“What the heck was that?”
“Cannon, I’ll bet. Supposed to be a Self-Defense Force training ground somewhere at the foot of Mount Fuji.”
“Hmm.”
They noisily exited.
After her meal, she stood at the same window and looked out at the lake. Two gaudy pirate ships. One low, flat, glass-bottomed excursion boat. The three vessels plowed busily back and forth across the surface of the tiny lake.
Compared to the world of novels—of the imagination—the real world was a letdown.
GAZING INTO THE FLAMES
At the end of the day, drawn by the fireplace in the lounge, Mitsuki again descended the staircase and, not quite aware of what she was doing, looked around for a figure in a dark suit. Her gaze landed instead on Kaoru, who was sitting alone next to a lamp, looking down so that her white hair stood out. Of Takeru there was no sign. Mitsuki didn’t feel she could ignore Kaoru’s presence, so she went over to say a quick hello.
Kaoru, a scarf again draped elegantly around her neck, was knitting. To Mitsuki’s surprise, on her lap next to a ball of lavender yarn was a silver iPod. When she saw Mitsuki she fumbled to switch off the device, then removed her earphones and laid down her knitting needles. Looking up, she spoke huskily.
“I found out who else is staying on. The bartender told me. A mother and daughter and a husband and wife.”
Mitsuki looked around.
“They’re not here. Not likely to come down at night. The husband and wife must be in their seventies.”
Mitsuki remembered the old couple she’d seen again at breakfast.
“Funny,” Kaoru continued, “they didn’t strike me as the type to stay in a hotel for more than a night or two.” She added in a self-mocking tone, “Listen to me! What a busybody I’ve become. An old lady with nothing better to do than stick her nose into other people’s affairs.”
“Would the daughter be plump and the mother thin, by any chance?” Mitsuki had in mind a mother and daughter she’d seen in the hot spring before dinner.
“Yes! They just checked in today. I spoke a few words to them. The daughter’s going to be married next month, and they came here to relax before the wedding.”
The pair she had seen in the hot spring had seemed on such good terms, it made sense that they would want to enjoy a little mother-and-daughter time. In this day and age most women kept their jobs after marrying, at least until the first baby arrived; had the daughter taken time off work to come or was she that rare traditionalist, a woman who quit work on marrying?
Kaoru had a lonely air as she looked up.
“Where is Takeru, if you don’t mind my asking?” Mitsuki said.
“Bed. He went for a drive before dinner, and when he came back he said he was tired so he was turning in early.”
As Mitsuki nodded and started to leave, Kaoru pointed to her iPod with a knitting needle. “What do you think I’m listening to? Guess.”
Mitsuki tilted her head to one side, considering. “Opera?”
Kaoru tittered the way women used to do, sounding much like Mitsuki’s mother. “No, my dear, it’s an old recording of Miyamoto Musashi. Takeru bought the tapes on Yahoo! Auctions and transferred them here for me. When I was a girl, it was a weekly radio series. I never used to listen then, but now I find the language mesmerizing.”
The idea of this refined old lady listening to the epic about the legendary swordsman was so unexpected that Mitsuki laughed too. She said goodbye, still smiling, and headed for the fireplace.
She too settled in by a nook’s lamplight, ordered a glass of red wine, and opened her book after putting on her glasses, but her eyes slid unseeing over the page. Added to the thoughts she had been entertaining since the night before, new faces and scenes she had encountered came and went in an incoherent jumble. Soon she was seeing again in her mind’s eye the figures of mother and daughter bathing together in the hotel hot spring.
She’d gone down for a soak after sunset. A man would no doubt beg to differ, but to her naked women seemed much the same, like animals, with less disparity in age than when they were clothed. Children and the elderly were exceptions, but everyone else was simply one more naked woman like the rest. Young girls who stepped out wearing pink sandals and fluttery skirts shed their excess youth in the bath along with their clothes. Clouds of steam also made it harder to tell if two women were sisters or mother and daughter.
Yet with that mother and daughter, the difference was plain to see. They’d sat at the edge of the communal tub, soaking their feet and letting their backsides show. One had a young, round bottom and the other, roughly Mitsuki’s age, a thin bottom that looked older than the rest of her. The two had seemed on amazingly good terms, sticking close together and chatting. After their pale figures left the bathing area, Mitsuki had lingered awhile before going to join them in the dressing room. They were wearing cotton yukata robes provided by the hotel, sitting side by side in massage chairs and enjoying the rhythmical kneading of their back muscles. They would probably sleep in twin beds and turn out the light at the same time to go to sleep. When Mitsuki came here with her mother, it had never occurred to her to sleep in the same room with her. She had reserved separate rooms for them without hesitation, and when she reported this, her mother had only said, “All right.”
What sort of man might the daughter be about to marry? She had a rather vacant look, so maybe she would get along without worrying too much about whether she was loved…or unloved.
Unloved…The moment this word came to Mitsuki’s mind, a painful wave of realization once again swept over her. She stared blankly at the red flames.
Reaching for the stars wasn’t so important after all, as long as there was something lofty in a man. No, even if there wasn’t anything lofty in him, just to have been loved—not adored, but cherished—would have made her happy. Choosing the wrong man might be forgiven in a girl of eighteen, but she’d been twenty-five. Life was a onetime gift, a true miracle, and at a crucial point she had stumbled. Knowing this, she had not faced up to her error but had continued to stumble along, until this very moment. That was the truly irrevocable part of it. The night before, she’d leveled heaps of slanderous charges at Tetsuo, but she herself was hardly guiltless, for hadn’t she stopped caring for him long ago?
When she read his email correspondence with the woman, hadn’t she been riven not with sadness but with humiliation? She should have left him long before this. Or she should have at the very least lived her life not nursing her wounds but squarely confronting the fact: her marriage had been a mistake.
She sighed, still looking blankly into the flames. Her book lay shut. Her glass of red wine, warmed by the fire, bore dark red streaks of lipstick that looked unclean.
How on earth had she come to this point?
Natsuki, who idealized her marriage to Tetsuo, often said enviously, “You’re so lucky!” Every time she heard those words, Mitsuki had felt a sense of triumph. In her mind’s eye she would see her small self toiling up the hill toward “Yokohama” behind her mother and sister, carrying Natsuki’s music bag. Pride had surely prevented her from seeing her marriage as the failure it was. Knowing she would have to tell Natsuki the truth was painful.
But pride alone could not explain her stubborn blindness.
She took her eyes off the flames and looked around the lounge, seeking Kaoru’s white head and perhaps, on some level, her mother. Absorbed in Miyamoto Musashi, Kaoru was sitting with back bent, assiduously plying her knitting needles, forgetting herself for a change. She looked old.
Mitsuki resumed gazing at the flames and let out another sigh.
Her mother had played no small role in all this, after all…As a grown woman, she had no desire to blame her mistakes on her mother; she even admitted that she owed her a great deal. But any woman leading an ordinary life—untouched by natural disaster, poverty, or incurable illness—was likely to be living that ordinary life in thrall to her mother, much more so than
any man could possibly imagine. This was especially true in today’s aging society where daughters were forced to go on keeping company with their mothers indefinitely. The problem was who Mitsuki’s mother had been—someone so unlike other mothers.
By the time Tetsuo’s first infidelity came to light, her feud with her venomous mother had been well under way. Sticky filaments were already wrapping around her, preventing her from forming any inclination to face up to the mess her marriage was. Being able to physically leave her mother, go home, and be with Tetsuo, who was no blood relation, had actually been a relief. Her life with him had seemed off-limits to her mother. The more indignant she became with her mother, the more she wanted her life with Tetsuo to be an inviolable sanctum. Facing up to the mess of her marriage had been the very last thing she wanted to do. And after That Man finally disappeared, the days had gone by in a welter of emotion as continuing indignation over her mother became entangled with exasperation and pity for what her mother had become.
What had made Noriko Katsura the woman she was?
What made any person the way they were? Who could say? No scientific advance, no new discovery about the firing of nerve cells in the brain, would ever provide an answer. And yet as Mitsuki grew older she had continually wondered about it, as had Natsuki. They had often commiserated over the telephone.
“She’s so outrageous. Who’d believe it if we told them?”
“I know. Impossible to even try.”
“No one would ever understand.”
“But you never know, there could be lots of daughters stuck with a mother like that.”
“I suppose so, but are three percent of all mothers like her or is it more like thirty-three percent? There’s no way to tell.”
“If a third of all mothers were like her, society would simply collapse, and you know it. Besides, Japanese people are supposed to have a gift for resigning themselves to what life dishes out.”
“Right. Especially women of her generation. They were taught not to want much.”
“We need someone to do a survey!”
“Absolutely. How on earth does a person get to be that way?”
“Maybe she was a mutant. Or wait a minute, think how old Grandma was when she was born.”
“So her eggs would have been old too.”
“Right!”
“But would that be enough to make someone turn out so damn self-centered?”
They always came to the same conclusion: “Her background has to be part of it too.”
Temperament was innate. No matter what circumstances their mother had been born into, she would have caused a considerable stir. But the peculiarity of her background undoubtedly had much to do with shaping her into the woman she became…
Mitsuki’s mind went in circles, coming to the same conclusion she had reached again and again before. Yes, it had all started with her grandmother, “O-Miya.” If she had not seen herself as O-Miya in the novel, she would not have eloped with her “Kan’ichi.” If she had not eloped with “Kan’ichi,” then Noriko Katsura would never have been born. If she had never read that serial novel in the first place, then not only their mother but she and her sister, too, would never have been born. If there had been no serial novels in Japan, then she, Mitsuki, would not be here in a mountain hotel staring into the flames and telling herself she was unloved…
She herself was the offspring of a serial novel.
THE GOLDEN DEMON
More than a century ago, in 1897, Ozaki Koyo’s novel The Golden Demon began to appear in the newspapers.
Seldom did a novel change a human life in so tragicomical a fashion—and yet so treacherous are the connections between fiction and life that who could truly say it had never happened to anyone else? No sooner did serialization of the novel begin than women all over Japan were reduced to tears, thrown into a crucible of emotion. The Golden Demon derailed her grandmother’s life—and for all Mitsuki knew could have inspired similar tragicomedies up and down the archipelago. The very term “serial novel” still invoked The Golden Demon. That melodramatic work—a work that continued to run in the newspapers off and on for five years and remained unfinished at the author’s death—earned an undying name in Japanese literary history because of the enormous impact it had on women of the day, who hardly had access to novels except those in the newspaper.
Golden Demon’s influence lingered on into the age of cinema, when, astoundingly, nearly two dozen versions were filmed. In the postwar era it was even filmed in Taiwan, a former colony of the empire of Japan. When television came along, there were made-for-TV versions. A popular song based on the story might no longer be familiar to the younger generation, but when Mitsuki was small everyone knew it. There was even a statue on the shore at Atami to commemorate a famous scene in the novel.
To be loved by someone like Kan’ichi Hazama: this was the heart’s desire of myriad women who might well be said to have succumbed to the Japanese equivalent of bovarism. Few characters in modern Japanese literature have Kan’ichi’s romantic appeal. Though poor, he is of samurai blood and a lover of learning. Orphaned in adolescence, he is taken in by a family indebted to his father. He and the daughter of the family, O-Miya, grow up together and in time exchange promises to wed. Then at a New Year’s card party, O-Miya meets a wealthy man sporting a diamond ring of breathtaking size and ends up marrying him—a self-important man with a mustache—instead.
Indignant at his beloved’s perfidy, Kan’ichi runs away from home and sells his soul, becoming a cruel moneylender. Though bitter and heartbroken, he clings to his love to the end. A young, lovely member of his profession sends amorous glances his way, but he addresses her stiffly and with evident annoyance. He clings to his love tenaciously, determinedly, stoically, as if adhering to a principle. Though O-Miya repents and comes to him to apologize, ready to die if need be, he is unforgiving and clings only to the O-Miya she used to be, prior to her change of heart. His love is an obsession.
Mitsuki’s grandmother had a far more pitiable childhood than her mother—or than the fictional O-Miya, for that matter.
Born to a geisha, she was taken from her mother at an early age, adopted into a geisha house, and raised to become a geisha herself, not in Tokyo but in Kobe, adjacent to Osaka. When she was nineteen by the old way of counting (seventeen or eighteen by the modern count), a wealthy man paid off her adoptive parents and made her his concubine. As if on cue, the man’s wife, who had been suffering from tuberculosis, conveniently died, enabling her to gain the coveted status of wife. When the novel first came out, Mitsuki’s grandmother was legally married and mistress of several servant girls.
Having no education beyond elementary school, she had never acquired the habit of reading books, but after seeing her husband off in the morning she must have enjoyed spreading out the newspaper. To educate the public, newspapers in those days put glosses by all Chinese characters to indicate the pronunciation, which no doubt helped. Perhaps she read with a frown on her face, muttering the words under her breath in the manner of people unaccustomed to reading.
She probably had no eyes for articles on politics and the economy. First she would have scanned the articles on robberies, fires, and family murder-suicides, saving the day’s installment of the serial novel till last. Given her upbringing, she may have taken an interest in the theater—Kabuki and gidayu ballad-dramas and such—but very likely her first encounter with the joy that literature can bring came through the serial novel.
In Mitsuki’s memory, her grandmother was a bleary-eyed old woman in a washed-out smock over a faded kimono, always either busy in the kitchen or hunched over her sewing. But when she imagined her grandmother reading The Golden Demon, she inevitably saw her as a woman of allure, someone who had stepped out of a woodblock print. The rich man’s house must have had Western-style rooms, but probably she was never truly comfortable except on straw tatami mats. Low dining tables called chabudai had become popular in the mid-Meiji era, and their house und
oubtedly had one. Mitsuki pictured her sitting on the tatami mats with her feet tucked under her, reading the newspaper spread out on such a table as she rested her young chin on one hand. Sometimes she saw her bent over the newspaper on the floor, her lithe figure folded at the waist. Proud of being a respectable wife, had she worn her hair in the traditional chignon of a married woman, perhaps tied with a band of red silk? Or had she daringly chosen a modern pompadour? Then again, she might have preferred the older and jauntier ichogaeshi style.
After her husband left, the sunlight must have streamed through the paper shoji doors with particular softness.
Her girlhood had been full of hardship; during music lessons she had endured beatings with the ivory plectrum of the shamisen, and at mealtimes she often was served only leftovers. Then all changed, and she needed to please only her husband. What luxury! She may have felt a pang of guilt, but she had never been in a position to decide her own fate.
On January 1, 1897, the first New Year’s Day since her marriage, serialization of The Golden Demon began. As she read on, episode by episode, she could scarcely believe her eyes. Could the story be about her? Once she began to wonder this, her suspicion grew. She fidgeted, hardly able to wait until her husband left the house so she could spread out the newspaper. Mindful of the servants’ eyes, she would read and reread the day’s installment, pressing the sleeve of her under-kimono to her eyes to wipe her tears. When she had finished, she would cut it out of the newspaper with a pair of shears and put the clipping away in a bureau drawer where she could take it out from time to time to read again.
Of course, the setting was rather different from her situation. She herself was certainly not from a decent background like O-Miya. But in the geisha house, she too had grown up with a young man with no blood relation to her. Like Kan’ichi, he had been orphaned in adolescence and, again like Kan’ichi, was taken in by foster parents because of a great debt they owed to his late father. He too was of samurai lineage and a lover of learning. Like O-Miya, she had whispered with him of a life together and, again like O-Miya, she had abandoned him in the end and married a rich man with a mustache. The young man, like Kan’ichi, had run away in disappointment.
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