Inheritance from Mother

by Minae Mizumura

  Uncle Yokohama was their mother’s cousin. An important man, people said. He’d been instrumental in the founding of the music department of the first women’s college in Yokohama—the first in Japan, for that matter, dating back to 1875—where he was a professor. Later, he became the college president. Natsuki was his youngest pupil.

  Naturally, his other pupils were invariably from distinguished families. Although their mother had in all probability nudged him to lower the cost of the lessons, they must still have been a burden. Besides, she was planning even then to send Natsuki to study someday in Freiburg, where he had studied; making a pianist of Mitsuki too would have been an impossible strain on the family resources. There was also the plausible excuse that having both daughters follow the same path was hardly interesting.

  Their mother was not entirely unmindful of the resulting unfairness and tried in her way to make amends. Having herself once longed to be an accomplished young lady, she’d arranged for both of them to take ballet lessons as well, but when Natsuki began going to “Yokohama” for piano, she stopped having her take ballet. And while she had Mitsuki stay on with the charming piano teacher, she took the trouble of switching her ballet lessons from a local studio to one that was more professional.

  To all appearances, there was no cause for complaint. But in fact, the sisters’ treatment was anything but equal. The difference lay in not only the money but above all the enthusiasm that their mother invested in each of them. On days when she didn’t have to go to work, she would sit beside Natsuki as she practiced, wearing a look of intense concentration. And she invariably went along to the lesson, dressed up in a prettier kimono than usual. The ceremony of the two of them setting out together for “Yokohama” continued until Natsuki finished middle school.

  But never once did their mother go to watch Mitsuki’s ballet lesson or even attend her recitals. Before going onstage Mitsuki would change her clothes, folding the discarded garments herself while watching out of the corner of her eye as the other children’s mothers folded theirs. Sometimes as she reached behind her back in her struggle to fasten the hooks on her costume, one of the other mothers would take pity on her and lend a hand. Even on recital days, it never occurred to her mother to give her money for anything but the round-trip train fare, so while the other children were treated to strawberry milk after the performance, she had to go without. She would be thirsty, too, which made it all the harder to bear. She felt like an orphan.

  And at home, she was always the one who had to help with the chores. After the death of Grandma, whom their mother had taken advantage of, they had a young live-in maid for a while, but when she and her sister were older and needed less care, the maid left. That’s when Mitsuki was put to work. Granted, Natsuki was by nature dilatory—“Really, just asking that child to do anything wears me out!”—but this unequal treatment was always justified in the name of her piano practicing.

  “Mitsukiii!” their mother would cry in a ringing voice. An energetic woman, she was not at all averse to working outside the home and kept herself busy with domestic tasks as well, not just cooking, cleaning, and laundry, but sewing and gardening too. Her work schedule was irregular, and so sometimes she would be home on weekdays. When that happened, Mitsuki had to give up her favorite pastime of lying lazily on the sofa reading novels. Through the sound of Natsuki’s practicing would come their mother’s ringing voice, summoning her: “Mitsukiii! Mitsukiii!”

  But perhaps because the inequality was routine, Mitsuki had never found it particularly galling—at least, not usually. Nor was she jealous of her sister, who had to sit at the piano day after day after day. She told herself that she was better off helping her mother and being praised for being “such a good girl.”

  When she was little, she would be sent out on errands. The people next door had a farm, already a rarity in Chitose Funabashi, and Mitsuki would set out with a round bamboo basket, picking her way through the fields to buy eggplants or cucumbers. Some days she would carry a pan with handles to the tofu vendor to buy a block of tofu; on other days, she would take a plastic shopping basket (then considered modern and smart) to the supermarket (likewise considered modern and smart) to buy meat and vegetables. When she got older, she would stand beside her mother in the kitchen and help get dinner ready, chopping with a knife or stirring with chopsticks while Natsuki’s piano played on in the background.

  “The little housewife,” her father called her proudly.

  When the piano lesson fell on a Sunday, Mitsuki could go with her mother and sister to “Yokohama,” a treat she looked forward to. She wore a felt beret and leather shoes. The train ride was long, with two transfers, but from the moment they arrived at “Yokohama,” they were in a different dimension, one where the air and the very flow of time were nonpareil. Their mother’s elation was infectious. When they stepped into the spacious entrance, smelling of well-polished wood, she led the way to the sitting room, her back with the obi tied in a simple bow exuding her pride as an insider. She would slide open the door, kneel gracefully, and say hello to Grandpa Yokohama, the piano teacher’s father. By then retired, he would be sitting on the veranda in a rattan chair, wearing a padded kimono and smoking a pipe in style. A maid brought in drinks and sweets on a tray. The previous pupil’s lesson would still be going on. Their mother’s voice was bright and charming and Grandpa Yokohama was all smiles, in a good mood. He had taken to their mother from the first, back when his wife, her blood kin, was still alive, and his affection for her never wavered even after the subsequent fiasco.

  When the previous pupil’s lesson ended, Mother and Natsuki would be shown into the parlor, a large room with two grand pianos side by side. Mitsuki would sit alone next door in the combination living-dining room, engrossed in a novel. The maid would bring her a fresh cup of tea.

  Sometimes Grandpa would come out to ask the maid for a cup of coffee or some such thing, and speak fondly to “Noriko’s little girl.”

  “You like books, don’t you, Natsuki?” he would say. He never knew which of the sisters was which, but his voice was unfailingly gentle.

  The teacher’s wife, known in the Katsura family as “Madama Butterfly,” sometimes came in too. One of Japan’s leading sopranos at the time, she used to walk around the house in high-heeled sandals like a foreigner. She would give the maid a hasty order of some kind before disappearing back into the room detached from the main house, where she practiced her singing.

  When she saw Mitsuki she would say, “Well, I see Noriko is here again with her girls!” But unlike Grandpa’s voice, hers held no gentleness, and the way she said “Noriko” sounded vaguely contemptuous.

  Little Mitsuki sensed the condescension in her voice. Then the inequality between her sister and herself no longer mattered in the least. She felt sorry for her mother. It was as if her mother, after a lifetime spent yearning for all that “Yokohama” represented, was being put firmly in her place.

  THE HOUSE ON THE HILL

  “Yokohama” had been engraved deeply in her mother Noriko’s mind since childhood. The “Yokohama” house at the top of the hill was always drenched in bright sunshine. Her family lived in a little rental house below that was always in the shadows. Even as a child, she must have dimly sensed that the steep terrain represented the difference in social status between the two families. Looking up from below the steep rise, “Yokohama” was in plain sight, but to get there you had to take a winding detour.

  Very like Noriko’s own life.

  After years of moving from place to place across Japan, her father was transferred to Tokyo before she started elementary school. The family settled in a house near his older sister, who had married into “Yokohama.”

  As a little girl with bobbed hair looking up at the house on the hill, Noriko hadn’t known anything—not even that her mother wasn’t allowed to cross the “Yokohama” threshold. Or that her parents weren’t properly married. Or that because her parents weren’t properly married, she her
self was illegitimate—a disreputable love child. All she knew was that the sunny house on the hill held everything shiny and bright, everything that was lacking in her house and that formed the object of her yearning and envy.

  All the rooms in the house where her family lived had straw tatami mats. “Yokohama” had a Western-style parlor redolent of fine polished wood, with a shiny grand piano played by the cousin seven years her elder—the future Uncle Yokohama. She had never heard the sound of piano playing or seen such a parlor before. The walls were lined with elegantly bound books—Western books too, naturally—and there were unfamiliar Western-style pieces of furniture too, a “sofa” and “armchairs.” Next to the parlor was the dining room, with a table as high off the floor as her small head was. There was the aroma of roasted coffee beans in the air, and tropical fruit brought back by her cousin’s father, the future Grandpa Yokohama, who was captain of an oceangoing merchant ship. It was because of him that the family lived near Yokohama, Japan’s gateway to the West, but little Noriko knew nothing of this. On his days off he smoked a pipe in his study. The yard was planted with grass instead of moss, and the garden, marked off by a circle of bricks, bloomed with roses, dahlias, tulips, and other Western flowers. A Scottish terrier, a breed then rare in Japan, had the run of the place. To top it all off, living next door was a French woman married to a Japanese. On Sundays Noriko went to church with her cousins and discovered the pleasure of singing, something she did well.

  As she warbled in church with all the strength her small body could muster, Noriko had surely believed that she would always be able to come and go at “Yokohama” as she pleased. But the adult world is prone to sudden, violent shifts without regard for the feelings of small girls. Eventually her father found work in Osaka through family connections, and Noriko had to move there with her parents, both of whom were originally from the western part of Japan.

  What a different world it was! The sound of the multiplication table being recited in the unfamiliar rhythm of Osaka dialect was dumbfounding, the sniffling and shouting in church—a church in name only, to her—astonishing. She felt as if she’d been sent to civilization’s remotest outpost.

  As she grew up and it became increasingly clear that people looked down on her and pitied her, memories of “Yokohama” grew all the more resplendent in her mind. As she pored over the illustrations of stylishly dressed Japanese girls and Western girls in the pages of Girls’ Friend, and later as she began going to see foreign movies, the world depicted there overlapped in her mind with those memories. But “Yokohama” was far away. One time she persuaded her father to have a new dress made for her, a rare treat, and to let her go back by herself during summer vacation—but the two weeks flew by, serving only to deepen her longing and envy. She returned chastened to Osaka.

  When her cousin, now a rising concert pianist, came by on tour, he was surrounded by fellow musicians. She could only look on from the sidelines. Feeling out of place, she was dazzled by their aura—the aura of what she later recognized as “high culture.”

  The desperate longing that most Japanese used to have for the West became inseparably entangled in Noriko’s mind with her veneration of “Yokohama.” At the same time, that veneration served as the sort of guidepost people have when they seek to better themselves even a little through art or learning. The more impoverished her status, the more intense her hunger for the world of the house on the hill.

  After graduating from a girls’ higher school—as private high schools for girls used to be called—Noriko made the greatest decision of her lifetime, prompted by a proposal of marriage from the son of a local barber. By then her father had already set up house with another woman, and she and her mother were living alone in a row house in the back streets of Osaka. Downstairs consisted of a concrete entryway with a tiny anteroom, a kitchen, and a three-mat room; above was a six-mat room with a clothes-drying platform at one end. It was closer to downtown than the place they had lived in previously, and so older, dirtier, and more run-down. Their neighbors were a colorful mix: a young woman who recited ballad-dramas of the puppet theater for a living; an old woman who taught girls the art of kimono making; the mistress of a geisha house; a concubine; and assorted cooks, carpenters, and dancers.

  Even if she refused the marriage proposal, Noriko understood that unless she could escape her present circumstances, she would have no choice but to go on living a small life in this back alley far removed from her dreams. Fear verging on desperation prompted her to come up with a scheme: she would get her maternal relatives to look after her mother while she invited herself to stay with her paternal relatives—at “Yokohama”—ostensibly to polish her household skills and her manners. With the determination of a seventeen-year-old, she pushed to have her way, and the adults in her life yielded to her determination.

  Noriko’s mother felt a lingering regret over the failed proposal from the barber’s son: “He said he’d take me in along with you.” The need to marry someone who would take in her mother as well as herself was a burden Noriko had to bear, as an illegitimate child.

  “Him? Nothing doing.”

  “You’re always hankering for the moon.”

  “I don’t care. Nothing doing.”

  “Just what kind of fellow would suit your fancy, I’d like to know?”

  Someone like her cousin, was the obvious answer. No point in saying so to someone as woefully uneducated, as innocent of high culture, as her mother.

  And so off Noriko had gone to “Yokohama,” with such determination that almost overnight she switched to the refined speech of uptown Tokyo. From her aunt she learned housekeeping—cleaning, laundry, cooking—but with formidable spirit made it clear that she hadn’t the slightest intention of settling for the status of domestic helper. To differentiate herself from the maids, she affected a long-sleeved kimono even when helping around the house. Her aunt and uncle had only two children, the concert pianist and another son, younger than she was. Her aunt may have felt a little uneasy about Noriko’s presence, but the strong family resemblance helped, and soon she began treating her almost like a daughter. Her uncle, with male nonchalance, welcomed their unexpected guest wholeheartedly.

  In no time, Noriko spread her young wings almost as if she’d been born into “Yokohama” from the first.

  Her mother Noriko’s two years in “Yokohama” must have been sweet, thought Mitsuki, and at the same time bitter. She found several old photographs of Uncle Yokohama carefully mounted in an album. He had a noble air; the photographs might have been stills of a movie star.

  Noriko’s cousin graduated from the Tokyo School of Music (later Tokyo School of Fine Arts) and then enjoyed a brief career as a concert pianist. Photos taken after performances showed him dressed in a black tuxedo and snow-white shirt, surrounded by bouquets of roses. The bouquets, suggestive of their donors, made it seem as if he were surrounded by a dozen lovely young ladies, his students and admirers.

  Noriko he had of course consistently ignored. In time he became engaged to marry. His fiancée had everything Noriko lacked. She was not only the daughter of a renowned university professor with a raft of prominent relatives but also a gifted soprano seen as having a brilliant future. She in fact went on to great success: when the Fujiwara Opera, Japan’s first professional opera company, gave its first overseas performance in New York City, she sang the lead in Madama Butterfly. Noriko too could sing, but her parents had never given her proper lessons, and she lived on the consolation of having sung a solo at her graduation from girls’ higher school. The contrast with her cousin’s fiancée was stark.

  Thinking over her mother’s life, Mitsuki surmised that the marriage of the much-admired cousin must have brought her mother a degree of sadness, but probably no very deep wound. He had never paid her much attention and had always seemed to exist on a higher plane; she was probably content just to be allowed to polish and repolish his grand piano in his absence. When he married his Madama Butterfly in a splendid
wedding and reception at the Hotel New Grand in Yokohama, young Noriko, though no doubt envious, had evidently been more entranced by the figure she herself cut in an exquisitely embroidered kimono, worn at the peak of her youthful beauty. The story went that afterward, when she heard that one of the guests had inquired if she were perhaps a princess of some sort, she had jumped for joy.

  In any case, once she joined the “Yokohama” household she acquired kimono made especially for her, new ones for every change of season. She took classes in tea ceremony and flower arranging. She joined a church choir and so met the woman her daughters would know as “Auntie,” becoming such friends with her that people mistook them for sisters. She even received a generous allowance to use with her friends. She never knew its source, but it was easy to imagine that her aunt must have contributed some, and probably her father also.

  The Noriko who lived in a back alley of Osaka on frayed tatami mats had seemingly vanished from the earth like smoke. But reality was not that obliging.

  Seeing how entranced Noriko was with her own transformation, her aunt must have had mixed feelings. Taking in a girl of marriageable age was tantamount to agreeing to find her a husband—but Noriko’s illegitimate birth was a barrier. Finding someone willing to take on her mother, persona non grata at “Yokohama,” made the task all the harder.

  Yet Noriko seemed born to the role of charming young lady. She attracted attention. One thing led to another, and soon she had the effrontery to fall in love with a tenor who was a frequent guest at “Yokohama.”