Money should be spent on oneself and not on social obligations: this was an article of faith in the Katsura family, yet Natsuki’s wedding violated all their rules. After she was married and gone, nobody could say how much was left in the investment fund that Auntie had given strict orders never to touch.
Standing in a pool of balmy spring sunshine folding laundry with her mother, Mitsuki repeated, “We’re stone broke.”
There was a short silence during which she kept her eyes down, matching socks by color—brown, dark blue, gray—before her mother’s voice rang out firmly from across the table: “I’ll borrow the money from Auntie. Overseas travel doesn’t cost a fortune anymore, the way it used to. We can pay it back in no time.”
She must have been doing mental calculations. After Father’s business failed, his fluent English had helped him land a job at a well-established corporation where he earned a good salary even though he was starting his career over. She herself still worked for Auntie, however much she grumbled that as fewer people wore kimono anymore, the business had no future. The family income remained decent. Mitsuki looked up.
“Only for a year,” her mother said. “You need to settle down.”
Mitsuki was used to unequal treatment. She couldn’t believe she was going to be allowed to study abroad. As she stood there not knowing what to say, her mother continued, “And no singing lessons. I hate to be the one to say it, but with your voice, they won’t lead to anything. As long as you’re going to study abroad, learn French.”
“Can I really go?” she finally asked. She herself did not think her singing would ever lead to anything. She sensed that she sang merely because she was carried away with the pleasure of being a “pretty young thing.” Her mother’s voice was far richer.
Her mother nodded. “If you know French, you can earn money translating. Articles from fashion magazines, say.” Sensing Mitsuki’s lack of enthusiasm, she added, “Or novels.”
“Maybe someday.” Mitsuki forced a smile and looked down. Having sorted all her father’s socks into pairs, she began to roll them into balls. Her heart flooded with gratitude toward her mother for making such a generous promise without so much as consulting her father. The words “thank you” rose in her throat, but she quickly swallowed them. Despite her genuine gratitude, lingering resentment surfaced once again. She knew without being told that Natsuki, after all she had cost their parents, had never said a word of thanks. She, Mitsuki, was no poor stepchild; it struck her as odd that she alone should express appreciation. She continued working, face down.
“You generally do as you please,” her mother said. “And you hardly ever complain.”
She said nothing.
“That’s why I’ve let you take a backseat to your sister, without really meaning to.”
This attempt at an excuse only inflamed her resentment. The door to her memories opened wide. Scene after scene rose in her mind’s eye, starting from early childhood. Though she had intended to say thank you, the words that slipped out were petulant: “Never mind. I’m used to it by now.” The sound of her own words hardened her heart still more. She kept moving her hands busily without looking up.
Her mother said softly, “I’m sorry, Mitsuki.”
Perhaps then, for the first time, her mother decided to do something to make up for all the previous unfairness. Just a month or so ago, while Natsuki was off being fitted for her wedding dress in a high-end bridal shop in Aoyama, she, Mitsuki, had been seated at a sewing machine, spreading out cloth she had picked up at a bargain sale at a craft store in Shinjuku, clumsily sewing a gown to wear at the chansonnier. To her sister’s gala wedding she had worn a hand-me-down kimono.
Having always been left to her own devices, she had at some point learned to fit into the adult world, a world where as a young girl she had value. She was by no means dissatisfied with her life. Her father had been a literary young man, though circumstances had forced him to enter the corporate world; he had no use for the constraints of corporate life and believed that art was best for his girls. Growing up in such a home had afforded her considerable freedom. She was grateful, and well aware that in the eyes of others she had had a privileged upbringing. Yet now for the first time it was clear to her that in fact, the difference in treatment between her sister and her had always rankled more than she had ever let on even to herself.
She did not know then that her festering resentment would pave the way for her marriage to Tetsuo, whom she was to meet in Paris. She kept looking down, making no attempt to hide her intransigence from her mother.
“What else could I do? You know how Natsuki is.” Her mother conveniently shut her eyes to the role her own driving passion had played in making Natsuki the way she was.
Probably her mother’s mind had opened to the possibility of her, Mitsuki, going to Paris because Natsuki’s time in Germany had not proven a total waste after all. Her father had been somewhat concerned about what Mitsuki was doing with her life and quickly added his approval. Rather than have her live in a dormitory or a single apartment, they arranged for her to stay with a proper French family, to guard against the same sort of indiscretion happening again. Her father consulted an American he had befriended while in the import-export business, a man who then, whether as a skilled negotiator or merely someone prone to exaggeration, let on to his French acquaintances that Mr. Katsura was highborn and had founded an impressive enterprise (the failed export business). As in a game of telephone, details were blown out of proportion. In short order, a French family offered to take in Mitsuki, with the proviso that “we’re not sure we’re qualified to look after such a fine young lady.” They had one daughter who was shy, they said, and a bookworm. They declined payment, but the Katsuras insisted on covering at least the cost of Mitsuki’s meals. Her hosts lived in a house in Saint-Cloud, on the western outskirts of Paris, beyond the Seine. Only after Mitsuki arrived did she realize that this was a highly sought-after residential area.
“I’m so jealous,” said Natsuki, watching her pack. “If I’d had the choice, I’d have gone to Paris too.”
Hearing this, Mitsuki felt strangely content, as if she had come out ahead.
Behind Natsuki’s back, her mother said, “If you must have a romance, make sure it’s with someone you can marry, will you please? And he’s got to be Japanese. I can’t speak any other language.”
Apparently, as far as her mother was concerned, Westerners should stay in the world of the silver screen where they belonged. Mitsuki shrugged off her mother’s words. The notion that they might be prophetic never crossed her mind.
And so one day under an autumn sky, Mitsuki set off for Paris.
UNDER A NEW SKY
Paris took Mitsuki by surprise, and not just because the finely articulated cityscape lined with sandstone seemed so beautiful after Tokyo’s busy clutter. She was surprised to see so many Japanese people. Early modern Japanese literature made it seem as if only scions of wealthy families—people who in the old days would have had a title—might be found wandering the streets of Paris. But times had apparently changed.
Of East Asians then living in Paris, the preponderance were Vietnamese from the former French colony; the next largest contingent consisted of some of the world’s Chinese. Most of these immigrants worked in Vietnamese or Chinese restaurants. The only Asians who traveled halfway around the globe just to visit Paris were Japanese, and few of them had much of a family pedigree. Many came just to shop. The avenue de l’Opéra, on the Right Bank of the Seine, was inundated with so many shopping-mad tourists that it was known as l’avenue des Japonais. Others came to study. The Latin Quarter on the Left Bank was roamed by Japanese students, most of whom were from families less well off than Mitsuki’s—the children of local government employees, schoolteachers, and small shop owners.
The reasons for this shift were many. Airfare had become more affordable, and Japan was the first East Asian country to enjoy relative prosperity. Besides, going overseas for langua
ge study wasn’t nearly as daunting as going to study music. The latter required years of formal training starting in early childhood, but no such barrier existed for language study. And so, even if it meant scrimping to send one’s offspring an allowance, Japan had embarked on an era when studying in France was open even to those of modest means.
The days when France was “so very far away,” as one Japanese poet wistfully wrote, were themselves now very far away.
“Ojosan.” Young lady. Someone addressed her this way in Japanese as soon as class was over on the first day she set foot in the Alliance Française. “I reckon you just got here,” he went on, speaking in Osaka dialect, which to Tokyo ears always sounds a bit comical.
While feeling with some embarrassment that at nearly twenty-five she was hardly young enough to be called ojosan anymore, Mitsuki found his manner sufficiently winning that she accompanied him to the school coffee shop, where other students from Japan sat in a circle. The air, thick with smoke from cheap Gauloise cigarettes, stung her eyes and nose. There was none of the earnestness she used to feel at the chansonnier; this was more like a gathering of idlers who had more time than they knew what to do with. Most of them were male—whether because few families could afford to send a daughter overseas or because doing so was too worrisome, she wasn’t sure. In this easygoing crowd, she alone felt tense.
“Say hi to Mitsuki Katsura,” the boy who had invited her said by way of introduction, and another boy commented that it was a nice name. He spoke standard Japanese.
“Where ya from?” asked the boy who had invited her.
“Tokyo.”
“Yeah? Whereabouts?”
“Chitose Funabashi.”
“Funabashi? Hold on, that’s in Chiba, isn’t it?”
He had mixed up the name of her hometown with that of a similar-sounding city in a nearby, decidedly unposh, prefecture. She smiled. “No, it’s in Setagaya Ward.”
A flurry arose.
“Wow, didja hear that? Setagaya!”
“Yeah, where all the bigwigs hang out. Politicians and entertainers and such.”
“Wow!”
After graduating from elementary school, Mitsuki, like Natsuki before her, had gone on to a private girls’ school in the same ward. Even after that, most of her girlfriends in the private college that she’d attended had grown up in a similar environment. But no one talked about “Setagaya Ward”; instead they spoke of particular towns within the ward—Kaminoge, Fukazawa, Kyodo—and everyone knew that Chitose Funabashi didn’t sound nearly as nice as the others. At the chansonnier too, even people who were not from Tokyo had been familiar with the city and its neighborhoods. There in the Alliance Française in the middle of Paris, she felt less that she had left Japan behind than that she had stepped out of Tokyo.
From that day on she’d been marked as a girl of privilege, when on the other side of the earth she had been caught up in her family’s desperate attempt to keep up appearances before the Shimazakis. Now, under the Parisian sky, she was transformed. Her staying with a French family in the premier residential district of Saint-Cloud only reinforced that impression in everyone’s mind.
Her host family was not particularly wealthy, and their house was one of the smaller ones in town, yet to Mitsuki it seemed impossibly luxurious. Their bay window was spacious and deep, unlike the poor excuse for one in her house back in Japan. She felt like a fairytale princess. While her compatriots lived in tiny garrets with communal showers that had no hot water to speak of, she enjoyed a comfortable room with a spacious private bathroom where she could soak her skinny self in a hot tub, playing with clouds of foam like a glamorous movie star. As night came on and the others gravitated to the student cafeteria, shoulders hunched in the evening chill, or returned to their dark roosts to cook a solitary meal, Mitsuki sat at a dining room table lit by a chandelier with a cloth napkin on her lap, tucking into a meal served in courses, beginning with hors d’oeuvres and ending with dessert—a nightly routine that, to her astonishment, never varied.
The difference between her lifestyle and that of the others was only too plain. At dinnertime she would leave the students, still clustered together, to return to her home in the suburbs like a sheltered girl with a curfew. The occasional weekend she spent with her host family at their Breton country house overlooking the English Channel, traveling to and fro by car, seemed the ultimate in grand living. No matter how she explained to the others that her family was paying only the cost of her meals, the message didn’t sink in. They preferred to go on seeing her through the lens of class prejudice.
Then Natsuki and Yuji came for a visit. Anyone could see they were rich.
To top it all, when asked what she had done after college, she answered with well-founded hesitation, and somehow the word spread that she had been a stage actress or a singer. The absence of rumors that she’d been a film actress showed, to her rueful amusement, that rumors have their limits after all. Film actresses had to be beautiful.
But though she was no beauty and, at nearly twenty-five, past her prime by the standards of the day, circumstances had conspired to allow her to be here in Paris, the world’s fairest city, for her life’s season of ripening cherries—and with an unexpected aura of glamour. Japanese boys clustered around her as if they considered falling in love a sine qua non of their sojourn in the City of Light. They vied with each other to see her off to her train station.
Take that, Mom.
If only her mother, who had offered such condescending commiseration on her looks, could see the puppy-love expressions on those young men’s faces!
A young woman who is entranced with herself casts a spell on men of every nationality and race. She attracts glances. By the time Mitsuki had shed the fish-out-of-water look of a traveler, she would walk down the street and young men would call out to her. Coolly hiding her pleasure, she passed them swiftly by. All Paris seemed to whisper in her ear, Time for love! and she felt as if she were waltzing on clouds. It wasn’t long before all the attention became bothersome and made her reluctant to linger long in a café.
When cherries ripen, the heads of “pretty young things” fill with folly. Mitsuki’s own youth and femininity went straight to her head. And yet, as her twenty-fifth birthday drew near, she was, strictly speaking, no longer a “pretty young thing.”
One day, lying on her side in bed, she casually laid her right hand on her belly and found her navel was no longer in the center. Though overall she was as skinny as ever, her middle had expanded slightly and her navel, faithfully following the law of gravity, had shifted somewhat in the direction of the floor. She turned over experimentally on her other side, and the same thing happened again. The expression “out of shape” took on vivid clarity in her mind.
At the same time, this vexing discovery meant that her head was no longer filled with the frothy visions of a “pretty young thing” but had matured to a certain extent. She remained entranced with herself, but that was far from all. She was now able to observe the outside world. The city of Paris came to her as a revelation, as it had to countless Japanese visitors since the country’s awakening to the West a century ago. During solitary rides on the train, bus, or Métro, while sitting in a café or strolling down an avenue, her thoughts were of Paris. She took to wondering how she might possibly extend her stay in the beautiful city. Only then did it sink in that she was not self-supporting.
Fall ended and winter set in. She was sitting one day in a café talking to a Japanese youth who had become her frequent companion—Tetsuo. “Some girls become prostitutes on the sly,” he was saying, “just to keep from going back to Japan.”
Her eyes widened. “Seriously?”
“Yep.”
“Compared to that, surely it would be better to go back to Japan!”
“The trouble is, they don’t want to. And anyone who would do such a thing is guaranteed to have a hard time supporting herself if she does go back.”
Mitsuki had been trying to work
out how someone like her might possibly stay on in Paris and be financially independent. In front of her was a pot of herb tea called vervaine—lemon verbena—the very tea which she had often come across in French novels and wondered how it tasted. She ordered it in cafés just for the fun of saying “vervaine.” In front of Tetsuo was a cup of espresso, the cheapest drink on the menu.
“Anyway, at least Japanese people have a country to go home to. Some people don’t even have that.” He added with finality, “The trouble with you, Mitsuki, is you don’t know what’s going on in the world. You’ve got so much to learn.” He was smoking a Gauloise.
Winter days in Paris were short. Mornings were still dark at eight, when she left the house, and by a little after three in the afternoon, darkness again set in. Day after day, the sky hung like a thick gray curtain, barely penetrated by the sun’s faint rays. The air was bitingly cold.
CITY OF MIRACLES
“You’ve got a lot to learn.” Every time Tetsuo saw Mitsuki, he told her this, and, with a meekness that in retrospect seemed ludicrous, she would feel ashamed of her ignorance.
Before winter set in with determination, Mitsuki had transferred from the language school to the Sorbonne, where she enrolled in a course on French civilization for foreign students. She became friends with a short-haired, boyish-looking girl named Masako, who was studying on a Rotary scholarship, and would often sit in a café with her and chat. Mitsuki was hardly ever alone with any of the male Japanese students. Japanese girls being scarce, they flocked around as she sat with Masako, and she preferred it that way. It was only sometime after New Year’s that she often found herself talking alone with Tetsuo.
Inheritance from Mother Page 11