Perhaps Tetsuo’s desire to relocate wasn’t all that strange…
Mitsuki tried telling herself this.
With the matter still unresolved, it was soon time for Tetsuo’s first sabbatical, and as he wanted to live in California, they went to the University of California, Berkeley, for a year.
For Mitsuki it wasn’t much of a vacation. Now that their mother had basically left their father’s care in her and her sister’s hands, Natsuki looked resentful and begged her to come back now and then. There was always more paperwork to do, and leaving that and all the visits to the hospital up to her sister not only made her feel a bit guilty but a bit uneasy as well, so with the understanding that her mother and sister would help with the travel expenses, she promised to come back to Tokyo once every couple of months. When she did, she would find that her mother had seldom visited her father, although she made excuses to see Mitsuki and tried to be ingratiating.
After the sabbatical, all thought of purchasing a condominium in the center of the city was driven from Mitsuki’s mind. To begin with, her father came down with pneumonia almost as if he had been waiting for her to come back, and she had to take a room in a business hotel near the hospital. Then came that infuriating telephone call from her mother prompting her to write a letter threatening to cut off all ties—and the day the letter arrived, her mother was struck by a bicycle.
It was just after her mother’s hospitalization that a “rather nice offer” came Mitsuki’s way. The timing could not have been worse. The same professor who had found part-time teaching jobs for her had telephoned: “Listen to this, Mitsuki.” There’d been a lilt in his voice. He always looked cheerful, but from the sound of his voice he had to be looking more cheerful than ever. “I have a rather nice offer for you.”
There was talk of putting out a new Japanese translation of Madame Bovary in paperback. He himself was getting on in years and had other projects he needed to finish, so rather than do it himself he wanted to recommend Mitsuki for the job and limit his participation to writing an afterword. The publisher, who couldn’t very well reject his recommendation, had agreed on condition that she first submit a sample translation of chapter one. Also, since they wanted to keep the project secret from other publishing houses, she would have only two years to complete the translation.
In mingled joy and consternation, Mitsuki had requested a day to think it over.
That night when Tetsuo came back and she told him excitedly about the offer, he was frustratingly casual. “You should do whatever you want.” That was all he had to say. He shared neither her excitement nor her pride—after all, the professor had handpicked her for this opportunity. It was as if Tetsuo saw, or chose to see, no significance whatever in his wife’s being specially singled out.
A half-forgotten picture rose in Mitsuki’s mind: the spacious entry hall in a luxury condominium building smack in the center of the city.
TETSUO’S FIRST FLING
That night Mitsuki had lain awake beside Tetsuo, her spirits low.
She lacked the confidence to take on a large translation project with a firm time limit while continuing to teach. Her mother would soon be out of the hospital and needing extra care. Her father had only just recovered from his bout with pneumonia. Her sister, with her convenient chronic illness, pitiable as it might be, could not be relied on. Mitsuki had just returned from a yearlong absence and was hardly in a position to ask for another year off. The only way for her to accept the translation job would be to quit teaching altogether. But if she said she wanted to quit teaching, how would Tetsuo react? He probably wouldn’t openly object, but he certainly wouldn’t like it. If she took on the translation while continuing to teach and then couldn’t finish it in the allotted time, the professor would lose face.
Tetsuo lay asleep next to her, his breathing slow and deep. To her ears it sounded like the heavy breathing of an utter stranger. She lay for a long time, listening.
The following day, Mitsuki called the professor. Unable to keep the sadness out of her voice, she explained the situation and expressed her regret.
“I see.” He conveyed the disappointment that she had feared.
Ever since, she had turned her back on the French language. At the time, she had laid the blame for her decision not on Tetsuo but on her demanding mother. That same day she had gone to see her mother in the hospital, and the moment she stepped into the room her mother had said, “You look a sight.”
Mitsuki ignored this, turned her back, and was stocking the small refrigerator in the room with delicacies when her mother added, “You know, you could put on a little makeup.”
She spun around. “Who’s got time for makeup!”
Her mother swiftly backtracked. “Poor Mitsuki, you’re worn out. I’m so sorry all this had to happen.”
You’re sorry? Look at you, having to use the potty and still giving me orders, wanting morsels from the food counters at Isetan. How about laying off if you’re sorry? Right there in front of Mitsuki, her monster mother lay in bed. Her mother, who had always done exactly as she pleased in life so that now Mitsuki, her daughter, couldn’t live the life she wanted.
When that night Tetsuo heard about how she had turned down the professor’s offer, he poured her a glass of light beer. “If it makes you feel any better,” he said comfortingly, “steady part-time teaching jobs aren’t all that easy to come by. Yours pays pretty well, and it’s not very demanding either.”
He knew what he was talking about.
Unlike Mitsuki, who taught only two days a week, Tetsuo sometimes was busy nearly every day. Besides faculty meetings, there was a succession of other meetings as well. During entrance exam season he would leave early in the morning, his face a mask of tension, and stay on campus until late at night. Mitsuki appreciated the difficulty of working for a living, and thought it selfish of her to want to be the one to stay at home and do as she pleased. Her guilt over allowing family troubles to sap her energy further inclined her to respect his wishes.
There was nothing she could do about it. Her mother was her mother and would go on sucking her energy dry. Mitsuki tried to resign herself but was still vaguely discontent. What about that night in the garret in Paris, surrounded by tiny candle flames like a million blazing stars, when Tetsuo had promised her so much? Hadn’t he been promising, more than anything else, to put her wishes first if she married him? Why had all those bright candle flames ever gone out?
At this critical time, knowing Mitsuki was saddled with her aging parents, Tetsuo did not reach out a helping hand.
Why?
After Mitsuki turned down the “rather nice offer,” Tetsuo’s hankering for a condominium in the heart of Tokyo took on new meaning in her mind, forcing her to reluctantly ask herself: the man she’d married in such raptures—what sort of man was he? Was he just another selfish creature, the kind that grows on trees? Could such a thing be possible?
Not long after that, Tetsuo had his first extramarital fling.
Mitsuki had left for work, then run back home to get something she’d forgotten. Tetsuo, unaware of her presence, was on the phone chattering gaily to someone—a woman, no doubt. She stood stock-still, listening, then burst into the room—and when she saw him gasp, fled back outside. However fast she ran, she was afraid he might catch up with her before she reached the station, so on the way she hailed a taxi.
That night, when she came home after her classes, Tetsuo was already there. Ignoring him, she tossed her big suitcase on the double bed, purposely banging it around in the process, and packed it with clothes, underwear, nightgown, shoes, and makeup. While she did so, it occurred to her that this sort of scene often came up in Hollywood movies. Why did American women just throw everything into a suitcase, even if they were angry? Was it only in the movies, or did they really pack that haphazardly? Mitsuki was not especially methodical for a Japanese, but at least she took time to fold her clothes properly and lay them carefully on top of her nightgown and underwe
ar. Her dirty laundry she put into a plastic bag. She packed her course materials too. She was damned if she’d go live with her mother, who was just out of the hospital and hobbling around on crutches. Instead she’d move in with Masako, who was divorced and raising her daughter in a cheap apartment.
To this day Mitsuki wasn’t sure what she’d been planning to do next. Reality had felt unreal; while rushing around she’d felt as if she were watching the movements of someone else in a dream. The intensity of her shock, the depth of her rage, showed the love she still must have felt for him—and not only for him, but also for her life.
Tetsuo, too, roamed around the apartment in tears. Finally when she put on her heels and stood in the entranceway at the door, he came, knelt down, and clasped her legs tightly from behind. Through her stockings she felt his tears on her calves.
Half an hour later as Mitsuki lay stretched out on the bed, her emotions now calmer, his excuses began. “I kept telling her we had to end it.” He covered her with a down quilt so she wouldn’t catch cold and was reclining beside her on top of the quilt with his arms folded above his head. The pungent smell of his armpit came to her. It was a smell she had learned to love in Paris, sweet yet vaguely animalistic.
The other woman was three years his senior, the wife of a colleague in the International Studies Department. After entering an arranged marriage and bearing a couple of children, she had lived an uneventful life until she accompanied her husband on a faculty study tour of South America, thus meeting Tetsuo and, she said, falling in love for the first time. Without Tetsuo, her first and probably last love, she couldn’t go on.
“Every time I said we needed to end it, she would sob hysterically, and I couldn’t cut her off.”
Mitsuki nodded, blowing her nose.
Such things no doubt happened. Tetsuo was tenderhearted, so it would have been hard for him to break it off. The gaiety in his voice as he’d spoken on the telephone still lingered in her ears, but she willingly accepted his excuse.
If she’d left him then, when she was considerably younger, she might have found someone else. She could have taken a full-time teaching position and made her own way. But at the time, the thought of divorce never crossed her mind. The two of them had a good cry together and ended up closer than before. After that had come her father’s death, which she alone had witnessed, and Tetsuo’s tenderness then had been a comfort.
And yet, after her discovery of his first fling, something was irrevocably altered.
From that time on, little by little she began to feel awkward around him, and without being aware of it she stopped making mental excuses for him. She even took a perverse pleasure in that awkwardness he aroused in her, and she began allowing herself to look at him from a certain distance. It was as if poisonous shoots from the tree of knowledge had begun to spring up in the soil.
His other fling came several years later. She eventually learned that it began during his second sabbatical on the Okinawan island of Ishigaki. She went with him, but by then her mother had become a concern. Approaching eighty, she was heavily dependent on Mitsuki, and to leave her in Natsuki’s hands for a whole year seemed cruel to both her mother and her sister. In addition to calling her mother every night, she had returned alone to Tokyo for a month during summer vacation when the Shimazaki clan went to the coast and again during the winter holidays when her mother wanted to be with family.
Just after Tetsuo’s sabbatical, one night past midnight as they lay curled in bed, reading, the phone rang. Fearing that something might have happened to her mother, Mitsuki picked up the telephone. She froze on hearing a woman’s voice say, “May I please speak to Tetsuo?”
He took the phone with a calm expression.
She had locked herself in her room, the woman said, and was about to slash her wrists. Her parents were asleep. Once she hung up, she was going to pull the phone out of the wall so he couldn’t call her back. Tetsuo sent for an ambulance and with his usual presence of mind—a presence of mind that never failed to amaze Mitsuki—asked that the driver pull up to the woman’s house without sounding his siren and alerting the neighborhood. Then he grabbed a taxi and rushed to her house.
Flustered, Mitsuki had helped him get on his way with all possible speed.
This woman was a year older than Tetsuo. Her parents, tired of seeing her loll around the house, overcome with ennui, had sent her off to Okinawa to visit her married brother, a mangrove researcher at Ryukyu University. She and Tetsuo met that summer while Mitsuki was in Tokyo, and although he supposedly made it clear that he had no intention of ever leaving his wife, she’d pursued him even after coming back to Tokyo. Her parents, rather than storming irately into his apartment as they might have done, instead apologized to Tetsuo. Was this because—as he must have known—their daughter was no impressionable young thing but a pitiable creature with a long history of wrist slashing?
Mitsuki took one more downward step on the staircase of life.
TELEVISION AND THE EYE OF GOD
A “ladies’ man” was a man who was fond of and attentive to women. Tetsuo was a ladies’ man in that sense, and yet somehow the phrase didn’t seem an accurate description of him. A ladies’ man might easily become a “skirt chaser,” someone who made aggressive advances to women and craved their flesh. But Tetsuo wasn’t like that. He had, after all, been a literary youth—one who had successfully transformed himself into someone who looked as if he belonged on the streets of Paris. He was a romantic. He liked romance, though not in the sense that he fell head over heels in love with women; what he liked was for them to fall head over heels in love with him.
The two women Tetsuo had had flings with seemed to have little in common. The first one was the wife of a colleague of his, so Mitsuki and she had once met. She’d been statuesque, dressed in a vivid suit. The second woman, as far as she could tell from Tetsuo’s description, was shy and retiring and dressed inconspicuously, wearing low-heeled black pumps with every outfit—mousy as could be. They were different even in physique, one a little plump, the other thin. Yet they did have one thing in common: both of them had been madly in love with Tetsuo.
And of course, like all his girlfriends from high school on, they had been older than him. He may have sensed that being younger than a woman somehow gave him an edge.
She remembered a conversation they’d had back when her mother was infatuated with That Man. Once, as Mitsuki was venting as only a daughter can, freely enumerating her mother’s faults and throwing in those of That Man for good measure, her vehemence had caused Tetsuo to let down his guard.
“Instead of a guy like that,” he said, “if only it’d been me who took her out—just think what a thrill she’d have had.”
Mitsuki bristled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He caught himself and said nothing.
“What a perfectly awful thing to say!”
“Sorry. I take it back.”
“Talk about narcissism!”
“I said I was sorry. Come on.”
Seeing the ferocity of her response, he realized he had misspoken, but probably he never understood what had made her so angry. It wasn’t only the indecency of the suggestion. What galled her was his smug assumption that any older woman he lavished his charms on would shed tears of joy. His conceit left her aghast.
The memory of that conversation had lingered for a while, leaving a bad aftertaste, but with the passage of time it had sunk deep into the recesses of her mind.
After finding out about Tetsuo’s second fling, she began to wonder if there hadn’t been other women as well. There were times when she appraised him with eyes so cold that she herself was surprised. She discovered that while she felt deep respect for the professor who had recommended her as a translator, she had long since lost respect for her husband. She also discovered that the world of what her mother called “high culture” was essentially alien to him. It was alien to Natsuki’s husband, Yuji, too, but Yuji at least knew it was and
had the grace to be embarrassed, while Tetsuo went around acting as if he appreciated that world when he did not and never would. Perhaps Mitsuki did not so much discover this as permit herself to acknowledge it.
Her mother’s reverential references to “high culture” often made Mitsuki herself cringe at the sheer silliness of it all. Her mother lapsed into sentimentality when it suited her—often when watching a movie, listening to an opera, or reading a novel—and the rest of the time put her own desires first while cavalierly dismissing those of people weaker than herself. And yet her rapture was genuine; there was at the core of her being an aching need for something sublime, a wild yearning as for stars above. And so, although her mother’s talk of “high culture” often evoked in her an inward sneer or outright revulsion, deep down Mitsuki herself, like many other women—like her mother—had no wish to live a life cut off from such stirrings. Nor did she wish to spend her life with a man to whom they were alien.
The Tetsuo she had known in Paris had seemed so suave, with the air of a connoisseur—so different from the other boursiers. Yet simply by virtue of being a boursier, he had also seemed an authentic seeker of knowledge. All the more so since he had awakened Mitsuki to her own ignorance.
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