Inheritance from Mother

by Minae Mizumura

  Nudged by the sunshine, Mitsuki roused herself and began to unpack methodically. Last night she had taken out only her pajamas. Now she spread the contents of her suitcase on the bed, hanging up some clothes in the closet, putting others away in drawers, and lining items up on the bathroom counter. To mark the end of a particularly difficult year of her life, she had brought with her the nicest things she had—the best of everything, not just coat, shoes, and outfits, but underwear too, along with necklaces, earrings, and scarves. Her makeup pouch bulged with extra eyeliner, eye shadow, mascara. She had packed these things intending less to enjoy them than to remind herself not to wallow in misery.

  Usually when she traveled she took along several books to read, but this time she had brought only the one she’d been reading at her dying mother’s bedside, along with a French-Japanese dictionary. She was here to think, not to read.

  She looked around the freshly organized room.

  Perhaps to lighten the travail ahead, she ought to have taken a suite. Or perhaps instead of being here looking out on the small, almost toylike Lake Ashinoko she should be reveling in the grandeur of the Pacific Ocean from aboard a luxury liner with the horizon stretching all around her for 360 degrees, as far as she could see. Her inheritance seemed to make possible almost any form of luxury she could imagine herself indulging in. But, however she might pamper herself, the fact remained that she was a woman in her fifties whose husband was leaving her for some young thing.

  By the time she finished a light breakfast in the French restaurant, it was past eight. On her way back to her room, she stopped by the front desk to say that she’d be working in her room all day and wouldn’t be needing maid service. She planned to order lunch from room service and eat in her room, she added, unable to get over the feeling that the entire staff was somehow intent on her every move.

  “Very well.” The man at the desk gave her a searching look.

  Mitsuki stood in front of the elevator trying not to think of the task ahead. Nearly a year had passed since the shock of discovering the tissue case—the tiny flower garden—hidden in Tetsuo’s drawer. All she knew was that she couldn’t go on avoiding the reality she had so far kept at arm’s length.

  Back in her room, she headed straight for the desk, turned on her laptop, and entered the password to her husband’s email. Characters danced before her eyes.

  The row of emails in the inbox brought a deep, sickening feeling to the pit of her stomach. These messages that Tetsuo and the woman had exchanged would be preserved forever in Google archives—wherever and however vast they might be—far beyond Mitsuki’s death and the deaths of the two writers. In years past, a person died, and eventually all those with memories of him or her also died, bringing about the complete erasure of that person’s existence. Just as the human body returned to dust, mingling with atoms of the natural world, a person’s existence would return to nothingness.

  How very clean.

  Now, as if in belated punishment for the invention of writing, any message once posted on the Internet was immortal. Words as numerous as the dust of the earth would linger forever in their millions and trillions and quadrillions and beyond. Here at the beginning of the twenty-first century a woman in her mid-fifties named Mitsuki Hirayama was about to be abandoned by her husband, a fact that would remain on record till the end of time.

  What humiliation.

  Mitsuki looked at the backs of her hands hovering over the keyboard—their light brown spots and blue veins. Hands normal for a woman her age. Hands of a housewife who stood at the sink day after day, washing dishes. Not that she’d ever been a model housewife, or even close. Tetsuo had said he didn’t want children either, so she had never given birth, never raised a child. And though now her eyes were drawn irresistibly to little ones roaming the park on unsteady feet, the sight bringing an involuntary smile to her face, she hadn’t been attracted to children in the least when she was young. Yet as if to chastise her for the choice she’d made, in the end much of her time and strength had been spent looking after her failing parents. That in itself might have caused her to neglect her marriage.

  All the same, did that allow him to cast her aside for a younger woman? Her father had left his first wife, poor thing, but not for a younger woman. To dump your wife like this was beyond words. What greater insult could there be? Tetsuo was the lowest of the low, a scumbag, a miserable excuse for a man. What he was doing was rotten, depraved. Saying the words to herself was curiously satisfying.

  When she got together with other married women her age, the conversation would inevitably drift to complaints about their husbands. Mostly the offenses were harmless enough: he didn’t remember what day which kind of recyclable trash went out, he bought all sorts of little contraptions when there was nowhere to put them, his presence around the house was stifling…But if word got out that someone had left his wife for a younger woman, everyone’s face would turn rigid. It was an offense of a totally different order. If Tetsuo left Mitsuki, he would tumble from the exalted rank of “wonderful husband” and be treated as a “miserable excuse for a man.” She would become the target of all their pity.

  Oh, the mortification.

  On top of the cliché of being left for a younger woman there was this new cliché of tracing how it all came about, through the trail left on electronic devices. All over the world there must be a host of women sitting before screens large and small, staring at their artificial light, forced to confront evidence of their husband’s philandering. And there would always be more such women.

  Mitsuki took a deep breath, then began tapping keys on the keyboard and opening email after email. Sentences she hadn’t seen since that first day rolled by. She came across the woman’s remark that had so wounded her: “Pathetic. I have to say, I feel bad for her.”

  She opened the attachment and looked again at the snapshot. She was sitting at a table in a restaurant in Shinjuku Park Hyatt Hotel, where for the last dozen years (ever since That Man exited the scene) the five of them—Tetsuo, Yuji, Natsuki, she, and her mother—used to go every spring for a joint celebration of all their birthdays. By chance, the woman’s request to see the faces of the Katsura clan had come just after that year’s party, so Tetsuo had sent her a photograph taken by a waiter. He hadn’t done it to be mean. He could not have known how she and Natsuki had wailed over the telephone:

  “Oh God, look at us!”

  “What a pair of old biddies we’ve become.”

  “Look at the neck and shoulders on us!”

  “Ugh.”

  However harmless his intention, and even though she had seen the woman’s remark once before, its cruelty—all the more devastating because it was true—hit home.

  But as she went on reading, Mitsuki began making discoveries. On this second time through, she began to see the words in a different light; they painted a different reality. The first time, deep in shock, she had merely slid her eyes over the surface. Her frozen mind had missed key points. This time, as she perused the correspondence in a calmer state, things she had missed before swam into view—dimly at first, then with unmistakable clarity.

  For one thing, the woman was not as young as the flowery tissue case had led her to believe. And Tetsuo…yes, he was committed to the relationship, had promised to get a divorce—their plans were based on that assumption—yet something in his tone conveyed the impression that he might yet wriggle out of it. Mitsuki sensed that the woman knew it, too.

  Mitsuki faltered, realizing the picture was rather different from what she had imagined.

  ROWS OF NUMBERS

  “One day soon I’m going to wake up and find I’m forty.”

  Somehow Mitsuki had missed the urgency of this statement before, but now she realized that the woman was in her late thirties—not exactly what people usually meant when they spoke of a “young woman.”

  No matter how sharp a dresser Tetsuo was, no twenty-something was likely to make a play for a man in his mid-fifties—wa
s that the reason his “young woman” wasn’t all that young? Or was he just too smart to let an ingenue lead him by the nose? The woman’s hair must be fuller and shinier than Mitsuki’s, her flesh more toned. Even so, a woman in her late thirties was a totally different creature from one in her twenties.

  The late thirties was a tricky time of life. Clothes and accessories could make you look younger than you were. If Mitsuki accompanied Tetsuo to a nice restaurant serving fine contemporary cuisine, they would look like any ordinary middle-class, middle-aged couple fond of eating out; but beside this young-looking woman, he would appear dapper, sexy. In a few years the magic of clothes and accessories would wear off, and then she would only look like someone trying to look young.

  Mitsuki looked at the other woman from the perspective of a twenty-year-old secure in the springtime of youth, saw her as “pretty old,” and smiled derisively—savoring a sensation she knew to be awfully petty.

  That explained why the woman was so hell-bent on settling matters—it was her age.

  But even if he’d been goaded into it, Tetsuo was seriously contemplating divorce. He had promised to use the year in Vietnam to broach the topic with Mitsuki. Yet he somehow was dragging his heels—which only spurred the woman to greater determination.

  She was a freelance magazine editor of some kind; an interview with Tetsuo had sparked their romance. Professionally, she was probably more used to sending email than texting or tweeting, and she wrote well—her emails were sprinkled with well-turned phrases that under other circumstances would have been amusing. She had a sharp mind and confidence in her looks. Plus, her assessment of the situation was admirably realistic.

  What struck Mitsuki on this read-through was the level of detail in her discussion of finances. For the vast majority of people contemplating divorce—all but the very rich and the destitute—the process meant scraping together paltry assets and figuring out how to split them up and go on living. The woman knew Tetsuo’s total worth—annual salary, savings, and stocks—as well as the balance on their mortgage and Mitsuki’s approximate income, even how much she had saved in the Japan Post Bank for her own pension. And although talk of a formal separation still lay ahead, she had worked out how much of his assets Tetsuo would need to part with for a divorce by mutual consent, the easiest kind. Mitsuki looked at the rows of numbers, stupefied.

  “If you’d divorced her when we first met,” the woman commented, “we wouldn’t have to hand over this much.”

  The law had been revised several years ago, entitling an ex-wife to half of her former husband’s pension for the years of their marriage. For marriages that had taken place after the enactment of that law, entitlement was automatic. For marriages predating the law, she could receive an amount satisfactory to both parties, up to but not more than fifty percent of his pension. This was called “consensual division.” In case consensus couldn’t be reached, family court would decide on the allocation. This was called “pension splitting.” The retirement bonus—a substantial sum—was subject to distribution to the ex-wife under the same terms. Those few women of Mitsuki’s generation who worked after marriage by and large took part-time jobs that didn’t provide any pension or retirement bonus. Mitsuki was no different. For women like her, this change in the law was a boon, but right now she felt less grateful than dizzy from the array of unfamiliar words.

  Life, it seemed, required people to learn not only technical terms like “gastrostomy” and “dysphagia” but also “consensual division,” “pension splitting,” and “retirement bonus allocation.”

  Retirement age at Tetsuo’s university was seventy, more than ten years in the future for him. Yet the woman had already worked out how much his retirement bonus was likely to be and how much of that Mitsuki was likely to demand. Not only that, she was urging Tetsuo to give Mitsuki the full amount ahead of time, without waiting for his retirement.

  Since they had been married for almost thirty years, that would come to at least ten million yen.

  Mitsuki had a fixed income of her own, which was a source of relief to the woman. If she’d had no income and was unable to be self-supporting, Tetsuo would be required to continue supporting her for some years, but thankfully that wouldn’t be necessary. More worrisome was the possibility that Tetsuo might be forced to pay a hefty cash penalty to compensate for his behavior, since they were divorcing because he’d become involved with another woman.

  “If this went to court, my nest egg could get scrambled too!” the woman wrote humorously, but clearly with genuine concern.

  Logically, she said, the most advantageous course would be for him to seek a divorce without revealing her existence. But realistically, since he got along well with his wife, it would seem odd if he suddenly brought up divorce while in Vietnam. If he made no mention of his involvement with her to avoid a financial loss, then his wife, mystified by his sudden decision, might refuse to grant him a divorce, and he might well land in court. A better idea would be to let on that he had acquired a mistress while in Vietnam. And to make it easier to obtain a divorce by mutual consent, he should offer to split his assets down the line.

  Mitsuki was overwhelmed by the woman’s passion and logic. Her intention was clear: to avoid being greedy and get Tetsuo to go through with the divorce before he changed his mind. Her family background seemed a notch above his, but like him, she was the only one among all her relatives to have graduated from college. Judging from her age, she must have graduated after the Gender Equality in Employment Act was passed, but rather than take full-time employment somewhere she had alternated working for a few years with spending time abroad. Once, for whatever reason, she had gone to live in Tuscany. She had taken courses in Italian and studied to become a wine sommelier. It was a way of investing in herself—or of making the most of the freedom enjoyed by single women, who retained the final option of marriage as a form of lifelong employment.

  In her thirties, she’d evidently worked furiously for several years. The kind of magazines she had worked for wasn’t clear, but the pay was decent and also she’d been living with her parents, so she managed to set aside a nest egg. Yet she was tired of the need to constantly sell herself and had started to cut back; she saw the coming interlude in Vietnam as a chance to quit work entirely. “I don’t want to go on this way forever.”

  Two years ago she’d moved into a cheap single apartment handy for trysts. “It’s your fault I’ve been eating away at my nest egg,” she wrote before concluding. “Anyway, please use the time in Vietnam to settle things once and for all.”

  When Mitsuki finished going through the emails, she felt empty and numb. This time, there were no tears. What hadn’t changed was her sense that the woman truly loved Tetsuo. As was only natural for a woman her age, she’d had a number of lovers, some of them married, but Tetsuo, she said, was the only man she had ever wanted to settle down with. Even if she was motivated in part by fear of ending up old and alone, there was real love there.

  Mitsuki sighed and guiltily exited her husband’s email.

  She looked at her watch. Past one already.

  She ordered a ham sandwich and a pot of tea from room service, then went into the bathroom and, standing in front of the polished mirror, reapplied her lipstick. A woman who looked piteously crushed stared back at her.

  The sandwich and tea arrived in twenty minutes. The uniformed steward who brought the order looked around the room, taking in the opened laptop on the desk, and gave Mitsuki’s face a furtive look. Had he been ordered to spy on the solitary woman locked in her room, refusing maid service? Or was she overreacting out of a sense of guilt at having just finished reading words not meant for her eyes?

  He set the tray on the small round table by the window. She sat in the armchair and looked outside, where sunlight from high overhead shone on the hotel garden and the lake beyond. The air seemed to have warmed up a little; the waves were reflecting dazzling light as before.

  While eating her sandwich Mits
uki tried to focus on what was nagging at her. Tetsuo was definitely planning on divorce. If he were interested in parading around with a younger woman only to satisfy his vanity, he’d have contented himself with a fling. But why this woman, of all people? That array of figures spoke volumes about how she must have carved out a life for herself in constant consultation with her pocketbook. Yet Tetsuo’s other love interests, beginning with his first crush in high school, then his girlfriends in college and graduate school, and his two previous mistresses, not to mention Mitsuki herself, had all been from a world of relative privilege. He himself had admitted wryly to consistency in that respect. Now he was about to divorce Mitsuki for this woman, so unlike the rest of them, even knowing that he would become poorer and would have to give up his dream of a condominium in the city. (The woman’s nest egg couldn’t possibly amount to much.) Tetsuo—the same Tetsuo who so appreciated the comforts and glamor that money could buy—was going to make this woman his wife.

  Mitsuki marveled at this, struck by how little she seemed to mean to Tetsuo and also by the glimpse of a Tetsuo she had never known. Finding out about this unsuspected side of him was like a slap in the face.

  And yet somewhere inside, he was hesitating. What could be holding him back? She considered this, and reached a theory so tawdry that she felt ashamed for both of them.