Inheritance from Mother

by Minae Mizumura

  On that day, Tetsuo had been earnestly in love with her. Until then she had never thought he loved her that much. Seeing him that day, she herself fell gloriously in love. And promised to marry him.

  Still pale, Tetsuo pressed the point: “You’re sure somebody like me is good enough?”

  Her cheeks might have flushed pink when she answered: “I’m sure. Somebody like you will do just fine.”

  She felt as if all the candles in the room had burst into song, serenading them with “L’hymne à l’amour.”

  THE SISTERS’ CONTRASTING FATES

  That night, ignoring the risk of missing the last train back, Tetsuo escorted her home as far as the front gate. Her host mother, having quickly spotted her flushed cheeks, soon let out a joyful “Oh la la!” and in no time the entire household was in an uproar. Her host father brought up a bottle of champagne from the basement, chilled it rapidly in ice water, and together they drank a toast.

  Things happened fast after that.

  Mitsuki had inherited her mother’s ability to get things done. She sat down and wrote a long letter to her parents explaining everything, including Tetsuo’s family background—careful to emphasize that his married younger brother worked in the family company and lived at home with his parents in the old-fashioned way, so she wouldn’t have to look after her in-laws in their old age.

  “If it’s all right with both of you, I think we’ll just register the marriage at the Japanese embassy here.” Writing the words, she felt so proud she could have danced on tiptoe. The hoopla surrounding her sister’s wedding was still fresh in her mind. Above all she remembered the peculiar closeness that had developed between her mother and sister. Natsuki’s sulks on coming back from Freiburg had all but been forgotten as, clearly on the best of terms, mother and daughter went on jaunts to shop for her trousseau. Mitsuki, who was sometimes pressed into service to help carry things, had been excited at her sister’s Cinderella marriage. Yet seeing her mother eagerly examine the luster of gold thread in a purse held out reverently by a uniformed clerk, glance at the price tag, and ponder the cost, her younger daughter’s existence totally forgotten, she’d felt her load of shopping bags grow heavier. The old hurt came flooding back, along with something close to a resolution that when she married, it would all be different. She’d felt alienated from her sister, perhaps even a bit contemptuous of her for living her life under the perennial sway of their mother’s passions. The letter she penned to her parents doubtless overflowed with pride in her having chosen her own path in life, unlike her sister.

  Her mother quickly wrote back: “You’re a smart girl. Your father and I trust your judgment.”

  That June, after registering their marriage at the embassy with Masako as witness, she and Tetsuo traveled through Europe on the cheap with money her parents sent them as a wedding gift. Then they went back to Japan, and she presented him to her family. What he may have thought on discovering that just as she had said, her family wasn’t wealthy, she had no idea.

  Her parents were well content with her Paris souvenir. “He’s handsome, and he’s got quite a way with him, doesn’t he?” Neither of them was concerned about his family background. Her father was a progressive who disapproved of worrying about a person’s antecedents, and her mother had probably had more than enough of extravagant in-laws, both financially and emotionally. Anyway, they doubtless took Tetsuo’s having studied in Paris as a sign that his family, even if not “good,” was good enough. His table manners passed muster: he ate his soup without slurping and wound his spaghetti neatly around his fork.

  When they finally met Tetsuo’s family, she and her parents were somewhat dismayed. The phrase “He’s the one that matters” began to pop up in their conversations. The families had little opportunity to get together after that, but what gatherings there were sparked guarded murmurs on the Katsura side: “Not exactly sophisticates, are they?” And after the arrival of a gift, someone would moan, “What on earth do we do with it?” But not even her mother ever breathed a criticism of Tetsuo.

  The following spring, Mitsuki did enroll in graduate school. She chose the French department of a fine private university once famous for the freewheeling ways of its literature students—a far cry from the genteel, urbane college she had attended before. She had no intention of ever pursuing a scholarly career. But having done little more than amuse herself by singing in the chansonnier and reading every novel within reach, she was determined to raise herself at least to Tetsuo’s level. She also thought that mastering French might one day help their budget. She could easily afford the tuition using money she earned as an English tutor for high school students, and with hand-me-downs from her mother and sister for the taking, she wouldn’t need to buy any new clothes.

  When Natsuki saw French books lining the shelves in the cheap rental apartment where the newlyweds lived, she said enviously, “You’re so lucky.”

  “Lucky? We’re as poor as church mice.”

  Mitsuki had felt jubilant. And on that happy note, her life’s season of ripening cherries drew to a close. If only time could have stopped there…

  Family troubles soon intruded on her idyllic life. To begin with, Natsuki spun out of control.

  She seemed happy Mitsuki was back, but signs of her growing dissatisfaction with married life showed on her face, which always all too transparently betrayed her emotions. It wasn’t that her marriage was a disaster. Far from it. Yuji played in Japan’s top-rated orchestra. Jun, their first child, had come along in short order. The young couple and their baby lived near his parents, not with them, so there were no in-laws on hand to grumble if Natsuki chose to forgo cooking and instead visit the food court in the basement of a Shibuya department store every night to pick up ready-made dishes from famous Kyoto restaurants. She took on a few pupils as well, so she enjoyed the status of being a piano teacher. She led a life of seeming elegance and ease. And yet she was unhappy.

  She felt isolated in the Shimazaki family. It wasn’t only that they set great store by ceremonial social functions such as twice-yearly seasonal gift giving and visits to the family grave at the proper times. That much she could have borne. Nor was their love of golf a problem in itself, or the way on New Year’s Eve they sat around the television watching the tedious year-end songfest from beginning to end. The trouble was that the world of high culture that so enthralled her mother—and that had dominated her own life—had little place in their lives. Not only high culture but anything remotely cultural seemed to leave them cold. They didn’t watch current films, let alone old ones. The television was always on, never music. They read magazines but not books. Yuji’s sister majored in voice at music school only because she’d taken it up in high school after lazily neglecting to practice the piano.

  The family happened to produce a cellist thanks to Yuji’s maternal grandfather, a lover of Western music who managed to turn Yuji (as the second son, he could pursue a career of his choice) into a classical musician. The grandfather had been a man of taste with wide interests; the collection of antiques on display in the house—including various bowls for the tea ceremony, from rustic Raku and Hagi wares to colorful Kutani—were testimony to his artistic bent, which no one else in the family seemed to share. Not even Yuji was an exception. For the life of her, Natsuki couldn’t see how the Yuji who guffawed at stupid comedy shows on television could be the same as the Yuji who set off conscientiously for rehearsals bearing his antique, Italian-made cello. She could only think that he was two different people.

  She began driving to her parents’ house with Jun to complain about the Shimazakis. Her mother quickly joined in, making fun of them. Having previously felt intimidated, she seemed to take glee in ridiculing their banality.

  But Natsuki, possibly encouraged by her mother’s attitude, didn’t stop there. In no time she fell in love with a lanky architect whose hair swept diagonally across his forehead. Their romance began one spring afternoon when she had taken Jun in her stroller to Yoyo
gi Park to enjoy the cherry blossoms. As she was sitting on a bench in tight jeans smoking a cigarette, he had struck up a conversation with this opener: “It’s better here in the daytime. At night when the rabble come out to eat and drink and carouse, it’s positively sickening, don’t you think?”

  Before their eyes, people were securing seats for the night revelries to come. With his forelock falling at an angle, this self-styled nihilist seemed always to look askance at the world. The ridiculous thing was that one day out of the blue, Natsuki brought him home to meet her mother and broached the topic of divorce.

  Natsuki’s astonished mother had not been impressed with her beau. “He didn’t look healthy,” she told Mitsuki later. “His color was bad.”

  The architect had looked on with a thin smile while Natsuki, in their mother’s words, “blabbered on.” He worked for a small architectural firm and planned to open his own office one day. He was living with his parents temporarily because his salary was low, but he did have a steady job, and once they were married they could rent a cheap apartment somewhere. His people were in business and fairly well off, but he didn’t get along with his stepmother and didn’t want to take their money. Natsuki could help out by teaching piano, but not in a cheap apartment; she wanted permission to give lessons there in the house in Chitose Funabashi.

  “I’ll have custody of Jun. He’s okay with that,” she added, proudly indicating the man with the sweeping diagonal hair whom she believed to be a genius, destined to be a world-class architect.

  All her life, Natsuki had been indulged by their mother. Anything she wanted was hers—the sole exception being the fiasco in Germany. She must have dragged the architect along because she had a premonition that for once her mother would not give in easily. But she was so used to wheedling that she had no idea when she had crossed a line.

  Their mother later told Mitsuki that listening to this folderol, she’d felt “so dizzy I almost fell off my chair.” Since the architect was there, she’d refrained from giving vent to her shock and fury, but over the next few months, she and Natsuki had been at daggers drawn. Baby Jun was mercifully too tiny to understand any of the drama going on around her.

  Their mother’s greatest fear had been that Natsuki would confront Yuji directly about a divorce. But Natsuki exercised admirable restraint, knowing that if she did do such a thing she ran the risk of being cut off by her parents.

  They talked in circles.

  “Mother, you did the very same thing!”

  “Not the same at all.”

  “You left the husband that ‘Yokohama’ found for you.”

  “I married him because I had no other choice.”

  “Well, what choice did I really have when I married Yuji? None.”

  “How can you look me in the face and say such a thing?”

  “Because it’s true!”

  Then came shrieking and tears. Eventually the architect had enough and took off. The peculiar intimacy between Natsuki and her mother may have contributed to his disenchantment.

  Natsuki’s suicide attempt took place soon after.

  Knowing when her mother would be out and when she would return, she had driven over to Chitose Funabashi with Jun and swallowed a large quantity of sleeping pills. On coming home and finding her unconscious, her mother had called an ambulance. Natsuki had taken a huge overdose, but she was found so quickly that she was able to have her stomach pumped and be released after a night in the hospital. Her mother telephoned Yuji and lied: “Natsuki’s come down with a sudden high fever, probably the flu, so I’ll keep her and Jun with me for a few days.”

  When Mitsuki was summoned to the hospital, the moment she walked in the room her mother exclaimed: “How could she do this! It’s like a page from a trashy novel!”

  What had Natsuki been thinking? Had years of living her life in harness to her mother’s passions caused a buildup of anger that suddenly boiled over? Or was it just a way of getting back at her mother for failing to give in to her demands?

  THE KATSURA FAMILY DISINTEGRATES

  The damage to Natsuki’s relationship with their mother was irreparable. Their mother took to regarding her with a cold eye, as if freed of something that had possessed her. Natsuki, the daughter she had brought up in her own image, was incapable of understanding her and all she had been through: the stigma she had borne because of her own parents, who flew in the face of propriety; her efforts to remake herself; the hope and determination she had invested in Natsuki. She as good as cut herself off emotionally from her—and yet the two of them had been so closely bound that the tie between them could never be truly severed. Their mother seemed to take a certain pleasure in overt snubs while Mitsuki, caught in the middle, had to listen to her sister’s grousing.

  Natsuki idealized Mitsuki’s marriage, in part because she had always envied her sister’s greater self-reliance.

  “You can have intellectual conversations with Tetsuo, can’t you?”

  “More or less.”

  “Must be nice.”

  But Natsuki made no more missteps. She soon gave birth to a son, Ken. With her impulsiveness and good looks, she must have had other admirers, but there were no more upheavals. Her life stayed on an even keel as she managed to play the role of a contented housewife.

  Perhaps to assuage her sense of isolation, she acquired two kittens, a brother and sister. She also became increasingly dependent on Mitsuki.

  Starting from that time, their mother too had drawn closer to Mitsuki, markedly changing the dynamic among the three of them. Even so, if the Katsuras had led tranquil lives after that, Mitsuki suspected her marriage might have turned out differently.

  Marrying Tetsuo may have been in part a reaction against slights, real and imagined, she had endured while growing up, but no woman’s marriage is ever entirely free of family baggage. What matters is how the family situation evolves.

  If only she hadn’t had to put up with her mother’s folly! If only that long messiness hadn’t ensued—that long, vexing messiness that sapped her strength and wrapped her in meshes of woe.

  Later she realized that That Man had made his appearance in her mother’s life shortly after her mother became disenchanted with Natsuki.

  Around then “Yokohama” too had lost its former traction with her. The fascination for all things Western that had long held the population captive had eased as Japan became rich and modernized. Her mother’s yearnings for “Yokohama” had eased too. Besides, “Yokohama” was no longer what it had been. Grandpa Yokohama, who used to pet her, was gone; the much-admired Uncle Yokohama, now retired, had lost his princely good looks and even developed a paunch; Madama Butterfly, no longer Japan’s top diva, had lost her flair too.

  And yet the old nameless stirrings that had always driven their mother were unassuaged. She still needed some outlet for her unceasing quest for exhilaration. This was all the more apparent after she stopped working for Auntie and had more free time on her hands. Her marriage of nearly thirty years had long since cooled off.

  And so in her late fifties she took up chanson lessons—and immediately started paying even more attention to her appearance. Having stopped working for Auntie, she gave up wearing kimono entirely. She seemed a notch lower in quality, somehow. At a recital she had insisted they attend, Mitsuki and her sister found that the other singers were not only younger than she, they were exactly the sort of people she would once have dismissed as “loud and flashy ladies.” The event had not a speck of artistry. It seemed merely a way for rudderless women of a certain age to kill time.

  That Man was the last straw.

  He stood backstage dressed in a white suit, a man in his mid-forties with a habit of tossing back his long hair—the picture of affectation. Women of all ages surrounded him, fussing over him. Among them was their elegantly tall mother, even more conspicuous in a floor-length gown.

  “Don’t tell me that’s the teacher,” murmured Natsuki.

  “Who else could it be?”<
br />
  “Ye gods.”

  He was not only affected but vaguely seedy-looking, the sort of person who years ago might have been a strolling guitarist in the back alleys of Shinjuku. But troubadours have a distinct aura of knowing life to its depths, something that he lacked. He had neither their fierceness nor their warmth. For Mitsuki of all people to say so would have sounded presumptuous, but he struck her as someone who knew little of life’s harshness.

  “Yuji must never see this.” Natsuki spoke seriously.

  After the recital, Mitsuki had called her mother. “If you’re going to take singing lessons, why not study with a proper voice trainer?” Long ago her mother had been a soprano able to hit a high A.

  “Oh, at my age I don’t have the voice for that anymore. I never got the training I should have had when I was young. Chansons are about all I’m good for.”

  This answer made perfect sense, but Mitsuki still was put out. It was as if, having washed her hands of Natsuki, her mother was now going out of her way to let it be known by taking up chansons that she had switched allegiance. When she asked the meaning of French lyrics, Mitsuki wouldn’t explain, saying only, “Lots of them are better in Japanese translation.” In fact, she thought sakurambo, “cherry,” was far more charmingly suggestive of a girl’s sweet, round flesh than cerise.

  If her mother could study under a seedy man like that without thinking twice, her old nameless yearnings had definitely lost luster. Not only that, the place was a chanson studio in name only, and, going along with the demands of the time, also taught American show tunes and even Japanese popular songs. Called C’est Si Bon, the studio was located one station from Chitose Funabashi, heading toward Shinjuku, and the instructor lived with his wife and children seven stations down the line the other way.