro. Saturday afternoons, when Yoko went for her piano lesson in Seijo, were not so bad. After she got back from school and had her lunch, she would change into her good clothes and set off with her piano books, Taro tagging along at least as far as Chitose Funabashi station. I often went with them—it was a good way for me to get my shopping done. Whenever we passed somebody wearing glasses, they would say he was a monk and howl with laughter—some bit of nonsense they’d picked up reading a child’s version of the old comic novel Shank’s Mare . They tossed the music bag back and forth, playing as they went. Afterward Taro used to stand at the railway crossing, watching till her train was out of sight.

It was strange how Yoko never minded being seen with a ragamuffin like Taro back then. When other children from school spotted the two of them together and jeered, she didn’t like it, but she had no qualms about walking alongside Taro in his shabby clothes while she herself was dressed smartly in a wool blazer, skirt, and felt beret. To a lucky girl who had never once felt ashamed of her own clothes, his shabbiness didn’t seem to be a problem, though dirt was another matter. Occasionally Mrs. Utagawa would buy him something new, but clothes back then were expensive. Besides, if it attracted too much attention his brothers might give him a harder time. So in a way it was unavoidable that Taro should go on dressing like the rest of his family. Yoko, on the other hand, had plenty of fine clothes, the sort that would have made her stand out in any ordinary elementary school. Seijo Academy, where her sister and her two cousins went to school, had no uniform. There was so much material left over from Primavera that the three of them had clothes in abundance, and of course Yoko, getting everybody’s hand-me-downs, had the most of all. New outfits were continually arriving even before she had had a chance to outgrow or wear out the old ones, which were bundled up and sent to the Elizabeth Saunders Home, an orphanage for biracial children born during and after the Occupation. The injustice of it all used to bother me. Fortunately Taro, who helped send the clothes off, had no interest in clothes, being a boy, and was only intent on tying the string as tight as possible around the bundles.

For Taro, Sundays were the worst. After a leisurely breakfast, Yoko’s father would usually set off for the university, but her mother was home nearly all day, so Taro had to stay away from the house. Even if I saw him hanging around the well, I had no choice but to ignore him. On weekdays after supper, Yoko poked at the piano for half an hour or so, but her sister Yuko took her music seriously, and on Sunday she would practice for hours at a time, the sound carrying through the surrounding space. At dusk Taro would sit with his arms around his knees on his favorite tree stump, looking as if he were listening intently. Sometimes the Utagawas spent the whole day out.

The Azuma family, for their part, had Sunday outings now and then, but usually they left Taro behind. Feeling sorry for him, Mrs. Utagawa had him carry her bags when she called on acquaintances in Kichijoji, visited her husband’s grave in the area, or went shopping at Mitsukoshi department store in the Ginza; there she would buy him a pair of trousers or something as a reward. Every other Sunday I had the day off, and I also took him out with me once in a while—sometimes to the Variety Restaurant in Isetan department store, where he would have the children’s lunch, sometimes to a Disney movie Yoko had seen with her family the week before. And I even took him to Korakuen Stadium to watch a Giants game.

One time we went together to visit my uncle Genji, who lived in Soto Kanda then. The husky-voiced woman was running a restaurant in Tamachi with his help; the restaurant was doing well, and they seemed to be leading a comfortable life in a small house they’d built. On hearing what a bright child Taro was, Uncle Genji told him solemnly, “Son, learn English. If you do, no matter what happens, you’ll always have food on the table.” Taro listened equally solemnly to this advice.

ONCE AGAIN THE Utagawas’ annual summer pilgrimage to Karuizawa drew near.

One day Takero again aproached Mrs. Utagawa with the idea of building their own summer house. “For my sake, Mother, why not buy a small plot of land in Oiwake and build a cottage there?” he said. “Summer in Tokyo gets hotter by the year. You’d be far better off spending the entire summer in the highlands yourself, you know.”

“I suppose I would.” She said. “But, dear me, what a waste. And without Fumiko around to help out, do you really think I could manage there on my own?”

“I’m sure you could get someone local to drop in regularly.”

“I suppose so …”

“If I had my own place I could go there any time I wanted, not just for the Bon festival.”

“That’s true. Why don’t we think it over this summer?”

“If we’re looking for land to buy, the easiest way to do it is while we’re in Karuizawa anyway.”

“I suppose so … Let’s just think it over for one more year, shall we?”

As the family’s departure drew closer, Taro’s expression grew more despondent, and Yoko, unable to enjoy playing with someone so down in the mouth, grew exasperated and peevish. “Come on,” she’d say, “you know perfectly well we’re coming back soon!” Perhaps one reason children get so depressed is that they have no voice in what happens to them. The day before Yoko left, Taro was utterly miserable. Yoko seemed affected by it and was moody on the train, but once we arrived in Karuizawa and she was let loose in the front garden, she was red-faced with excitement in no time, chasing after the others and playing as usual. It was as if she’d forgotten all about life in Tokyo.