Minae Mizumura - A True Novel

One day when I was staying there in Oiwake, I sat at the small dining table mending Mrs. Utagawa’s night yukata while Yoko used some garden shears to snip green soybean pods off the stem before they were steamed. Mrs. Utagawa was in the tatami room next to us, dozing, and Taro was out on the porch with his schoolbooks spread on the folding table. Earlier when he tried to help Yoko, she had chased him away, insisting that he study. Some time ago Mrs. Utagawa had offered to pay his school fees and train fare, and he planned to take the exam for Shinjuku Municipal High School, his school of choice. Watching him write intently with his left hand, his face twisted in a scowl, I asked Yoko, “After Shinjuku High School, what will he do?”

“Go to the University of Tokyo.”

“And then?”

“Be a doctor like Papa.”

In her innocence, she seemed to think that everyone should end up like her father.

“When he’s a doctor, what then?”

She paused in her snipping and cocked her head, considering.

“Spend all day every day in his lab, is that it?” I asked, teasing.

This seemed to catch her off guard, her round, childish face showing that a life like her father’s wouldn’t be much fun for those left at home. For a while she was stumped—but then her eyes lit up.

“He’ll be somebody like Dr. Schweitzer, and work for the good of mankind.”

Somehow she made it sound as if her father wasn’t lifting a finger for “mankind.” “Oh, really,” I said, wanting to laugh. “Dr. Albert Azuma, is it?”

“That’s right,” she said, and slowly intoned in English: “Doctor … Taro … Azuma.” She clicked her shears triumphantly in the air.

“What about you?”

“Me?” The question seemed to surprise her. “I guess I’ll work for the good of mankind too.” Spoken with considerably less confidence.

While we carried on like this, Taro alternately looked up moodily at the sky or sighed and laid his cheek on his book. A swirl of unsettling thoughts—his guardian might soon die, he might never come to Oiwake again, might not go on being a frequent visitor in the Utagawa house or even be able to attend high school at all—must have fed a deepening anxiety that made studying impossible.

Nothing will ever be the same again: that thought surely preyed on him, and caused his usual caution and restraint to break down. Soon after this a scene took place that set Harue firmly against him. It was a little thing, but I doubt whether she ever forgave him for it.

IT HAPPENED TOWARD the end of summer, when I was in Karuizawa. The curtains in the dining room and parlor had been sent to the cleaner’s for the first time in years, and when they came back the Saegusa sisters decided to have Taro rehang them. I phoned Oiwake, and the next afternoon he came over on his bicycle. The day was sweltering in a way that was unusual for Karuizawa, the atmosphere heavy with an oppressive languor. Taro had pedaled all the way under a burning sky, and his tanned arms and neck glistened in a most discomfiting way.

He had left Mrs. Utagawa asleep in the Oiwake house, and with Yoko there too he went straight to work, clearly eager to finish up and get back as soon as possible. The three sisters, on the other hand, were in a lazy, self-indulgent mood brought on by the heat and humidity. They sat sprawled on the chaise longue and armchairs in the parlor, fanning themselves and sipping glass after glass of iced tea while they chatted idly about nothing at all, watching without really seeing as Taro went back and forth between the dining room and the parlor, dripping with sweat. A crack of thunder and a rainstorm would have cleared the air, but as evening drew nearer the heat continued to simmer. In that setting, the presence of a new maid called Mie proved especially provocative.

That Mie was a problem. She was the third maid to enter the Saegusa household after Chizu: fresh out of middle school, a precocious little thing with a high bosom and rounded hips, the sort of girl whose whole body shouts her need to fall in love. I heard that back at the Seijo house, when she carried a tray in Masayuki’s presence, her hands shook so much that everyone noticed and smiled. She fell hard for Taro the first time he came over in early summer to weed the garden, and ever since then had made herself the target of the sisters’ teasing by dropping things, getting her orders mixed up, and giving little shrieks whenever he was around. Hearing the story of his origins one day put a damper on her ardor, but even so, once he was in front of her she seemed to lose control. That day too, she let out a series of funny little squeaks that might have been laughter or excitement, and for no good reason went in and out of rooms where he was. When he was hanging the curtains in the dining room, she went into the dining room, and when he was hanging them in the parlor, she went into the parlor.

He had finished putting up the lace curtains in both rooms and the heavy brocade drapes in the dining room. All that remained were the parlor drapes. Just then Mari, Eri, and Yuko came trooping in from a game of tennis, declaring it was just too hot out there, sheer torture! They tossed their rackets down carelessly, toweled themselves dry, and dabbed some ointment on their mosquito bites before taking the iced drinks I’d prepared. Then, each with a glass in hand, they sank wearily into chairs, just like their mothers.

At that point Taro reentered the parlor with the stepladder. When Harue caught sight of him, she looked around at everyone and whispered, “Watch now. Mie will come wandering in.”

Sure enough, not long after he had set up the stepladder by the windows and started to hang the drapes, the door opened cautiously and Mie peered furtively in. She took one step inside the room before realizing that everyone’s eyes were on her and fleeing in consternation.

“Now that is what’s called a sex bomb,” said Harue in a low voice as soon as the door was shut, eliciting a chorus of shrill protests from Mari, Eri, and Yuko. “I can’t help it, there it is.”

“A pity she’s so short,” said Natsue.

“No, shorter is better!” This from Fuyue. “A pocket pinup, they call it. Made in Japan to suit Japanese taste.”

“The common man’s taste,” supplemented Harue.

After a languid silence, fanning the neck of her cotton dress with an ivory-handled fan, Harue turned and looked up at Taro, who was perched on top of the stepladder. “Taro,” she said, “Mie’s been popping in and out for no reason—had you noticed?” Her tone was teasing. She was addressing him directly by name nowadays. Instead of a reply, he only showed a trace of a wry smile and went on working in silence.

“Seems to me she has a bit of a crush on you.”

Taro’s smile disappeared as he stood facing the window, showing only a boyishly slender, stiff neck.

“Something wrong?” His failure to respond to her baiting made her perverse. She fluttered her fan as she continued to address the back of his neck. “Not your type?”

Still with his back to her, Taro said nothing. He kept working steadily, hands on the curtain rod.

“Girls like her are called pocket pinups, did you know that?” Still no response. Harue exchanged looks of roguish humor with her sisters and the three girls sitting in front of her before turning back to Taro and increasing the pressure. “Well? What do you say?”

He kept his back to her.

Harue drew up her shoulders and, with a certain hauteur, turned to face the front again. Then, in a deliberately flippant tone, she said, “Well, who could blame you? You’ve been spoiled, after all.”

She looked around the room with satisfaction. Two sets of beautiful women from two generations were draped in various careless, almost seductive poses—the Saegusa sisters and three of their daughters, all but Yoko. The elder women were still lovely to look at, but Mari, Eri, and Yuko were like flower buds on the point of opening, mirror images of the beauty of their mothers in their youth.