Inheritance from Mother

by Minae Mizumura

  After she handed in the forms and returned to the room, her mother again stared at her. “Mitsuki,” she said, “I’ll go into a nursing home.”

  She must have been contemplating this all night, ever since hearing the words “portable commode.”

  “Really?”

  The patient in the next bed might have pricked up her ears too.

  “The truth is, I won’t be able to go out anymore, will I?”

  This was so.

  “I’d rather be dead than end up this way, but since I failed to die, I suppose I have to be realistic. I can’t live alone anymore. If I can’t, I can’t.”

  Mitsuki was impressed that now, when something so critical was at stake, her mother’s brain could function as clearly as in the old days. She was grateful, too. But then an anxious thought struck her. Was a person so used to having her own way even capable of communal living?

  “Everything won’t be to your liking in a nursing home.”

  “I know that.”

  “Even if you have a private room, the time you get up in the morning and your mealtimes and bath times are all set. You’ll have to put up with a lot.”

  “I know that,” she repeated, looking up at the ceiling. “The thing is, I failed to die.” Then, eyes still on the ceiling, she began to sob like a little child. When Mitsuki was young, her proud mother had never wept in front of her, but in old age that had changed. Now, unable to wipe her eyes, her right hand immobile and her left arm hooked up to an IV, she went on sobbing helplessly, flat on her back.

  Mitsuki went over and touched her arm softly. She did this to compensate for not being able to say the words “I’m glad you’re alive, Mother.”

  Her mother said, sniffling, “You and your sister come see me often, will you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.” Then Mitsuki said, “Remember that place we went to see before? Is that one all right? It’s a little far from Chitose Funabashi.”

  Two years before, after a friend of Natsuki’s had searched for a nursing home for her mother, Natsuki had inherited a pile of information and given it to Mitsuki, who, after some checking on the computer, found a place almost exactly midway between their two homes: Golden Years. The deposit and monthly fees were high, but once they sold the land in Chitose Funabashi, with that money and her pension their mother could live there till past one hundred without going bankrupt. One day they had invited her to go take a look at the place; she hung back, protesting that she was still perfectly capable of living by herself, but they dragged her there anyway. She’d remained unconvinced, although pleased by the homey front hall with its rosebud wallpaper.

  “It was nice,” she answered now. “It’ll do. Once I’m there, I won’t be going anywhere anyhow, so how far it is won’t make any difference to me. As long as it’s easy for you and Natsuki to get to, that’s all that matters.”

  “If you lived there, we could come see you all the time.” But not every day, she added as a precaution.

  “Come as often as you can. Seeing you two girls is the only pleasure I have left now.” Once again there were tears in her voice. They were probably sincere, but then again, knowing her, they could be a ploy to gain sympathy.

  Realizing that her mother’s decision was genuine, Mitsuki let out a sigh of relief. At last they could sell the land in Chitose Funabashi. The new house meant little to her, and the old house where her grandmother had lived was long gone. She felt only a sense of liberation. They hadn’t been able to sell the land for her father. They’d had to hang on to it in order to provide for their mother’s old age, after she’d all but abandoned him. Now, at long last, they could let it go.

  “The land in Chitose Funabashi”—how many times had they said it together, her mother, her sister, and herself, like some sort of magic incantation?

  Their father had gone from job to job before starting an import-export business and had become a regular corporate employee only after that venture failed, when he was around forty. The survivor’s pension their mother received therefore didn’t amount to much. For years she had worked part time selling woolen chabaori, kimono half-coats designed by a friend from her choir-singing days who was known to the family as “Auntie.” (How tall and stunning their mother had looked in a kimono!) The extra income had helped, but that sort of work offered no pension. Her current income, including her national pension, came to around 160,000 yen per month. Enough for a frugal widow but nowhere near enough for their self-indulgent mother.

  Auntie had not only a superb sense of style but also a good head for business and was a skilled investor. Knowing their mother’s improvident ways, she had encouraged her from the first to put some money in an investment trust. This precaution, plus their father’s retirement bonus and life insurance, had yielded a nice little nest egg.

  Lately, however, her savings balance had been declining at an alarming rate. Every time Mitsuki looked at her mother’s passbook, she quelled her uneasiness with thoughts of the sixty-eight tsubo of land in Chitose Funabashi, Setagaya Ward. The house there was no longer worth anything, but the patch of land it stood on was quite valuable. Her parents had bought the place shortly after she was born without thinking too much about it, but as more and more Japanese gave up farming and moved to the city, real estate prices had soared in Tokyo, especially in Setagaya. That land was the family’s sole asset, and a precious one.

  The value of that asset would have been much less if the Long-Term Care Insurance system had been enacted earlier. Mitsuki would then have talked her mother into selling half of the land—the backyard—so her father could live out the rest of his days in a decent place rather than that extended-care hospital. But before the insurance system came along, affordable private nursing homes were nonexistent, leaving only two other options: a public nursing home with an impossibly long waiting list or a private nursing home so expensive that a family like theirs could only sigh. Selling the entire plot of land might have been enough, but that would have left nothing for her mother’s old age. So almost by default, the land in Chitose Funabashi remained untouched.

  Her mother had her own ideas of making do. When her savings ran out, she would borrow from Natsuki’s husband, Yuji, she said, using the land as collateral. “After all, I invested a lot in that girl.” She didn’t know that Mitsuki was thinking of dipping into Tetsuo’s and her savings to prevent poor Natsuki from feeling any smaller around her wealthy in-laws than she already did.

  Just then Natsuki burst onto the scene.

  “I’ve been running all over!” she declared as she came in. “I took cookies to the neighbors and the lady at the laundry shop, and then I went back to Mom’s house to find those things you use to thread—”

  Mitsuki cut short the flow of words. “She’s going into a nursing home,” she said. “She brought it up herself.”

  Natsuki’s face registered her astonishment.

  FRONTAL LOBE MELTDOWN BEGINS

  “Is it true?” Natsuki went over to her mother’s bedside.

  “You come see me as often as you can, now.”

  Her initial surprise having subsided, Natsuki seemed about to make some ironic quip, but out of respect for her mother’s decision she only said, “I will.”

  That day Natsuki and Mitsuki sat by their mother and wore reading glasses as they worked, expanding the elastic waistbands in the new pajamas and underwear and writing KATSURA with a magic marker on all her things. Once their mother passed the age of seventy, compression fractures had caused her spine to curve, and as her height decreased her waist had expanded, making the stomach oddly protrude. In the last few years this had become especially pronounced, to the point where she couldn’t wear anything without first letting out the waistband.

  “Never had to do this in home ec class, did we?” said Mitsuki, struggling with the bodkin her sister had brought.

  Natsuki, despite her weaker eyesight, was managing slightly better. “That’s for
sure. Even when my kids were little, I never needed to do anything like this.”

  When they wrote KATSURA, they tried to make the lettering as small and inconspicuous as possible. Mitsuki would never forget the way her father’s name had been emblazoned on his pajama pocket. Though by and large the hospital saw to his needs, families had been expected to do the laundry. She used to make the round-trip on train and bus loaded down with clean, folded laundry on the way there and a bagful of dirty clothes on the way back. Then professional launderers appeared, offering their services.

  Her mother, on one of her rare visits to the hospital, had managed to be the first to pick up that information. She’d called with excitement in her voice: “Guess what! From now on we don’t have to do his laundry anymore!” Quick as always to take action, she’d gone straight to the hospital store, bought a magic marker, and written his surname on all his few belongings that very day. The next time Mitsuki visited her father, there he was, sitting in pajamas with his surname written large on the breast pocket, for all the world like a jailbird. The memory of her mother’s insensitivity wrenched her heart.

  As she and Natsuki toiled, their mother suddenly said, “When the money comes in from the land in Chitose Funabashi, leave me what I need, and you two go ahead and split the rest. It’s better to have money when you’re young.”

  Despite her callous treatment of her husband, she had always been generous with them, willing to share whatever money she had.

  “But you could live to be a hundred for all you know.”

  “Oh, no. Heaven forbid.”

  For the first time since her fall, she was in a fairly good mood. Soon sorrow that her life was over would send her spiraling into despair, beginning a rapid slide into dementia; this was one of the last times when she would be herself.

  Back home, when Mitsuki told Tetsuo the news, a funny look came over his face.

  “I see,” he said, after a pause. “Then you’ll be selling the property in Chitose Funabashi. So that’s that.” Doubtless he had hoped her mother would pop off one day soon so that half the proceeds would be theirs. Mitsuki felt a stab of pleasure.

  The following day was December 30, the day Tetsuo was leaving—supposedly for his parents’ house. His decision to leave a day earlier than usual nagged at her as she got ready to visit her mother in the morning. He said he would stop by the hospital that afternoon on his way. She couldn’t think of a way to dissuade him.

  Before setting out, she handed him the customary New Year’s gifts for him to take to Toride: four decorated envelopes containing money—a substantial sum for his parents and progressively smaller amounts for his sister-in-law, niece, and nephew. At eighty-one and seventy-six, his father and mother were still going strong. The younger son had taken over the father’s job and lived with them, as did his wife and children. Tetsuo’s brother, like his parents, was a good person, and so was his wife; thanks to her, the burden of actual caregiving, which traditionally fell to the wife of the firstborn son, would never land on Mitsuki’s shoulders. Even if Mitsuki and Tetsuo were called on to provide financial support down the road, this arrangement was a boon for which she was infinitely grateful. Back when Tetsuo proposed, he had promised her she wouldn’t have to look after his parents, and that promise, at least, he had kept. But perhaps because he was a man and so little affected by such matters, he himself didn’t seem particularly grateful to his brother and sister-in-law.

  As he took the money envelopes, Tetsuo imitated his father’s voice and turn of speech: “A fine daughter-in-law if ever there was one.”

  Her sister-in-law’s round-cheeked face came to mind.

  Once she left the apartment, she found herself walking with surprisingly light steps. She decided not to think about Tetsuo. With all that needed to be done to empty out the house in Chitose Funabashi in preparation for her mother’s move to Golden, she worried whether her strength would hold up, but now at least the end was in sight. The way leading to her mother’s death was clear. After years of vexation, at long last she saw the possibility—no, the assurance—of relief.

  She had already contacted Golden first thing that morning. There was likely to be an opening soon, they said, but should her mother be discharged from the hospital first, they could accommodate her in a sister institution until a room did open up. The idea that there was “likely to be an opening soon” was faintly disturbing; yet this was far better than hearing there was no chance of an opening in the near future. It was good news.

  The station was lively with cries of people selling New Year’s decorations and the usual year-end bustle. This too lifted her spirits. She had no way of knowing that this momentary grace would be followed by endless days more trying than anything she could have imagined.

  “You’re late!”

  As her mother lay fastened to her bed, eyes glaring, the first words she spoke to Mitsuki were the same as the day before. What came next, however, was different. She suddenly extended her left hand, the only one she could use now, and wailed, “Oh, Mitsuki.”

  Mitsuki wondered what was wrong as she went over to her mother, who clutched her fingertips with surprising strength before launching into a feverish appeal.

  “Last night they came and took away all my medications. Isn’t that terrible? I beg and I beg, but they won’t give them back. Without my medications right here where I can reach them, I don’t know what to do. Please go talk to the nurse and tell her she’s got to give them back.”

  Over the past few years Mitsuki had often heard her mother’s tearful pleas, but never had she seen her look this miserable. With her brows knit and the corners of her mouth drooping, her face conveyed a kind of animal sorrow. The nervous strain of having worried over this all night made her forehead, which seemed to have shrunk noticeably of late, look even narrower.

  “They wouldn’t even give you your Halcion?” This was her mother’s nightly sleeping medication.

  “No! Or my Depas, or my Takeda.”

  Depas was an antidepressant. Soon after Mitsuki became hypersensitive to air-conditioning and started to see a specialist for treatment, her mother claimed to suffer from the same condition and tagged along to receive the same prescription from the same doctor. At first she’d taken half a Depas several times a day, but lately she’d been having her home helpers use a kitchen knife and a carving board to chop the pills into quarters so that she could medicate herself at more frequent intervals. As her anxiety increased, she clung to the small, thumb-sized plastic vial of Depas as if it were a talisman. She would take a Halcion before bed, and if she woke up during the night she’d take out the vial of Depas from under her pillow, swallow a small white quarter of a pill, and go back to sleep. During the day she took one roughly every two hours. Because Mitsuki herself relied on Depas, her mother, who relied on Mitsuki, was all the more prone to addiction.

  The Takeda was for constipation.

  “I can’t sleep and I can’t move my bowels, so I’m uncomfortable, and without my Depas I’m at my wits’ end. I’m so nervous I don’t know what to do. You’ve got to get them back for me.”

  At the nurses’ station, Mitsuki learned that at bedtime her mother had been given her usual dosages of Halcion, Depas, and Takeda. When she explained that her mother had always managed her medications herself and was ill at ease without having them nearby, the pills were returned with disconcerting alacrity. Evidently her mother had been so shrilly insistent that the exasperated nurse had consulted with the doctor and received permission to return them if the family approved.

  After being duly warned about the danger of an overdose, Mitsuki apologized for all the trouble before returning to her mother’s room.

  What was going on? Had the decision to enter a nursing home somehow made her mother let go of herself? Had it set off a meltdown of her frontal lobe, the seat of memory, judgment, and rational thought? Her mother’s sole memory of the night before was the terror of having her medications taken away.

  “
Oh, Mitsuki!” her mother cried out in relief when Mitsuki came back into the room holding up the medications like war trophies. She went over to the bed, and her mother proceeded to grab her hand, nuzzling it and planting kisses on it with exaggerated delight. She had never seen her mother put on such a physical display of emotion, in such an un-Japanese way (though, come to think of it, who knew what she may have done in private with That Man?). Perhaps in her sorrow she had lost all restraint and metamorphosed into one of those Westerners on the silver screen whom she had idolized since schoolgirl days.

  Thank God for the curtain separating the two beds in the room.

  Her mother swallowed a piece of Depas, and that seemed to relax her a little. “I wish I were dead,” she kept moaning, but Mitsuki didn’t take the bait, instead sitting where her mother could see her and telling about her phone call to Golden while marking KATSURA on various personal articles. There were still a good many items left to label: her mother’s false teeth container, her toothbrush and toothpaste, a tissue box, a glasses case. Her mother had always liked seeing her daughters wait on her, and Mitsuki knew that watching her carry out this small task would have a soothing effect.

  Then in came Tetsuo. He was wearing a camel hair coat he’d bought on sale in February and carrying a deceptively simple arrangement of flowers in a basket, chosen with his usual good taste. The tapered petals of some large, dark-purple flower whose name she didn’t know stood out against the deep green of the leaves; the effect was somehow too chic for a hospital sickroom.

  Mitsuki had put off mentioning that Tetsuo would be coming. Her mother looked startled when he showed up, but her face, etched with sad vertical lines, quickly brightened as she widened her eyes, donned a company smile, and exclaimed, “Tetsuo dear!” When he thrust the basket at her, the smile became her trademark coquettish simper. “Oh, aren’t they lovely! Flowers like this just light up the room!”

  Seated just beside her mother, Mitsuki sensed the effort it took for her to accommodate someone from the outside world.