Five minutes went by, and still no bus appeared. Mitsuki looked up from her watch to see an elderly couple, probably from the same train she’d been on, come struggling up with bags in tow, one large and one small. They were dressed well enough, but something in their faces and figures suggested a lifetime of hardship.
The old wife looked at the timetable. “Oh no, Papa, we missed it.”
The old husband replied, “Well, I warned you not to go to the bathroom at the station.” He did not sound accusatory.
The mildness of his tone must have been what prompted Mitsuki to speak up. “I’ve been waiting several minutes. The bus simply hasn’t come yet.”
They looked at her in evident surprise. She was wearing a black winter beret, tilted at an angle, and a woven coat that her slightly taller sister had given her reluctantly, saying, “Somehow this looks better on a shrimp like you.” She also had on high-heeled boots. Even her turn of phrase must have marked her as someone from a different world.
The old couple thanked her effusively, bowing from the waist like a pair of windup dolls.
Finally the bus arrived, and after the reddish-haired young woman got on, Mitsuki gestured to the couple to board ahead of her. They wouldn’t hear of it and only went on bowing. She felt awkward preceding her elders, but rather than prolong the moment with endless exchanges of politeness, she gave up and climbed aboard.
The bus tore recklessly along the twisting mountain road. The old couple sat huddled shoulder to shoulder. Local people got on and off. Eventually the young woman got off too.
After nearly forty minutes, the electronic sign at the front of the bus read MOTO-HAKONE. Mitsuki remembered that her destination, Moto-Hakone Port, was one stop after that. As she looked at the red lettering, thinking how confusing these place names were, the old couple hastily pushed the buzzer and got off, with many a bow in her direction. Did they go through life that way, continually bobbing up and down?
That pair from another era disappeared into the dark of night.
Mitsuki got off at the next stop, but the port was a mere blur in the rain. If the shuttle bus wasn’t waiting, you were supposed to telephone, according to the home page, but there was no public telephone. Regretting that she hadn’t brought her cell phone—they really had become indispensable—she looked around, and a little way ahead, across the street, saw a single bright spot: a convenience store. Outside, a pale-green public telephone gleamed in the light.
The shuttle bus soon arrived. The driver was silent. The fog deepened and the darkness grew blacker, creating the illusion in her mind that she was being borne off to another realm.
The illusion persisted even after she arrived at the hotel. She had made the reservation under her maiden name. When she announced herself at the reception desk, still with a sense of being not quite anchored to reality, the clerk behind the counter gave her a quick look, picked up the receiver, and said, “Madam Katsura is here.”
Out of nowhere two men in black suits appeared, as if they had been waiting; they bowed formally, hands against the sides of their trousers, and then handed her their business cards. She glimpsed the title “Assistant Manager” on one of them before being motioned with polite gestures to a table in a corner of the lobby. She sat down feeling somehow uneasy, though she had nothing to feel uneasy about. Then to her bewilderment she was presented with a pair of menus from the hotel restaurants, one offering Japanese cuisine and the other French. With a considerable show of embarrassment, they took turns explaining that while in the past the hotel had welcomed many long-term guests such as herself, today most people stayed only a night or two, and as a result the menu selections were rather limited. The lounge and annex café served only light meals and sweets. “If you notify the reception desk the day before, we can arrange to offer other dishes of your choice.”
So that’s what this was all about. Even so, such fuss seemed unwarranted. And all the while they apologized profusely for the inconvenience, they continued sending little glances her way. Their persistent attention felt just short of rude.
The bellhop, a young woman wearing a uniform with a small cap, led her toward her room.
“Are there only a few long-term guests?” Mitsuki asked as they headed down the long corridor.
“Almost none anymore.”
“So, only me?”
The bellhop smiled. “Actually, it so happens that several people will be staying from now till Christmas.” She looked at Mitsuki, still smiling.
THE LAKE SUNK IN DARKNESS
If even one long-term guest was unusual, then several at once seemed almost divinely ordained. “That’s quite a coincidence,” Mitsuki commented.
“Yes, there’s no record of anything like it on the computer. The manager is surprised.” The bellhop’s voice conveyed youthful excitement.
Mitsuki was shown to her room and, before the young woman left, asked if any of the others had yet arrived.
“Some have, some haven’t.”
What sort of people are they, she wanted to ask, but the question seemed too intrusive. It might be difficult to get a straight answer. She would find out soon enough.
The door was shut, and Mitsuki surveyed the room.
The inheritance from their mother had left her and Natsuki 36.8 million yen apiece. She could hardly believe she had that much money in her bank account; she would have to use it carefully and make it last. Her room here cost fifteen thousand yen per day, breakfast included, during their “single-room, single-occupant special campaign”—the cheapest deal available. The top-floor room was designed to look like a European garret with a slightly slanting ceiling, but fortunately it was spacious, like the room she had stayed in before.
Her suitcase had arrived ahead of her, sent by courier service along with a cardboard box packed with two-liter bottles of mineral water that she’d ordered from an online store. The humidifier she had requested over the telephone was on the desk, and beside it lay a coil of white cord—the Ethernet cable that she had also requested. Before making a reservation, she had double-checked that this old-fashioned hotel had an Internet connection in the rooms so that she could reread the emails between her husband and the woman. She was told they had wi-fi as well, perhaps to keep up with the new Hyatt Regency nearby. Changing the settings on her laptop would have been too much trouble, so she planned to connect with a cable as usual. The Ethernet cable that would provide entry to the emails looked sinister, like a slender poisonous snake.
Mitsuki took off her hat and, with her coat still on, crossed over to the window and flung it open. Cold air from the winter mountains flowed into the room. The blackness outside was of a depth and intensity unknown in the city. Every room in the hotel overlooked Lake Ashinoko, but the lake was now shrouded in darkness. The only illumination came from a scattering of garden lanterns, their glow hazy in the drizzle.
Mitsuki let out a long breath.
Her desk back home was still piled high with documents relating to her mother’s death. The library was jammed so full of cardboard boxes containing Mitsuki’s share of her mother’s clothes, dishes, old letters, and whatnot, that there was scarcely room to get around. She had set off on this trip telling herself that if she didn’t go somewhere and get away from it all, she could never be truly free of her mother and think things through the way she needed to. Yet now, face to face with the quiet darkness, none of this seemed to matter anymore. Her very existence seemed to fade and disappear, swallowed in the gloom.
The lake lying silent in the dark beyond was the same lake her grandmother had seen a hundred years before. On this hill overlooking Lake Ashinoko had stood the villa of a baron, a second- or third-generation member of a zaibatsu family. He had bought an immense tract of land, hired a Western architect to design a residence modeled on a Swiss lakeside villa, and invited people over for dinner parties almost every night. Her grandmother was sometimes included on the guest list, since she was married at the time to a prosperous man who was abo
ut the same age as the baron and baroness and had some sort of business dealings with them. She must have been nervous, a former geisha among so many Westernized, upper-class people, worried that she might commit a faux pas. How had she handled the knives and forks of gleaming silver? Later on she would leave her prosperous husband and elope with a penniless youth—Mitsuki’s grandfather.
Her grandmother had in her long life experienced everything from virtual slavery to luxury and pomp to gritty poverty and more, but the dinner parties at the villa seemed to have left an indelible impression. In her strong Osaka dialect, she would reminisce to her daughter, Mitsuki’s mother, “That house was built way out in the mountains. It was so lonely, you’d have thought a fox might come out and play tricks. But everything was in the style of Over There.” (“Over There” meant the Western world.) “I couldn’t eat my food in peace. Gobs of meat, and it stunk to high heaven!” Like others born in the Meiji period, she would eat chicken or duck, but any other meat she regarded with a prejudiced eye, based on the ancient taboo on eating four-legged creatures, and avoided when possible.
Mitsuki’s mother had grown up in an Osaka row house hearing such talk. Yet only late in life, after the bicycle accident that aged her overnight, did she say that she wanted to visit the Hôtel du Lac—the hotel built on the site of the baron’s villa. Mitsuki, with the memory of her father’s lonely death fresh in her mind, had been angry and appalled that her mother would suggest such a thing, yet in the end she had gone along on the trip, in large part, she now realized, because she herself had been curious about the place.
That visit also had been in the wintertime.
According to the pamphlet they’d been given at the reception desk, the Hôtel du Lac had been redesigned more than once during its long history. Around the time the Music Box Car made its appearance, the hotel was a chalet with a red peaked roof, a popular honeymoon destination for couples during that period of heady economic growth. When Mitsuki as a little girl listened to the Romance Car pipe tootle-oo, tootle-ee as it flew by, there would have been several blushing newlywed couples on board. That chalet had grown old and undergone major reconstruction, resulting in the present hotel, designed to suggest an imaginary French château.
Over thirty years had already passed since the last reconstruction.
After lingering awhile by the window, visualizing the lake as her grandmother had seen it a century before, Mitsuki closed the window gently so as not to disturb the peace of the mountain night and then went downstairs, still wearing her coat. She intended to go to the Japanese-style restaurant for dinner, as that sounded a little more casual than the other. The moment she stepped inside, a tall, square-shouldered waitress wearing a kimono came up to her with a broad smile. She looked like a college student, Mitsuki thought.
“Welcome, Madam Katsura.”
Did the entire staff know who she was?
As it turned out, the restaurant offered chiefly the traditional multicourse kaiseki style of Japanese haute cuisine. She didn’t feel like eating something so elaborate on her own, so instead she ordered an assortment of dishes she didn’t usually make at home, such as simmered head of bream.
Just then she noticed the elderly pair from the bus entering the restaurant and being led to a neighboring table. They were accompanied by a couple perhaps in their late thirties. The old man and woman recognized her, widening their eyes in momentary surprise before once again bowing politely.
“We got off at the wrong stop,” the husband said, scratching his bald head in embarrassment. Just as she had suspected, the similarity in names between Moto-Hakone and Moto-Hakone Port was a stumbling block for tourists.
The four of them sat down.
“Really, I don’t how we could have been so careless!”
“Never mind, Mom, you’re here, and that’s the important thing.”
Mitsuki continued to catch fragments of dinner table conversation between the old couple, their son, and his plump, amiable wife. They must have placed their order in advance, for without further ado, drinks and sakizuke, the first course of a kaiseki meal, were brought to their table.
“It’s a good thing we left the children home after all,” said the young wife, looking around.
“Right,” said her husband. “It’s not exactly a family restaurant.”
His mother nodded vigorously. “You can say that again!”
Every new course—soup, sashimi, hassun platter, a grilled dish—produced a chorus of exclamations from the two women: “This is so fancy!” “Oh my goodness, there’s more. Would you believe it?” From the level of excitement, Mitsuki could picture the family’s everyday life, and also she sensed that each one was eager to make this a happy occasion for the others.
When she had finished her struggle with the bream head and was wiping her fingers on the small damp towel provided, the final course, rice seasoned and cooked with various ingredients, was just being served at the neighboring table in a round wooden container. Everyone protested they couldn’t eat another bite.
“No problem,” said the young husband. “Let’s just leave it then.”
“And let all this food go to waste?” His mother sounded scandalized.
Not the sort who belongs in a hotel like this. No sooner did the unworthy thought rise unbidden in her mind than Mitsuki swiftly suppressed it. This sort of mental correction was something she had done time and again since she was old enough to remember.
When the studentlike waitress appeared, the mother looked up and timidly asked, “Could you possibly make this into rice balls or gruel for breakfast?”
The waitress, momentarily confused, responded after a short pause. “In the morning we have a different menu, and all the food is freshly prepared, so don’t worry about leaving that behind.” A considerate young woman, she smiled graciously.
“Sorry for letting all this good food go to waste.”
“Not at all.”
The son and his wife exchanged quick, embarrassed glances, but said nothing.
Mitsuki got up and, with a nod to the traditional old couple and their gentle son and daughter-in-law, headed for the exit. Outside the restaurant, she could look down on a spacious lounge with a high ceiling. Before her a staircase led to the lounge and down a corridor to one side were the elevators to take her back to her room.
She hesitated.
If she went back to her room, the laptop computer was waiting in her suitcase, wrapped in a thick cashmere shawl. All she had to do was connect it to the white Ethernet cable, and she would be able to enter her husband’s Gmail account and open the door to a world where words hurtful to her flew back and forth. Having come this far, she had no choice but to do so.
Looking down at the lounge where a tall artificial Christmas tree stood covered in silver and gold decorations, she continued to waver until she saw a blazing fire in a hearth far away. This was still her first night here. The emails could wait.
The lounge contained barely a dozen people. She settled in a sofa by the fireplace and ordered a glass of red wine, then stared absently into the fire. As she watched the ever-changing dance of the flames, she forgot the passage of time. Long ago, in her childhood, her grandmother used to go out to the backyard with a cloth wrapped around her head and burn leaves in a bonfire; even then, the kaleidoscopic flames had held a strange power and fascination for her.
How long did she remain spellbound by the flames? Returning to the present with a start, she looked around and saw an old white-haired woman sitting a ways off. She stiffened. The hair, the makeup expertly applied…no, it couldn’t be! Hadn’t she sealed her mother’s vexatious spirit in that outsized urn, along with her ashes, before she finally left Tokyo behind? Could this be her mother’s ghost, tagging along? Fantasy and reality mingled in her eyes, where the afterimage of the fire still lingered.
Next to the old woman sat a conspicuously handsome young man. Not yet thirty, she thought. She sensed intuitively that they too were here for a lo
ngish stay. What might their relationship be? Her gaze went back to the old woman—who, to her surprise, was looking intently at her.
DUST
It was a long time since sleep had been nectar.
For the last few years, she would wake up feeling stiffer than when she went to bed. This morning was no different.
Her light sleep had been interspersed with memories of the evening before: fleeting visions of jumbled scenery glimpsed from the Romance Car window, the constantly bowing old couple, garden lanterns glowing hazily in the darkness and rain. The ever-changing flames in the fireplace were there, too—and the old lady who’d been staring at her, and the gorgeous young man at her side. Back when she was well, scenes and figures she encountered while traveling would pleasantly stimulate her brain as she fell asleep, filling her with eager longing for the morning and new paths to the unknown. Now such scenery and figures only rattled her nerves, and waking in the morning was no longer pleasurable.
Conscious of how stiff she was, Mitsuki lay faceup in bed.
She checked her watch. Not yet seven. She laid a hand on her belly—an unconscious habit now—and felt how appallingly cold it was. She should go to the hot spring to warm herself, but the thought of getting up, combing her hair, putting on a civil face, and going downstairs seemed like too much trouble. On the other hand, staying the way she was, face up in bed in this dim room, would only fray her nerves and stiffen her back muscles all the more. She’d been grinding her teeth, too.
Morning after morning might go by in this fashion, and slowly she’d turn into a sallow, sullen-faced old bag.
She wanted to go back to sleep, but now she was wide awake. Grudgingly, she got out of bed, went over to the window, and opened the curtains. She drew a sharp breath. Darkness had blotted out the lake last night, but here it was before her now, placid and glorious. Tall cedars swayed in the breeze at the far end of the garden, and ripples on the lake sparkled silver in the rays of the newly risen sun. It was true, just as the ancient poetess had written: in winter, early morning was the best time of day. Those famous lines from the Pillow Book floated through her mind: “In spring it is the dawn…in summer, the night…In autumn, the evening, when the glittering sun sinks close to the edge of the hills…In winter, the early morning is beautiful indeed.”
Inheritance from Mother Page 21