Inheritance from Mother

by Minae Mizumura

  “So how are you, Noriko?”

  “Oh, this is the end of the line for Noriko.”

  “O-MIYA’S BLOOD”

  Tetsuo and her mother exchanged flirtatious banter as always.

  “You look lovely as ever, broken bones and all.”

  “Listen to the man. I don’t have my teeth in—I’m a sight.”

  “You, Noriko? Never.”

  The frivolity of these exchanges didn’t usually bother Mitsuki, but today it grated on her nerves—and not only because of the tissue case. The basket of flowers he had brought was wrong somehow, and she couldn’t help feeling that Tetsuo himself didn’t quite fit in.

  Hospitals, however clean they are kept and however well disinfected, are filled with the faint smell of death, emanating from the sick and elderly. Neither sunlight streaming through windows nor the brisk efficiency of doctors and nurses can conceal the adversities of sickness and old age that arrive suddenly and without warning or stealthily, little by little. Tetsuo popping in with his basket of flowers seemed to represent less the vigor of good health than rank insensitivity to life’s unavoidable tragedies. This wasn’t his fault. Life was at full tide in him, so that he emanated blithe unconcern, that was all; still, he seemed like a thoughtless intruder.

  Mitsuki couldn’t help suspecting that her mother rather shared this impression.

  What she normally thought of Tetsuo was hard to say. Around the time Mitsuki had begun to feel vaguely uncomfortable around him, her mother had seemed to feel the same way. And yet, while at some point she had taken to speaking ill of Natsuki’s husband Yuji with complete abandon, she never came out and said a word against Tetsuo.

  He stayed less than ten minutes. Mitsuki walked him to the elevator, and as he pushed the button, he mentioned casually that she needn’t call his parents’ house until New Year’s Day. To her ears this sounded like an order. He was well dressed, better than usual for a trip home. Her conviction deepened; but this was not the time to bring anything up. When she returned, she was taken aback to find her mother staring fiercely at the wall, all trace of her former affability gone, looking almost savage. As soon as she spotted Mitsuki, she started in, her tone vicious: “Ooh, I just can’t stand it.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “What’s the matter with him, you mean! Those flowers! And me flat on my back. I’m sorry, but they’ll only be in the way, so you’ve got to take them home.” She pointed with her chin at the offending arrangement on the tray table.

  Mitsuki rose to her husband’s defense. “How will Tetsuo feel?”

  “He’s gone off to Toride, hasn’t he? He won’t be back.”

  “Still, if he knew he’d feel bad.”

  “They’re in the way. I don’t want them here in front of me.”

  “I’ll put them up on the shelf where they’ll be out of your way.”

  “I don’t want them anywhere I can lay eyes on them.”

  “I have to go shopping on the way home. I can’t take something that big with me.”

  “Then throw them out! Who needs them?” She added spitefully, “Besides, there’s something funny going on if you ask me. Him all dolled up like that.”

  Mitsuki was speechless. She’d known her mother could feign sociability, but never before had she been witness to a transformation so complete and so stunning. Discovering her mother capable of such duplicity was painful. And there was something else equally painful: despite failing faculties, her mother had somehow discerned the truth. Perhaps as her frontal lobe degenerated and she began to lose control, some sort of sixth sense came into play.

  Inflamed by her own words, her mother seemed to feel the misery of her situation more keenly.

  “Kill me! There’s no point in going on living this way, so just kill me!” Unable to sit up, she twisted her body as she shrieked.

  Mitsuki raised her voice. “I have no intention of killing you and ruining my life by becoming a murderer!”

  The poor woman in the other bed—what must she be thinking?

  Her mother began weeping soundlessly. Mitsuki regarded her steadily. She felt less pity than irritation. She too wanted her mother to die—had long yearned for her death with an intensity far greater than her mother’s. At the same time she had done what she could to make her happy, perhaps shortening her own life a little in the process. And she would have to go right on doing exactly the same thing.

  In a slightly calmer voice, she said, “Look, Mother, you just have to accept your situation and get through it the best way you can.”

  Finding words that can provide true solace to those facing the rigors of old age is never easy. Without great love, the task is difficult indeed. Her mother seemed to sense the difficulty she was having and said no more.

  After that, Mitsuki finished labeling the few remaining items. Her mother asked constantly for Depas. Every third time, she would give her a quarter of a pill and a sip of water. She helped her eat supper and get ready for bed, seeing to it that she rinsed her mouth and wiped her face before leaving with a reminder that Natsuki would be in the next day.

  Her mother was still overwrought.

  Mitsuki was exhausted and thirsty. Lugging the basket of flowers, she searched for a juice-vending machine. She was wandering blindly down a corridor when she spotted a middle-aged man in a dark suit coming toward her. She realized it was the same man she had seen the day before in the hospital store. Today too his expression was desolate, the air around him congealed with sadness.

  After he went into a patient’s room, she paused to read the nameplate by the door: WAKAKO MATSUBARA. A pleasantly old-fashioned name. Must be his wife. A man his age was unlikely to grieve for his mother with such abandon. Looking around, she saw an unfamiliar nurses’ station and watched as a female patient past middle age, wearing a knit cap, was wheeled into a different room. She looked thin and haggard. This must be the oncology section, and Wakako Matsubara too must be a cancer patient, just as she had imagined.

  Night came on early in the winter; outside it was already dark.

  Leaving the subway station, she walked home through the lamplit park. As she trudged along, she saw a couple of homeless people; felt the presence of the huge trees around her; looked up at the chilly winter sky. She sighed. Everything was as usual, but she felt acrimony churning within her. The sheer venom of her mother’s rejection of the flowers was one thing; the coquettish simper rising like a mask on that face where misery had etched so many lines was quite another—it had been sickening, almost unreal.

  Mitsuki remembered her mother’s mother as a very old woman who had doted on her. But people who knew her grandmother’s history—she’d been a geisha—referred to her in private as “O-Miya.” And they used to say of Mitsuki’s mother, “She’s got O-Miya’s blood in her veins.” Could that simper have something to do with “O-Miya’s blood”?

  One thing was certain: her mother must have often simpered that way for That Man.

  The following day, Mitsuki stayed home all day. Her sister would be visiting the hospital with her family, including her son, Ken, a graduate student home from the States for the holidays. She tried to make some headway on a patent translation due first thing in January but soon gave up, unable to stop thinking about what had to be done before her mother went into the nursing home. That had to come before all else. She started making a to-do list in her notebook, only to flop down on the bed. Exhaustion from the past three days flooded over her and settled in her bones.

  That evening when her sister called, Mitsuki asked, “Was she still going on with her ‘Kill me!’?”

  “I wasn’t there alone, so she behaved herself. She was pretty sociable, actually. But it was weird. And there was a lot of ‘Do this, do that,’ so I got worn out.”

  After she hung up, the telephone instantly rang again. It was Tetsuo, who had instructed her not to phone until New Year’s Day, tomorrow. Perhaps feeling guilty, he asked after her mother.

  “She’s
the same,” Mitsuki replied, thinking of the discarded basket of flowers. “What about you?”

  “Same here too.”

  “Are your parents well?”

  “They’re fine. You know us, we’re a tough bunch.”

  She hung up without offering anything more. What Tetsuo might make of his usually talkative wife becoming so taciturn, she didn’t know.

  Later, as she got ready for bed, she heard a distant sound. It was the tolling of a temple bell, resonating through the winter night air. After a pause it sounded again, a low, lingering tone. That would be the bell at Myohoji temple, being struck 108 times—once for each sin of mankind—to purify human souls for the coming year. A new year was beginning, she realized and stretched out under the covers.

  She felt cold. Since she’d gotten sick, her body turned to ice when she was tired, especially the lower half. She laid a hand on her belly and felt an eerie chill through her palm, as if she were carrying a dead child.

  LIVING GHOSTS

  As she lay awake with her eyes closed, the sound of the New Year bell resonating through the darkness brought memories that fortunately came less frequently now, memories of the hospital where her father had been confined.

  The hospital had been far away, necessitating a transfer from train to train and then to a bus. Back then, crumbling hospitals were being rebuilt across the country, but extended-care facilities were given last priority and her father’s hospital remained shabby and dreary to the end of his stay. The inpatients too looked shabby and dreary as a result. Her diabetic father’s weak eyesight had been a saving grace.

  His floor had had a wide corridor with a nurses’ station and restrooms midway. Patients requiring more care were assigned wards closer to the station; those requiring relatively little care, wards farther away. Her father, one of those requiring little care, had been at the far end. Many of his ward mates were stroke victims, paralyzed on one side but mostly able to shuffle around by themselves or, if walking was impossible, to propel their own wheelchairs. They could be seen around the cafeteria and washrooms, and would even drop by the other wards for a friendly chat. In short, if they’d only had family members willing to take them in, most of them needn’t have been in the hospital at all. Like her father.

  He’d been given three square meals a day; he’d been kept cool in summer and warm in winter; he had benefited from modern medical treatment. His situation could have been far worse. Certainly there was no comparison to the plight of Mother Teresa’s unfortunates. Yet not long after her father’s death, Mitsuki had been struck by an obituary of the saintly nun describing her “Home for the Dying” in India as a place offering shelter to “all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society, people that have become a burden to the society and are shunned by everyone.” The words shook her. Every time she’d gone to see her father she’d felt consumed by guilt at having abandoned him, undoubtedly because the entire hospital building was indeed very like a “Home for the Dying.”

  When he was first admitted, he used to walk to and from the restroom with his back straight. “Walk tall,” he had always told her when she was a little girl. Walking that way, like someone with things to do, might have represented the last vestige of his self-respect. He’d been born to an old family of physicians, and a trove of sepia photographs from his childhood showed how devotedly he had been raised and with what high hopes. Even after his father’s sudden death plunged the family into impoverishment and ruin, all his life he had maintained the air of a man of fine breeding, a member of the prewar middle class. He lived in a world so different from his ward mates that she never saw him talking to them. None of them struck up a conversation with him, nor he with them. In fact relatively well-off families like theirs hardly ever placed their aging members in such wards; they usually had a spare room as well as one or two nonworking women who could stay home and provide care.

  The hospital head was a devout Christian and a man of character, and perhaps for that reason nearly everyone on staff from the head nurse to the cleaning ladies had always been kind. Even so, her father’s plight had been pitiful.

  Severely ill patients could not move around. Those who wandered on foot in the corridor tended to have the typical bandy-legged walk of people wearing diapers. Some had a long white cloth wound around their middle so that if they tottered or fell, a nearby staff member could quickly scoop them up. Dressed in pajamas much alike, males and females indistinguishable, they wove their way around the wheelchairs, drifting up and down the corridor like living ghosts.

  The concentrated smell of sickness, old age, and death was so dreadful that unless she took a deep breath outside in the sunshine before going in, she used to feel swallowed up by that darkness.

  The last space on earth allotted to her father was the second bed from the window in an eight-man ward: a space measuring, with the curtains drawn, just two meters square—smaller than a prison cell. There was no chair. In the beginning he used to sit on the bed, time heavy on his hands. Mitsuki would open the narrow locker containing his few belongings, help him into his Burberry coat, put leather shoes on his feet and a soft felt hat on his head, and take his arm to go out for a stroll. He had always loved going for walks. Outdoors, as in the Chitose Funabashi area of her childhood, there were houses, bamboo groves, even a stream. If she shut her eyes to the detergents polluting the stream, it was as if time had turned back. She could almost hear his voice admonishing her: “Walk tall.”

  He was by then half blind. At first he could perch on his bed and listen to the radio or cassette tapes, almost as at home. It was perhaps a little over a year later that she found out he was getting cheated at the hospital store. She went along and saw him take a pack of the cookies he always bought to the register, hand over a thousand-yen note, and start to leave. The exchange between him and the cashier was smooth and practiced; clearly the same thing happened every time.

  “What about your change?” Mitsuki reminded him, from a little distance.

  The woman looked up with a start before saying, “Oh, yeah,” and then calmly counted out a handful of coins. She might be hard up for all Mitsuki knew, but did that give her the right to take advantage of a half-blind old man?

  “Dad, always make sure you get your change, okay?” She said this purposefully loud enough for the woman to hear, feeling sad for the human race, herself included.

  He sat on his bed so much that the mattress soon developed a sag in that spot. Mitsuki wanted to ask for a bed by the window for him but didn’t quite have the nerve, and in the meantime he began spending more and more time stretched out on the bed.

  Three or four years after he went to live in the hospital, after Mitsuki and Tetsuo had moved into their little condominium, she made up her mind to have him stay with her at least for the short length of time that Tetsuo was to be in Africa. By then her father’s eyesight was even worse and his brain foggy; he seemed unable to understand why she had brought him there even though it wasn’t New Year’s. After spending the night, he’d announced, “Mitsuki, I’m going home.” Realizing that the hospital had become his “home” brought some relief, but at the same time it filled her with pain.

  Around then their arm-in-arm walks were confined to the hospital rooftop. Later they would merely walk up and down the hospital corridor. Since that wasn’t enough exercise, she would seat him on a bench in the corridor and have him move his arms up and down or sideways. He obediently followed her instructions. It was completely meaningless. What must he have thought?

  “Okay, Dad, I’ll be off then,” she would say before leaving, taking his hand in hers, and he would lift his head from the bed and say, “You be careful on your way home, now.” He never once forgot to say it, till the last. He also thanked her without fail.

  Once he came down with pneumonia and was moved to a ward by the nurses’ station, but managed to recover and live another year despite his weakened condition. Oh, how she had wished for his death, for
his sake.

  Mitsuki and Tetsuo lived near the Horinouchi crematorium. In the past, ashes from cremated human remains used to drift down from the crematorium smokestack. People said that accounted for the low real estate prices. Naturally there was also a funeral hall. Often there would be a man in a black suit and armband standing at the station, holding a sign with a family name edged in black to point the way. Every time she came across such a scene on her way to visit her father, she would feel a hot rush of envy. Some people went ahead and died the way they were supposed to. Her father stayed stubbornly alive.

  Though her mother’s side of the family was long-lived, her father’s mother had died young and his father had not lived to see fifty, so everyone assumed her father wouldn’t live long, either. Yet on and on he had lasted, to her distress and Natsuki’s too. His death came in his seventh year in the “Home for the Dying.”

  Her mother, the one who had consigned him there in the first place, used to go reluctantly to see him in the beginning, but her visits quickly diminished in frequency, coming at longer and longer intervals. Mitsuki stopped saying anything. In her father’s last year, after That Man ceased to be a part of her mother’s life, perhaps out of sheer defiance her mother had ended her visits altogether. Mitsuki and her sister each went often in the beginning, but their visits dwindled from twice a week to once a week, and then they took turns. By the time he became bedridden, one or the other of them would go every couple of weeks.

  Mitsuki was the only one present at his death.

  It had been her sister’s turn to go see him, but she kept putting it off, lengthening her stay in her summerhouse on the coast. Mitsuki was feeling a bit miffed, and just as she was thinking she would have to go herself, the hospital called to report a sudden change in his condition. He was dying. It was early September, before the start of the fall semester, and by sheer luck she’d been home to take the call. She phoned the summerhouse but no one answered; she had no choice but to leave a message on the answering machine. Next she called her mother.