Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

Even with Yoko gone, Mrs. Utagawa had Taro come over every day to do things around the house, to fill in for me. He was a great help to her that summer.

Then, of all things, his right arm got broken. It happened in August, during the ten days Mrs. Utagawa spent in Karuizawa as she always did, around the time of the Bon festival. I didn’t find out about it until the end of summer, back in Tokyo. Taro himself told Mrs. Utagawa that he broke it falling out of a tree he’d been climbing, but she quickly guessed it was those brothers of his who were to blame. O-Tsune did take him to a doctor to have the bone set, and his arm was in a cast, supported by a sling, but Mrs. Utagawa didn’t trust any doctor O-Tsune might choose, so she personally took him to a nearby hospital and had the fracture X-rayed again to make sure that all was well.

When I got back and saw Taro with his arm in a grimy sling, I was obviously surprised, and Yoko’s eyes widened too. She accepted the story that he had broken it climbing a tree and touched the cast in a gingerly way, commenting that it was lucky he was left-handed. But if she looked sad at all, it was less out of sympathy for him than because school was starting the next day.

“I haven’t done my arithmetic yet, have you?” she asked. Every summer in Karuizawa, Yoko would go on playing right up to the last minute and then, fretfully, cram all her summer homework into the final two days. That summer, though, she had apparently decided to cheat, hoping to be able to copy Taro’s answers.

Her face broke into a smile when he nodded. “Goody,” she said, holding out both hands without the least sense of shame. Taro was just as bad. “Be right back,” he said, and dashed off with a look of dumb happiness on his face. That night I saw Yoko copying his answers on the sly so her mother wouldn’t catch her.

One evening a few days later, I went out into the front yard to bring in the laundry. Mrs. Utagawa was watering the flowers, her figure outlined against the red sky. Yoko and Taro were squatting side by side on the concrete patio, he still with his right arm in a sling. Using his left hand, he was making mud pies with her, decorating them with the petals of bellflowers, cockscombs, and marvels-of-Peru from the garden. They produced a row of these colorful pies. Mrs. Utagawa, having emptied her watering can, went over to leave it on the patio. Instead, she held the can over his head and pretended to be watering him.

“Grow, grow, nice and big,” she said playfully. “Oh, if only you were a little tree, Taro, I could water you like this and you’d grow big in no time. Then you could stand up to anybody!”

By then she may have already made up her mind to build a summer cottage in Oiwake and take him along as a houseboy.

I don’t know when she told her stepson of her decision, but by the time the leaves started changing color, they were already deep in discussion about buying land up there. Natsue must have been feeling guilty that she spent over a month in Karuizawa every summer while old Mrs. Utagawa stayed only ten days or so; she had no objection to their building a separate summer house. Oiwake was a fair way from Karuizawa, nearly half an hour by car, but Natsue knew that her husband had always loved it there, and since she intended to continue spending her summers over in Karuizawa, she had no problem with the location, either. For my part, I arranged for my family in Saku to work with a local real estate agent to look for a suitable spot, somewhere close enough to the main road for Mrs. Utagawa to catch the bus to Karuizawa. She was keen on the idea. By the time my family found a likely piece of land, it was so cold that she needed gloves and a heavy shawl in addition to her winter coat, but she went with me willingly to take a look at it.

She was the one who settled on the rough layout of the house too, in consultation with Takero.

One day after the groundwork began, she took out a simple blueprint of the house, spread it out on the tatami floor, and asked Taro what he thought.

“What is it?” he said.

“A house we’re going to build in the mountains. Right near the place where Yoko goes every summer.”

He leaned forward, all ears.

“Here’s the room where we’ll have our meals, and this will be the study for Yoko’s papa. These two adjoining rooms will have tatami. This one will be my sitting room, and when Yuko and Yoko come over to visit, they’ll sleep here with me.”

Taro stared at the layout, looking quite grown-up for his age.

“Tell you what,” she said. “How about if next summer you went there with me as my helper?” Just to do the shopping along the main road would mean a fifteen-minute walk each way through the hills. Taro must have been in the picture from the beginning. “Where would you sleep, do you think?”

He pointed silently to a square behind the main house, off to the northeast.

“What a clever boy you are. Do you know what that is?”

He was quiet, with his head on one side, so she said, “It’s a shed.” Then she told him that she would put in a bed for him there, a straw mattress on top of wooden slats, with a window above so that when he woke up the first thing he’d see in the morning would be a burst of green leaves.

“Everything is green there, everywhere you look. It is very, very pretty.”

His eyes now lit up with childish excitement.

I think she decided to put Taro in the shed in case Takero, when he came to visit, found the boy’s presence a nuisance.

Taro looked serious again as he studied the blueprint and asked, “Where will Fumiko sleep?”

“Well, she won’t be going there very often, so she won’t need a special room of her own.” It wouldn’t be often that everybody was there at once, and since the main room for meals had enough extra space, they could make do when the time came.

“Hm.” He stared at the blueprint awhile longer and then asked, biting his lower lip, “Can I see Yoko there?”

“She’ll be some distance away, but you’ll be able to go and see her now and then, yes. And sometimes she’ll come over and stay with us.”

“Taro!” Yoko came in carrying a light-blue hula hoop in both hands. She’d been waiting for him in the playroom, but had grown impatient and come looking for him. Her grandmother asked her to come nearer, and she plopped down next to Taro. Together they peered at the blueprint. Since Natsue was always saying that the family “didn’t have that kind of money” for various things, Yoko seemed to find it hard to believe that there was really going to be a new summer house.

“Have we got that kind of money?” she asked.

Mrs. Utagawa gave a vague answer.

“Can Taro come for sure?”

This time the answer was firm. “Yes, for sure.”

Before long Takero too took it for granted that Taro would be going. Having grown up surrounded by nurses, maids, manservants, and live-in students acting as houseboys, he found nothing strange in the arrangement. He also knew what a help the boy had been to his stepmother while I was away in Karuizawa, going to the post office and so on. If Taro himself wanted to go, then there was no reason to object.

That day Taro hung around as long as he could, poring over the blueprint and making suggestions. For one thing, he proposed having people go in and out of the cottage through the porch, without an entrance hall, and using that space as a small maid’s room instead. When Mrs. Utagawa presented this idea to Takero that night he was impressed. “Seems practical, and since there’ll be no guests to speak of anyway, why bother with an entryway?” In fact, I found it very helpful later to have a little room of my own. Taro also said that since summers up there would be cool and moist, maybe my north-facing room should have a wooden floor, with a raised platform for the futon. Putting bunk beds in the shed was his idea too. It might just have been a boyish wish to sleep high up, but the idea ended up increasing storage space, which came in handy.