Inheritance from Mother

by Minae Mizumura

  Mitsuki and her sister bowed their heads. The doctor looked at his watch.

  “Time of death, seven twenty-three p.m.”

  I think that’s it: the doctor’s choice of words struck Mitsuki as peculiar and lingered long in her ears.

  THE UNDERTAKER’S MENU

  Day in and day out, she had been inwardly awed by and grateful for the nurses’ brisk professionalism. After her mother died, they were transformed into a different set of professionals: purifiers of the dead. Their faces bore a solemn gravity almost religious in nature. The family was shooed from the room.

  Yuji got the telephone number of a nearby funeral parlor from the clinic and placed a call, after which they all waited downstairs in the waiting room. Yuji picked up a magazine and read it. Jun, a young and overworked career woman, put in eyedrops and went back to her laptop. Natsuki and Mitsuki sat quietly.

  In less than an hour, a nurse came for them.

  Their mother had shrunk some ten centimeters in old age, but since she was lying down, the gray dress appeared to fit her perfectly. The nurse had applied powder and lipstick to her face. The sisters got out their own cosmetics pouches and lightly penciled in her eyebrows, adding a touch of gray eye shadow to match her dress and scarf. Mitsuki would have liked to outline her lips in bright red with a lip pencil, but she refrained.

  “She always hated the way her front teeth stuck out a little.”

  “I know. She thought it was her one flaw.”

  “Talk about self-confidence!”

  After that they put knee-high stockings on her. Both of them remembered from childhood that except when wearing a kimono, she always wore stockings. There was little purple cyanosis, but her once-slim legs were swollen beyond recognition.

  Eventually a pair of undertakers wearing black suits and circumspect expressions appeared and carried the body out to a waiting minivan. The family piled into Yuji’s Mercedes-Benz. The funeral parlor was modern and new inside and out, with a lobby suggestive of a decent but not grand hotel. Any hint of death had been completely eliminated. There was not even the scent of incense, in the old days a constant companion of the dead.

  The moment they settled down on the sofa in the lobby, Yuji, as the man representing the family, was the one to tell the undertakers, “No funeral.”

  Mitsuki still remembered the disgruntled look on the undertaker’s face at the time of her father’s death. But times had evidently changed. The younger of the two undertakers responded with a glibness that caught them by surprise: “Certainly. In that case, we have a simple plan that should suit you nicely.” With that, he produced a color flyer labeled “Serenity Plan.” It resembled a restaurant menu.

  Mortuary (per day) 10,500

  Casket (paulownia wood) 63,000

  Dry ice (per day) 8,400

  Pair of flower stands 31,500

  Stretcher car (daytime, 10 km) 12,600

  Hearse (standard vehicle) 18,900

  Cremation (classic service) 47,250

  Cinerary urn (porcelain) 10,500

  Waterproof sheet 5,250

  Administrative expenses   52,500

  Total ¥260,400

  Other items were listed as optional: crematorium staff gratuity, cremation certificate, extra urn for partial burial of remains.

  “Are more families skipping the funeral these days?” Mitsuki asked, curious.

  “I would say the market is polarized,” the younger undertaker answered courteously.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Some families, like yourselves, choose to forgo a funeral, and others choose a full-blown service with all the trimmings.”

  He sounded like a market analyst—or a caterer. Perhaps when the bereaved family was more outwardly grief-stricken, he changed his tone to match, and death acquired its proper solemnity.

  When all was ready, they were ushered into, of all things, a tatami room—somehow jarring in this otherwise modern facility. To Mitsuki’s further astonishment, there lying on the tatami was her mother’s corpse, head pointing north and a white cloth laid over the face in the traditional manner. She had always slept in a bed; Mitsuki could not recall ever having seen her recline on tatami. It was as if in death she had been forcibly dragged back to her starting point, a life lived on fraying mats. For someone whose lifelong motivation had been the pursuit of nameless dreams, this seemed a form of ridicule—and, at the same time, of consolation.

  “Aujourd’hui, maman est morte.”

  Back home, following a long telephone conversation with her sister, she got into bed and in the darkness spoke those French words for the first time in years. The taboo she had unknowingly imposed upon herself against uttering any French was gone. She tried saying the words in Japanese—those words she had wanted to speak aloud for such a very long time: “Today, Mother died.”

  Then, after taking her medicine as usual, she fell asleep in a world without her mother for the first time in her life.

  The remains were cremated two days later.

  Back when their father died, the sisters had been fiercely angry with their mother and chose for his memorial photograph a black-and-white one from his student days, taken long before he’d ever met her—before he’d met even his first wife. His face, framed by an old-fashioned stand-up collar and round spectacles, had looked heartrendingly young. What sort of future had he imagined for himself? He wore an expression not to be found in contemporary Japan, a mix of reserve and high hopes. In the crematorium, on a stand by the chamber door, the youthful photograph had seemed oddly out of place.

  They did not intend to choose any ordinary photograph for their mother either, but there were so many—being photographed having been a kind of hobby of hers—that they had trouble deciding. In the end they chose one from her thirties. She was standing outdoors with the two of them; they were holding hands in a circle, as if about to start dancing. The picture was in color, a rarity at the time. She was wearing a mauve kimono embroidered around the skirt with silver and gold and topped by a white wool chabaori jacket, one of the many she owned from her job with Auntie. The sisters had on matching navy dresses and white cardigans decorated with a scattering of little lace flowers set with pearllike beads—presents their father had brought back from America. Their mother looked sweetly maternal, her head tilted to one side as she clasped their hands. Theatrical as could be. The love of their father, who took the picture, was all the more strongly evident for his not being in it.

  They were fond of the picture, but Mitsuki wondered aloud if it wasn’t rather inappropriate for the purpose at hand. It showed their mother as not only young, but at play with her children. Natsuki had no qualms. “No, it’s perfect,” she declared. “I mean, that’s exactly the mother we would have wanted.” Her breezy indifference to convention sometimes took Mitsuki by surprise.

  What emerged from the furnace were bones so trifling they could scarcely believe their eyes. Strange to think that a woman with these measly bones could have wielded such a saucy tongue. The crematorium clerk ran a magnet over the heap, drawing out the various metal screws that had held her bones together.

  Her ashes filled the urn only halfway. Mitsuki got into Yuji’s car clutching the urn. Lingering heat warmed her lap.

  Straight off the next day, they had to begin dealing with the aftermath of her death. Mitsuki hesitated to contact Tetsuo’s parents. Their names were naturally marked with a double circle in her mother’s address book, and she felt bad not informing them, but if she did she would have to make clear that Tetsuo had been kept in the dark. She decided to say nothing for the time being.

  Exhausted, the sisters decided to postpone a small get-together in their mother’s memory until sometime after the New Year, around her birthday. She’d been born on February 11, a day celebrated in prewar Japan as Empire Day, the supposed anniversary of Emperor Jimmu’s accession to the throne back in the misty past. Her name, “Noriko,” was written using a character associated with the day. She used
to grumble, “Why couldn’t they have named me Kaoru or Naomi or something with a little more pizzazz?” When they urged people to “come dressed to the nines” in her honor, those who knew her well laughed. Many of them must have known about her abuse of their father but all responded graciously.

  It was during a lull in dealing with the aftermath of her mother’s death that the urge to go to that hotel by the lake resurfaced. When she told Natsuki her plans over the telephone, her sister sounded wistful.

  “How long are you going for?”

  Natsuki obviously wanted to join her, but didn’t quite dare say so. Mitsuki realized she needed to be away from her sister as well. She needed to be alone.

  “A while. I reserved a room for ten days.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  “I might want to get some work done, so I’ll take my laptop, but I want to be cut off from the world, so I’m leaving my cell phone behind.” “Oh, I see.”

  Mitsuki knew she wouldn’t be able to escape talking on the hotel room telephone to her sister, who would be in the soundproof piano room with her two cats.

  Before leaving, Mitsuki met Masako in Yotsuya for dinner at a Portuguese restaurant. Masako taught part time five days a week in various universities; weekend nights were the only times she could spare for a leisurely dinner. She lifted her bespectacled face from the menu and said, “God, you got old.”

  She liked to talk like a man. She always wore pants and used no makeup. Mitsuki had begun to suspect she was a lesbian.

  Over the soulful sound of a traditional fado, she added, “People age fast after menopause. Not that I’m one to talk.”

  They were the same age, but Masako had gone through menopause first. A year or two ago, on hearing that Mitsuki too had experienced the change of life, she had said over the telephone, “Life is sad. Menopause comes even to Mitsuki.”

  Now as they chatted, Mitsuki found herself relating how Tetsuo had gone off with a young woman. Masako’s familiar face in front of her, the mournful tones of the singing and guitar, the bean soup warming her from the inside, the pleasant tipsiness from cheap red wine, all inclined her to open up.

  Masako stared at her. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  Mitsuki said nothing about the two other women Tetsuo had been with during their marriage. She felt too embarrassed—perhaps less for herself than for Tetsuo’s sake.

  Masako knew all about Paris. “After the way he chased you around? That bastard!”

  “As you said, I got old, so there you are.”

  “Don’t be an idiot. What’re you gonna do?”

  “Not sure. That’s one reason I’ll be spending some time in Hakone, just to sort things out. The hotel looks right out on Lake Ashinoko.”

  “Don’t do anything dumb.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like jump in the lake.”

  A forgotten shadow flitted across her mind. Back in Paris, Masako had told her the story of a professor with a young girlfriend who asked his wife for a divorce only to wake up the next morning and find her dead, hanged, in a downstairs room. In her mind’s eye she briefly saw the wife’s body dangling from the ceiling. The professor had then taken a position at a different university and married his young woman. End of story.

  “Don’t be silly.” Mitsuki laughed and took another sip of wine. “Though, you know, there’s something nice and old-fashioned about offing oneself in a lake. ‘Entering the water,’ they used to call it.”

  “Does have a ring to it.”

  Mitsuki imagined the loneliness of the lake in winter, shining with a leaden hue.

  Part Two

  ROMANCE CAR

  It was nearly the middle of December when Mitsuki boarded the Odakyu limited express “Romance Car” bound for Hakone Yumoto.

  Relieved to have set off while it was still light out, she bought a bottle of hot green tea from the young woman pushing the cart down the aisle and after a sip or two turned to look out the window. To her surprise, below was Ring Road 8. They had already passed Chitose Funabashi Station. When she had taken the Romance Car in the past, she had caught a glimpse of the old station looking just as it had in her childhood, but now the line was an elevated four-track railway, and the station had been remodeled, making it hard to spot when they went by.

  Chitose Funabashi Station was a place full of memories—including some she didn’t actually remember.

  When she was about two, she used to wake up at dawn and pad into the tiny room where her grandmother lay sleeping. Then her grandmother would slip on wooden clogs and carry her piggyback out to the railway crossing to watch the trains go by. She had often been told this by her mother, and the image of an old woman standing morning after morning with a small child on her back, reaching behind to pat her while pointing out the trains as they went by, was at once a bit sad—wasn’t there anything else a grandmother of that era could show a two-year-old?—and heartwarming. Although she had no memory of that scene, imagining it always filled her with bittersweet nostalgia—all the more so since not only her mother but her father too had focused more attention on Natsuki.

  The train continued to speed west, smoothly and noiselessly, as if there were no rails underneath.

  Across the aisle sat four men with salt-and-pepper hair, facing each other. The two in window seats were playing with a miniature chess set. All four were drinking canned beer. They exuded the easygoing cheer of the newly retired. On the surface, not one of them appeared to have a care in the world. But Mitsuki’s bleak state of mind cast a shadow on everything in sight, making her wonder what sort of lives these men might actually be leading. When she was little, the adults she looked up to had all inspired trust; the possibility that they might be struggling with their own dark problems had never occurred to her.

  She turned her eyes back out the window.

  The scene lit by the sun’s lingering rays was ugly. A row of square concrete boxes resembling old-style public housing was followed by newly built, standardized houses in a minidevelopment. Every rooftop was set at the same angle, in accordance with the “right to sunlight” law. The effect was to further cheapen the landscape.

  They had already passed the station near which That Man, now a “perfectly ordinary granddad,” lived with his wife.

  After Mitsuki began reading modern classics of Japanese fiction, she had learned that this area, once known as Musashino, used to be green with woodlands, evoking the poetry of nature; but knowing that did nothing to lend charm to the sight of tiny suburban houses packed in so tightly that there was scarcely room to breathe.

  As a child, she had never even been aware that the land continued west of Chitose Funabashi, where she lived.

  The Odakyu line had always been the line that took her downtown to Shinjuku. On special days when she wore a big ribbon in her hair, she would change there to the Marunouchi subway line and head to Ginza in the heart of the city with her family. Taking the Odakyu line in the opposite direction, past Chitose Funabashi and deeper into the countryside, was unthinkable. She knew vaguely that heading away from the city there were bound to be other railway stations for a while, but in her mind these gave way to an endless stretch of rural scenery where eventually the rails disappeared into grassy fields.

  Her worldview shook when the Romance Car was revamped and reintroduced as the Music Box Car. As she played by the tracks, a far-off warning whistle would come gradually closer, a melodic tootle-oo, tootle-ee, tootle-oo. Then a streamlined shape something like an airplane nose would come into view, and red-and-gray cars would go hurtling past at lightning speed—away from Shinjuku. No train that stylish could possibly be headed for the sticks. It must be about to lift off from Earth and soar into space, an intergalactic railway bound for somewhere wonderful—the future. She and her friends loved the Music Box Car, but people living near the tracks must have complained about the noise. Before they knew it, the train sped by in silence, without its melodic whistle.

  Not until she was i
n junior high school did she learn that the Odakyu line went to Odawara Station, a former stage on the Tokaido, the great Edo-period highway. That explained its name: “Oda” was from “Odawara” and “kyu” was from kyuko, or express. The railway express to Odawara.

  This was the time of year when the day was shortest; dusk was already setting in. Lights began to come on in homes along the way. Little by little, there were more houses with a small garden attached, houses that had been rebuilt in a style neither Western nor modern in particular, but all much alike. Old-fashioned houses, the kind with tiled roofs and paper doors that let light shine through with a soft glow, were scarcely to be seen. The sky was a gloomy gray that conveyed the chill of winter.

  After they crossed the Tama River, she could make out evergreen trees in the dim light. Past the Tsurumi River, the green increased. Soon the elevated tracks came to an end, and they went past a series of grubby old stations that still retained a certain charm. By the Sagami River, pampas grass waved its silvery plumes. Watching as the feathery plumes were gradually swallowed in darkness, Mitsuki was again glad she had left while it was light out. The scenery rolling past her window now, coming into view only to disappear, touched her heart, despite her melancholy state, with a faint excitement.

  By the time the train pulled into Hakone Yumoto, the end of the line, it was almost completely dark outside. The station, which had evidently undergone renovation, was now shiny and new, with escalators, bearing little resemblance to the run-down place she’d been to with her mother years before. This could be any station in central Tokyo, she thought. Only when she stepped outside did she encounter the lonely night scene of a hot-springs town with few people stirring.

  A cold drizzle had begun to fall.

  She and her mother had gone from the station to the hotel by taxi but, according to the hotel home page, if you took a bus to a place called Moto-Hakone Port, a shuttle bus would come to pick you up at a port “where a pair of colorful sightseeing cruise ships lie at anchor, decked out like Caribbean pirate ships.” Looking up at the drizzle, she went to the bus stop and checked the timetable. The next bus was due in less than five minutes. A young woman with hair dyed reddish-brown was already waiting under the roof of the bus shelter, shoulders hunched.