Inheritance from Mother

by Minae Mizumura

  Shortly after the recital, her mother had started doing secretarial work at the studio several days a week. She was fond of going out and now had somewhere to go, besides which she would be paid for her trouble. What was wrong with that? At first Mitsuki had thought nothing of it. But when she dropped in for visits to her parents’ home, she soon began to sense that things were somehow off kilter. She eventually came to see that her mother was infatuated with the chanson instructor. For a woman of her years to become infatuated with any kind of a teacher happened all the time, and, given that their family had seen more than its share of elopements and divorces, plus one attempted suicide, there seemed little to be gained by expressing disapproval.

  Years went by before Mitsuki saw just how deeply involved her mother was with That Man. One night, sometime after eight, a colleague of her father’s had called her at home with alarming news: her diabetic father had collapsed and been rushed to the hospital by ambulance. He’d been dehydrated but was now conscious and stable. After he collapsed, they’d kept dialing his home telephone number, but nobody answered. Finally the caller had looked through his address notebook and come across the name “Mitsuki Hirayama,” which he remembered was the name of one of his daughters.

  Mitsuki hurried to the hospital in the city center. She first notified Natsuki, but since Natsuki had two small children to look after and their father’s condition was stable, they agreed that she needn’t come along. Riding in the subway, swaying as she gripped the overhead strap, Mitsuki felt a premonition that her life hereafter would consist of the endless repetition of such scenes. Once a semi-neglected daughter, now she would bear the full weight of the Katsura family’s various burdens.

  It could not be mere coincidence that the man had stumbled on her telephone number and not her sister’s.

  When she got there, her father was alert. He did not say, “Where’s your mother?” Looking back, she could see that pride had kept him from asking, but also by then he must have been used to the late hour of his wife’s return home. Mitsuki continued calling home with no luck, until it occurred to her that her mother might still be at the studio. That was when it dawned on her that a tasteless drama was being played out.

  There was a row of telephone directories in the hospital, and in the Yellow Pages she soon found the listing for C’est Si Bon. A man’s voice came on the line.

  “This is the daughter of Noriko Katsura speaking,” she said in a clipped and formal manner. “Is my mother still there by any chance?” She heard the man call, “Noriko, it’s your daughter.” After a pause she heard the receiver being handed over to her mother.

  “Mitsuki, what on earth do you want?” Her mother’s voice was defiant and shameless.

  The hour was by then past ten o’clock. Mitsuki had avoided calling on days when her mother worked at C’est Si Bon, not knowing exactly when she would be back. She had never imagined that her mother would stay out so late.

  A MAN SOMEHOW LACKING

  The mother who went off to “Yokohama” with a singing heart never truly aggravated her, nor did the mother who forgot her existence before Natsuki’s wedding. She’d still felt close to her, still could turn to her when in need. But from that time on, her mother became repulsive to her. She felt as if her mother exuded venom.

  Her father’s diabetes worsened. After reaching retirement age he had become president of a subsidiary, but ill health forced him eventually to resign. When Mitsuki went home for a visit, she would find him sitting slumped over, hollow-eyed and abandoned in a house with cobwebs. He had eye surgery, but afterward, perhaps as a reaction to the anesthesia, his mind was fuzzy. In time he developed digestive ailments unrelated to the diabetes and was hospitalized repeatedly.

  Once after he had been in the hospital nearly a month, shortly before the planned day of his release, her mother was summoned for a consultation. She asked Mitsuki and her sister to come too, so they did. From now on, the doctor said, the patient’s home care would require extra effort. He needed to be on a strict diabetic diet, have insulin shots, and take medicine four times a day, after each meal and before bed. As his eyesight continued to fail he would need assistance with personal hygiene besides.

  Their mother made a face.

  There was a short silence before the doctor added with a slight frown, “Or of course, you could put him in an extended-care hospital somewhere.” Perhaps seeing how shamelessly their mother’s face lit up at this suggestion, he went on, his frown deepening, “If the family is unable to provide the care he needs, that might be his best option.”

  After that she would quote the doctor’s words to them like holy writ: “The doctor himself said it would be better for your father this way.” She turned a deaf ear to their offers to come by regularly to help out.

  “You’re ill, anyway,” she said to Natsuki.

  Though Natsuki had never fully regained her strength following the suicide attempt, her children were now at an age when they required less attention. Normally there would have been no reason why she couldn’t have shared in caring for their aged father. But just about the time his eyesight faded, she developed uveitis, an incurable inflammation of the eye. Repeated examinations turned up no cause; it was as if she were keeping their father company in his eye troubles. The only treatment was a high dosage of steroids, with side effects causing her face, neck, and body to swell up like the proverbial “fat lady” of opera. Stopping the treatment caused a gradual return to normal, but after repeated bouts of this on-again-off-again course of treatment, she tired easily and was often laid up in bed.

  “And you never were strong to begin with,” she said to Mitsuki. “Besides, you have your work to do.”

  The doctor found a hospital near the city limits that would accept their father and wrote a letter of introduction. The wards there held eight.

  Mitsuki was aghast. She briefly considered taking him in. But she was then still living in a small 58.8-square-meter condominium and in those days Tetsuo often worked at home; having an invalid in the apartment would have made normal life impossible. She quickly banished the thought and tried to shake off a sense of guilt. Natsuki, chronically fatigued and less and less comfortable with her in-laws, was hardly in a position to take him in either.

  “Oh, if we only had a tenth of the Shimazakis’ money!” Natsuki wailed.

  “I know.”

  “I can never let Yuji find out the kind of place he’ll be in.” She also wanted to keep him in the dark about their mother’s involvement with That Man.

  And so their father never went home, but took off his pajamas and changed into a suit for the ninety-minute taxi ride to a hospital far away. Mitsuki and her mother accompanied him.

  He apparently still thought that after a short stay in the new hospital he could go home. Sitting beside him in the taxi speeding away from the city center, Mitsuki patted his arm and said nothing to disabuse him of the idea.

  The next day when she alone went to visit him, she brought posters of Monet’s water lilies and tacked them up on the wall over his bed.

  At first their mother reluctantly took turns visiting him along with her daughters, but over the years she reduced her visits, though she was always careful to check in with Mitsuki: “I wasn’t planning on going this week, if it’s all right with you.” She must have felt some guilt. And for Natsuki, the period of their father’s hospitalization corresponded to the time when her health was at its lowest ebb. As a result, Mitsuki’s burdens continued to grow in middle age. To be home in time to make dinner for Tetsuo, she had to see her father on days when she didn’t teach. Besides this physical burden, there was the heavier emotional burden of her unrelenting pity for him, night and day. The stress of maintaining normal relations with her mother as the “understanding daughter” steadily became more of a trial. Yet when she tried to put even a little distance between them, her mother was swift to react; to fend off the threat of abandonment, she would sound a little contrite and for a while be on her best
behavior, trekking to the hospital like a dutiful wife.

  “I saw him yesterday. He was fine.” She would go out of her way to make these reports.

  But eventually, her mother had played her final card, claiming that the chanson instructor—a man a dozen or more years her junior—had promised he would get a divorce and be with her in her declining years. Her visits to the remote hospital became even less frequent. Perhaps her husband’s unexpected longevity made the prospect of seeing him face-to-face increasingly distressing—or infuriating. Mitsuki, while dubious that That Man’s promise could be trusted, decided that if she didn’t have to look after her mother she could perhaps go along with the deal.

  Then her father contracted pneumonia.

  This was just after she and Tetsuo had returned from his first sabbatical, the one in California, during which she traveled back several times to check in on her father. Grateful that classes had not yet begun, she took a room in a small nearby hotel and went to see him daily, raising him up a little when he was conscious and spoon-feeding him soup in accordance with the nurse’s instructions. At night she would go back to her hotel and vacantly read a book or watch television. Natsuki, who was having another bout of eye inflammation, would call every night and ask apologetically how he was doing. Mitsuki would tell her in a slightly sulky tone. She also had long telephone conversations with Tetsuo nearly every day. She had not yet found out about his first affair, and this was part of the reason why she would vent all her anger at her mother—who had yet to put in an appearance during this crisis—holding back nothing and seeking his comfort.

  When she called her mother on her first night at the hotel, her mother sounded flustered, but said in an ingratiating tone, “Your father’s so lucky to have you. I’ll pay your hotel bill.”

  The next few days went by without further contact. Then one night her mother called. “How is he?”

  “Hard to say. Even the doctor says he can’t tell yet.”

  In fact her father had passed the crisis point, but she somehow didn’t feel like sharing this information.

  “Oh.”

  Silence. Mitsuki purposely said nothing. Her mother apparently decided to ignore her aloofness.

  “There’s one more thing, Mitsuki.” She said this with what sounded like determination, but then shifted to a honeyed, cajoling tone. “I’ve been thinking. When this is all over, I want us to go to Europe again. On me. By then your father’s life insurance money will have come in.”

  Mitsuki felt the room spin.

  “I want to see Paris once more before I die.” Her mother’s voice had a sunny lilt redolent of her younger days.

  For a moment she was speechless. Then she said frostily, “Why not go again with that teacher of yours? It’s your money. Suit yourself.” Her fingers gripped the receiver. She had accompanied her mother to Europe twice, once in graduate school and again several years later. The first time, Tetsuo had come too. Then her mother had gone a third time with the chanson group, led by That Man.

  “Actually…when I go with him, something’s lacking. I don’t feel like I’m getting the full experience. His French doesn’t sound like French. I mean, his background is what it is. Once was enough.”

  Mitsuki no longer remembered how she may have responded. All she could remember was that then, for the first time, it came to her with burning clarity: she wished her mother would die.

  That night, before falling asleep she had murmured into the darkness the words “Today, Mother died.” From then on she waited for the day when she might say those words out loud for real.

  All along she had thought her mother and That Man an unlikely pair. She now knew what she had always sensed deep down: he wasn’t someone her mother wanted for his own sake; he was merely a makeshift entertainment who would allow her to keep on chasing her nameless dreams. Dyeing her hair black, suppressing her seventy-plus years, dressing up to go out to restaurants where even though she was no drinker she would tap her wineglass with his, little finger raised just so—all of it had the feel of makeshift entertainment. That Man was a mere expedient, someone to be her dance partner on life’s stage as she sought to squeeze as much as she could out of her remaining time.

  And yet even as a mere expedient he wasn’t quite up to the job. Tickets were expensive so she didn’t go often, but when she did attend the ballet or see an opera by an overseas troupe it was always Natsuki or Mitsuki she wanted with her, not him—precisely because when he did go along, the occasion lacked a certain something.

  Mitsuki should have known that the only man to romance her mother, an old woman living on a pension and dwindling savings, would be no prize. Rather than indulging in such a sleazy romance, why couldn’t her mother have shown more self-respect and gone on pursuing her dreams on her own? Was she that desperate to escape from her husband, who bore the twin stigmas of sickness and old age—the inevitable suffering of life? Perhaps she wanted to think that such suffering should have no place in her life.

  SEASONS OF LIFE

  After her father recovered from pneumonia, Mitsuki went home and spent two days at her computer composing an eight-page letter to her mother. This time she was determined. If her mother wanted to keep on with That Man, fine. She and her sister would take care of their father—and sever their ties to her. She concluded with a request that her mother not telephone her, but respond in writing.

  Two days later, her mother’s ear-splitting voice sounded over the telephone. “What were you thinking, sending your mother a letter like that? I nearly had a heart attack!”

  Later that afternoon, out walking, her mother was struck by a bicycle and knocked down, breaking her left hip. The shock of the letter might have been what kept her from watching where she was going. She had surgery, spent forty days in the hospital, and for some time afterward was barely able to stand. That Man couldn’t cope, having a job and a family, so Mitsuki had no choice but to come to the rescue. Natsuki also pitched in, with bad grace. Mitsuki’s letter and ultimatum were consigned to oblivion as That Man faded out of the picture.

  After the accident her mother turned overnight into a wrinkled crone with bent back. From then on she stopped dyeing her hair.

  Her first time out on crutches, hobbling along, she had said morosely, “I guess my chickens have come home to roost.”

  The words Yes, Mother, they have came to mind, but Mitsuki couldn’t say them. Give me a break was what she really wanted to say. Her mother just didn’t get it. Yes, from now on she would have to use a cane, but Mitsuki and her sister would be the ones who would have to take care of her. Mostly Mitsuki. Why should her mother’s chickens come home to roost with her?

  Carrying both their purses over one shoulder and clutching shopping bags in both hands, Mitsuki had said nothing. She could not bring herself to needle her mother by asking what had happened to That Man’s promise to look after her—not because she felt sorry for her hobbling mother, but because she knew that needling would accomplish nothing.

  That Man was never spoken of again between them.

  A year or so later her father died, and by the time his life insurance came through, her mother had difficulty getting around, so talk of a trip to Europe evaporated. Mitsuki constantly dreamed the same dream, waking just as the thought hit her: Why, Dad’s in such good shape, I could easily take him in!

  Feeling sad and rueful about her dead father while resentfully looking after her steadily aging mother: that had been her life ever since. The absurdity of being forced to be her mother’s caregiver turned sorrow over her father’s end into a residue of resentment that festered like a sore.

  Even after That Man’s departure from the scene, the intensity of her mother’s insatiable passions never lessened. If anything, whether because she was trying to contain lingering feelings of guilt or because she was unhinged by the physical and emotional shocks she had endured, by the time she began applying makeup with her former meticulousness Mitsuki’s cane-tapping mother had grown more
self-centered than ever. Mitsuki wondered about herself: was it because she was Japanese that she didn’t simply walk away and be done with her? Was she swept up in a cultural climate where a woman’s virtue had long been inextricable from her role as caregiver? Or was the prospect simply too exhausting? Did she sense that severing their connection would drain her of all her strength and that once her weeping and wailing were over, her voice a dry rasp, she would only take pity on her mother and so fail to extricate herself after all? Baffled, she continued to be her mother’s mainstay.

  Little by little her mother shed the trappings of vulgarity and returned to her former self. That was some comfort. Aiming to be able to go out walking by herself again, she had her old acupuncture therapist come to the house once a week for an entire year. Seeing how determined her patient was, the therapist exerted herself with more zeal than anyone could have hoped for. And so, despite having suffered a hip fracture in her seventies, for a time Mitsuki’s mother had been able to take the train alone, aided by her cane, and get out to see the foreign films she claimed she couldn’t live without.

  The aging process naturally continued unabated. Her mother resisted every step of the way. When she could no longer get out to the movies by herself, she finally got Mitsuki to buy her a VCR, a purchase Mitsuki had been putting off because of her mother’s hopeless inability to handle machinery. She explained over and over how the remote worked and wrote out the necessary steps in big letters, as for a kindergartner. With that piece of paper in hand, her mother was able to manage the controls. Then she kept them busy renting a continuous supply of videos for her. She also read voraciously, the way a goat eats paper, and books had to be bought. She still wanted to go to the theater, to go shopping, and to eat out, but such outings were impossible unless one or both of her daughters accompanied her. Pooling their resources made it less exhausting, so as far as possible they would both go along.