Needless to say, her adoptive parents had had a great hand in her betrayal. Seeing how the young man excelled at his studies, they’d marveled at this evidence of his samurai blood. At the same time, they grew more calculating. Although originally they’d taken him in mainly out of a sense of obligation, they soon saw that if he graduated from the university they could rely on him in old age; a young man of his gifts might well become a high government official. As their hopes swelled, they began to treat him better. They knew he was in love with the geisha’s daughter they were training but didn’t want him tied to anyone so low. The family business (which was nothing to be proud of anyway) they could leave to the husband’s younger brother and his wife. They would find their young man a proper bride and enjoy a comfortable retirement, making the most of their role as his guardians.
Mitsuki’s grandmother, little better than a slave, would certainly have had no right to choose her own husband and probably couldn’t have gone against her adoptive parents’ wishes. She ended the relationship because she had no other choice. It was the sort of misfortune that befell women of those days—women of her background, especially—all too often.
When she became the rich man’s concubine, her adoptive parents must have been overjoyed. For one thing, they were well rewarded. For another, the young man in their charge had escaped being tied to a geisha. How could they have known that after she vanished, he would run away, brokenhearted?
Even as she proceeded to become the rich man’s lawful wife, Mitsuki’s grandmother kept the memory of her first love enshrined in her heart. Then along came The Golden Demon, a new installment every morning. On top of that, the rumor reached her that her former lover had run away. She remembered then the black look he had given her one day when their paths had happened to cross. She grew more and more convinced that the serial novel was written about her, and over time, reality and fiction blended indistinguishably in her untrained mind. She came to think she truly had left him for a diamond. Though blameless, the more she read, the more she blamed herself. The choice between love and money that often forms the basis of the modern novel—a choice unavailable to Japanese women of her time and particularly unavailable to geisha—this choice, she came to think, had been hers to make.
The accusatory lines Kan’ichi speaks on the shore at Atami must have seemed leveled directly at her—and not only the most famous: “Wait and see, O-Miya. Today is the seventeenth of January. On this night one year from now, I will make the moon cloud over with my tears.” He continues: “You’ll rise in the world and you’ll lead a high life, and that’s all very fine for you, but think how I feel, given up in exchange for money. Shall I say I am in despair, mortified? O-Miya, if I could I’d like to stab you—no, don’t be surprised!—stab you and take my own life.”
Ah! At that point Mitsuki’s grandmother would have cried out in an access of emotion and, like O-Miya, collapsed in a disheveled heap to cry her eyes out. Possibly.
When Kan’ichi becomes a moneylender and the lovely woman in the same profession tries to steal his love, Mitsuki’s grandmother became jealous. Kan’ichi is so devastatingly handsome that the woman can “scarce control her feelings of attraction.” No matter how she throws herself at him, he remains adamant, but even so Mitsuki’s grandmother fretted.
During gaps in the serialization, she would read and reread her clippings, morning and night. As she handled them, gradually the paper tore at the fold and the print smudged. Unbeknownst to her husband, she tried to track down the young man. To keep her adoptive parents from continually relying on her for money, her present husband had had them formally renounce any relationship with her, but timidly she went back and called on them. They raged at her—“Thanks to you, he disappeared!”—and she left in despair.
After the author, Ozaki Koyo, died leaving The Golden Demon unfinished, Mitsuki’s grandmother made a last attempt to find the young man. Nearly seven years had gone by since the novel began serialization, and after years of childlessness, she had given birth to two sons in quick succession. She managed to find someone who’d gone to school with him and tearfully persuaded him to help her search, only to learn that her erstwhile lover had caught typhus in Taipei and died a year before, while sailing home. She lay in her futon for six months and for a while thereafter seemed half demented. Her husband finally had enough and again took a concubine. She felt relieved then and in her relief was able to resume her duties as mistress of the house and mother. It was during that interim that the invitations had come to visit the baron’s villa.
Time passed. When the two boys were at an age to prepare for college entrance examinations, a live-in tutor was hired—a student who turned out to be the very image of her lost love. He too was of samurai lineage; he too was a lover of learning.
“I was thunderstruck,” she would later say. “I thought it was him reincarnated.”
Or could it be the son of her vanished young man? No, for both the tutor’s parents were living. It was no more than a chance resemblance between strangers. Even so, her feelings for him grew daily stronger. She even felt somewhat justified in falling in love, as her husband had taken a woman on the side. The tutor gradually came to return her affection, for she was still beautiful. They became lovers, and in the end she left her husband and her two sons to run off with him—the man who became Mitsuki and Natsuki’s grandfather.
In speaking of her first, long-lost love, she always referred to him as “Kan’ichi.” That was perhaps only natural as, until meeting their grandfather, she had yearned less for him than for a fictional character in a novel.
The following year she gave birth to a daughter, Noriko, who after growing up asked one day what the real name of “Kan’ichi” had been.
“That’s neither here nor there.”
“Anyway, Golden Demon is set in Tokyo, Mother, and you always lived in Osaka.”
“Who’d ever read a novel in Osaka dialect? Believe you me, if Kan’ichi had said those lines of his like an Osaka native—if he’d so much as called her ‘O-Miya-han’ instead of ‘O-Miya-san’—it’d never have worked. Ridiculous.”
DAMN FOOL
As she grew older, little by little Noriko had groped through the fog of secrecy to learn the truth of her birth. She never believed her mother’s story about being the real “O-Miya-san,” but neither did she have any proof to the contrary. Her ignorant mother’s gullibility was appalling yet pitiable. She let it lie. There was nothing she could do anyway to change the fact that she owed her very existence to her mother’s overactive imagination.
The watchword of the militaristic age had been “give birth and multiply.” That helped explain why the tutor “O-Miya” eloped with—Noriko’s father—had had eight siblings. The most successful of the eight was the eldest girl, Noriko’s aunt, who married into the Yokohama family.
The marriage wasn’t a big social leap for her. True, her father was an impoverished military man burdened with a large family, but the family had been feudal retainers of Tsuwano Domain before the Meiji Restoration and afterward converted to Christianity, like many in the learned class. The “Yokohama” were descended from a physician of Western medicine in the same Tsuwano Domain and had also converted to Christianity. The aunt’s good looks working to her advantage, the marriage came about naturally. Her husband, the later Grandpa Yokohama, became captain of an oceangoing merchant ship, and year by year the gap widened between her lifestyle and that of her siblings.
If the eldest girl was the family’s pride, the second son, Noriko’s father, was their disgrace. He graduated from Kobe Higher Commercial School, the forerunner of Kobe University, where as an honor student he had received a tuition exemption. By rights he should have gone on to lead a prosperous, respectable life, but before that could happen he was trapped by “O-Miya” and lost his way. It was one thing that she’d formerly been a geisha, quite another that she was another man’s wife. Worst of all, she was fully twenty-four years his senior, easily old enou
gh to be his mother. She wasn’t even pregnant; that at least would have made it easier to understand. No, she conceived Noriko after the elopement—all unnecessarily, you might say, depending on your point of view.
“Damn fool.” So said one of her more outspoken relatives.
Noriko’s father never went so far as to formalize the marriage, and although he doted on Noriko he merely acknowledged paternity without erasing the stigma of her being a love child. “O-Miya” knew her place and never asked for more; she took comfort in his at least having recognized the child as his own. That she took comfort in such a half measure underscored the unsavoriness of her background and the fragility of her position.
The three of them moved from place to place until they settled for a few years in Yokohama. Then they moved to Osaka, where at school Noriko was dumbfounded by the sound of the multiplication table being recited in dialect. They settled in a row house in a dusty neighborhood on the city outskirts, facing a noisy main street, where her mother hoped to open a sundries shop on the first floor. And so Noriko, the daughter of a white-collar worker, was thrown in among rice merchants, hardware store owners, short-order cooks, grocers, hairdressers. Not that they needed the extra money. Her father was beginning to earn a fair income. Even so, her mother, in addition to opening a shop—which soon enough failed—also contented herself with poor clothes and poor fare, as if she were no more than a maid, probably hoping to lessen the burden on Noriko’s father and thereby keep him longer by her side. She must have known from the outset that at some point, in some fashion, he would leave.
As Natsuki and Mitsuki grew older, their mother must have decided there was no longer any harm in speaking ill of her own mother in front of them, and her carping only increased. She remembered their grandmother “O-Miya” as uneducated, unrefined in words and deeds, warped and ignorant from her peculiar upbringing. Perennially shabby attire had only accentuated the ugliness of a woman long past her prime, an ugliness that as a girl she had found galling. “O-Miya” claimed that when she eloped she took along her jewelry and pawned it piece by piece to make ends meet: tortoiseshell combs, carved coral netsuke, jade obi ornaments, sapphire rings. (No diamond? Mitsuki used to wonder.) But their mother seemed incapable of mentally connecting her hideously old parent with sparkling gems. Nor could she believe that she had ever been beautiful. “I was so disgusted by how old and ugly she was. I used to think, I’ll never let myself go to seed like that.”
But even supposing “O-Miya” had tried to keep her looks, Mitsuki doubted it would have made any difference: she couldn’t have possibly held on to a lover twenty-four years her junior who never made her his legal wife.
And indeed after Noriko went to a girls’ higher school, her father did leave her mother for another woman. With his disreputable past, he could not hope to marry well; his sleazy wife was a former waitress in the run-down oden shop where he used to go to cheer himself up with a cheap hot meal. Noriko despised her. But her father kept on providing conscientiously for her and her mother. And bizarrely, he lived with his new wife on the same street as them in order to watch over Noriko until she finished school. That arrangement, painfully awkward for all concerned, lasted until Noriko graduated; only then did both parties move elsewhere. It was another six months before Noriko, scared by the talk of her marrying the barber’s son, made up her mind to move in with “Yokohama.”
When Noriko’s father wed the waitress, “O-Miya” had wept into her dirty apron, but quickly resigned herself to the inevitable.
Mitsuki, listening to the story, reflected that their grandmother had been blessed with an innate cheerfulness, which fortunately their mother had inherited, and an unassuming disposition, which unfortunately their mother had not inherited. The sadness of the story was offset in her mind by warm memories of her grandmother bustling around the house, taking care of all the cleaning, laundry, and cooking. Apparently while they were on their own in the row house, “O-Miya” always used to say she was “just the maid,” and their mother had found such lack of dignity off-putting. But at the house in Chitose Funabashi she had been exactly like a maid, and there hadn’t been anything the least undignified in that image.
Their mother had a fierce streak, and if “O-Miya” had been frail in her old age, she might well have found herself abandoned on a mountain somewhere like old people of long ago, as legend had it. Luckily, though small, she’d had a strong constitution, and far from being abandoned, exuded the contentment of one who has finally found her place in life. Their father had been kind to her. When Mitsuki leaned against her as she sat sewing, she’d sensed in her rounded back the relief of someone who knew, after a long and turbulent life, that when the end came she could safely breathe her last here on the tatami mats, without a care.
By the time she had pieced together the story of her grandparents, Mitsuki felt sorrier for her grandfather.
Thrust at a young age into the role of Kan’ichi, he’d gone from being an exemplary student with a bright future to being an outcast laden with a heavy burden. A lesser man would certainly have ditched her mother and grandmother along the way, but not only was he from a Christian family, underneath it all he was imbued with old-fashioned Confucian values as well, a man bound by his sense of duty to an almost painful degree. With the thoughtless exuberance of youth he had cast aside ambition, spoiled his life, and ended up spending the prime of his manhood embracing shame, regret, and guilt. The mistake he had made in his youth was wholly out of character to begin with, and it was perhaps only natural that he wouldn’t marry a woman twice his age. A dutiful son and brother at heart, he had managed to maintain ties with his frostily disapproving parents and siblings and thus also with “Yokohama,” the family his sister married into that was to have such a formative influence on Mitsuki’s mother, Noriko.
After Noriko grew up, a relative had enlightened her.
“You mustn’t resent your father, Noriko. He could have just as easily abandoned you and your mother to live under a bridge and be beggars.”
Noriko’s grandfather, after all, had been happy enough to leave her mother, the child of his mistress, in a geisha house. In contrast, her father had never abandoned his responsibilities, even if he did eventually move out. He’d seen that she graduated from a girls’ higher school, regularly sent her an allowance even afterward, and to cap it off provided her with a fine dowry.
The relative’s comment wounded her, but for the first time she saw those words as one way of looking at the situation. The fact that it had never occurred to her before hinted at the pains her father took to see that she had as normal a childhood as possible.
In talking to her daughters, she unfailingly bemoaned the hardship she had experienced growing up: “You just don’t know how I suffered, knowing people called me names behind my back.” This was true. Neither Mitsuki nor Natsuki could imagine such a thing; it scarcely seemed real. Times had changed, and while logically they understood that the terms geisha-agari (ex-geisha) and shoshi (illegitimate child) had borne some humiliating stigma, such slurs seemed ancient history. And their mother being who she was, neither of them was inclined to be very sympathetic anyway.
As Mitsuki grew older, moreover, she realized how her mother, treated like a princess by her self-abasing mother and doted on by her softhearted father, had grown up basking in her parents’ love, a love that was all the more intense because the three of them were cut off from society. Precisely because she was a child of sin, she’d been pampered and made even more headstrong.
Nor was that all. After her father moved out, her mother had clung to her as the one remaining tie with him and indulged her more than ever. Her father, meanwhile, full of guilt, could not on either sentimental or ethical grounds be stern with the daughter he had so unhesitatingly spoiled, and took pains to accommodate her wishes without offending his wife. And so, no matter how much trouble she caused by insisting on having her own way, Noriko often succeeded in the end. This pattern of behavior must
have become ingrained in her.
Under the circumstances, who wouldn’t try to have their own way?
GRANDPA’S TEARS
There was one anecdote that wrung Mitsuki’s heart.
It happened when Noriko was still in elementary school, living with her father, who had begun to be concerned about her future. All her life she would have to bear the ignominy of being a shoshi, an illegitimate child, and be burdened with her mother besides. A good marriage was probably not in the cards for her. But fortunately she was bright: even though she spent all her time playing with the neighborhood kids, her grades were excellent. Her father therefore conceived the plan of one day sending her to a normal school so that she might become a teacher at a girls’ higher school. Perhaps her lifelong taste for the finer things in life had not yet evinced itself, or perhaps her father, a man of simple tastes (not just frugal but “a cheapskate,” Mitsuki had always been told), either never noticed or purposely closed his eyes to what kind of woman she was turning into. She was hardly suited to be a teacher, but at a time when working women were regarded askance, teaching was the most respectable occupation for a woman, and especially teaching at a girls’ higher school. If she taught at such a school, she would be able to support herself and her mother.
He tried to get Noriko into a competitive girls’ higher school far beyond the reach of most girls from such a remote section of Osaka. With pride, he wrote on the form the name of the school he dreamed she might one day attend: “Nara Women’s Higher Normal School.” The only other such school in the country was in Tokyo. Though reluctant, he would have had to write down on the same form the word shoshi—a word whose meaning she did not yet know.
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