Inheritance from Mother

by Minae Mizumura

  Well pleased that her father was pinning his hopes on her, Noriko took extra classes and devoted herself to preparing for the entrance examination. Her grades became even better, and for the first time she enjoyed studying. On the day of the examination she unfortunately caught a cold and developed a fever, but she was satisfied with her score, as she reported to him. And yet when she went to see if she had been accepted, her number was not among those posted. Her father came home from work in high anticipation, but on learning that she had failed, without changing as usual into a kimono he sat erect in a corner of the room with his back turned and quietly began to cry. As Noriko and her mother looked on anxiously, his back began to shake and he sobbed, wiping away his tears on one arm.

  That was the one and only time in her life she ever saw him cry, their mother used to say.

  He must have guessed that she’d been rejected because he wrote “shoshi” on the application. Seeing him cry, she was devastated that she had let him down. He surely knew how she felt and wanted to comfort her, but to do so he would have had to explain the meaning of that offending word. As he wept with his back turned to her, in his heart he must have begged her forgiveness. “O-Miya” must have felt wretched at the sight of them. The thought of the family of three, social outcasts, each embracing a private sadness in that moment, was pitiable indeed.

  After that painful mistake, he’d made it his new life’s goal to marry her to someone who would take responsibility for both her and her mother, and chose for her a Christian girls’ higher school where the sole expectations for the students were marriage and motherhood.

  Even though her father had doted on her when she was small and tried his best to fulfill his parental obligations after moving out, all her life Noriko had resented him. And not because he left. That was unavoidable, she could see. She resented him because despite having made it his goal to marry her off, once she came of age he did nothing personally to achieve that goal. He just sat and prayed for someone to come along—someone good enough to take in her aging mother along with her. Only then would he be free from the error of his youth. Free not only financially but psychologically. No doubt he preferred a simple life anyway, but both before and after marrying the waitress he lived frugally, putting aside what he could for the wedding his daughter would surely one day have. And yet he did nothing to make it happen.

  After Noriko graduated, and she and her mother moved elsewhere in Osaka, once a month he stopped by to deliver her living expenses.

  “My rotten father…” She called him that in large part because he had distanced himself at that crucial time in her life.

  But as Mitsuki grew to see these things with the eyes of an adult, she felt she understood how her grandfather must have felt. Had he sought a husband for her among his circle of business acquaintances, the past that he had been at such pains to conceal would have been exposed—an unbearable outcome for someone who was a walking textbook of deportment, without a dissolute bone in his body. But since he had an unusually strong sense of responsibility, perhaps eventually he would have swallowed his pride and gone to some likely acquaintance with hat in hand, asking if he knew some family with a marriageable son.

  Perhaps. If she’d been a more normal daughter.

  But what a daughter she turned out to be! Noriko was headstrong to begin with, and circumstances conspired to develop in her the habit of constantly testing her limits. She would read people’s expressions and in a honeyed tone try to see how much she could get away with.

  After her father moved out, leaving her and her mother with nothing but ratty furniture, she was undaunted. Just leaving childhood behind, on the cusp of womanhood, she went after her dreams with greater singleness of purpose than ever before.

  Many of her classmates were girls from wealthy families. The sight of their fine clothing used to make her blood boil with jealousy, she said later, but she was never one to take any indignity lying down. She studied the illustrations in Girls’ Friend and saved her allowance to buy cloth, which she industriously sewed into dresses in the modern style of Jun’ichi Nakahara, the illustrator idolized by millions. She knit herself sweaters, too. Her mother never made her precious girl do any housework, so after she came home from school, her time was her own. When she grew fond of watching foreign films, she even sewed low-necked, long evening gowns like those worn by the beautiful creatures on the silver screen. Alas, she made them from old cotton yukata, ripping out the seams, and used leftover material to attach abundant frills to the neckline and hem. Naturally she couldn’t go outside in such garb; all she could do was wear it to bed. When night came on, she would lay out her thin mattress next to her mother’s on the frayed tatami and drift off to sleep amid the ratty furniture, clad in a homemade ball gown. Lying next to her snoring mother, what dreams did she see?

  However resourceful she was, there was no way she could fulfill her dreams on the pittance she received for an allowance. Naturally, she would wheedle her father into giving her things. He dealt as best he could with her interminable, unreasonable demands, consulting his wallet and taking care not to upset his wife. When she wanted a bed soft enough for the Real Princess in the story “The Princess and the Pea,” he gave her an iron-frame bed such as a soldier might sleep on with a straw pallet. When she longed for a shiny black piano, he gave her a weedy-sounding organ. Each time she would be disappointed, but quickly rebound and coax him into giving her something else. Distraught at her never-ending demands, he must have been gradually beaten down, the task of finding someone for her ever more daunting. What chance was there of finding a prospective groom to satisfy her? And if he did manage to marry her off, in the end she would either be sent packing or run off of her own accord—perhaps with that fear in mind, Mitsuki speculated, he never made much effort.

  And in fact, her mother did run away from her first husband.

  Once when she was sorting through her aged mother’s correspondence, Mitsuki came upon an envelope of old, handmade washi paper on which the writing, done with a fountain pen in blue ink, stood out with strange vividness. The hand was familiar. She turned it over and saw her grandfather’s name. He had moved to Kyoto at some point, and the letter had been mailed from there.

  “A letter from Grandpa?” she asked.

  “Yes. It burned me up, and I kept it to remember. Go ahead and read it if you like.”

  Mitsuki’s mother and father had managed to buy the land in Chitose Funabashi but couldn’t come up with the cost of building the new house, so her mother had asked Grandpa for a loan.

  He had written back in his neat hand, using old-fashioned, prewar orthography: “Do you not know the meaning of the expression ‘do without’? Since your self-centered actions have caused everyone such suffering and trouble, you have no business trying to build a house. Just do without for once.” The letter continued in that tone, half admonishing, half querulous.

  As she scanned the blue ink, Mitsuki thought of the time in her mother’s life when the letter had been written. Six years after “Yokohama” had found her a dream marriage partner and Grandpa had provided her with a proper dowry, she had run off with another man, Mitsuki’s father, leaving a small daughter behind. Grandpa had disowned her, Mitsuki knew. How her mother reinstated herself in his good graces she didn’t know, but apparently she’d lost no time coming to him begging for a loan. Mitsuki couldn’t help sympathizing with her grandfather. He must have been horribly upset. No sooner did he suppress his anger and restore their relationship than she turned right around and made this brazen request. There was no telling what further demands she might make.

  After receiving the letter, her mother had resorted to cutting up the property and selling nearly half of it to raise the money. “That used to be our land.” Mitsuki could well remember her saying this with some resentment as she pointed to new houses squeezed onto patches of land on either side of the property in Chitose Funabashi.

  After their grandmother died, Natsuki and Mitsuki had go
ne to visit Grandpa in Kyoto, where he lived in a tasteful home in traditional style with a pine tree gracefully spreading its branches at the front gate.

  “Now what will you two young ladies be doing today?” he’d asked them, sitting formally with his legs folded under him, using honorific forms even to his small granddaughters. In his elegance of speech he’d been very much like Kan’ichi, Mitsuki thought now. She and Natsuki had been his only grandchildren. He may have wanted to treat them with affection, but he seemed constantly on guard, she remembered, not simply in deference to his childless wife but perhaps because he projected his fear of their mother’s never-ending demands onto them.

  After their mother became utterly dependent on her, Mitsuki learned to brace herself for some new demand whenever she heard her name coaxingly called: “Miiitsukiii!” But however she tried to maintain her guard, her mother would keep a sharp lookout, watching for a chance. Was it her mother’s own fault that she was the way she was?

  It was the same old conundrum. Her mother could not be blamed for the disposition she was born with—and what if her unusual upbringing had contributed to making her who she was? To what extent was she responsible for the way she turned out? Could any person’s foibles be laid at their doorstep alone? There was no answer. Her mother was the way she was. That much remained an incontrovertible fact.

  SLIDE SHOW

  How long had she been sitting in the hotel lounge?

  She was so close to the fireplace that the dregs of her red wine at the bottom of the cloudy wineglass had clotted into something approaching jam. Would Kaoru say not “jam” but confiture, puckering her lips on that final vowel the way French people did? She looked around, but the white head was now gone. The only ones left were a young woman and a middle-aged man who was delivering an enthusiastic harangue, as men in the presence of a young woman so often did. Tetsuo at least had brains. Surely he wouldn’t make such a fool of himself. Mitsuki stared openly at the pair, and for a bitter moment her thoughts flew to the skies of Vietnam.

  High time to retire to her room. Warmed by the fire, the air felt heavy and thick, pressing on her with leaden weight. The young woman’s high-pitched, ingratiating laughter bounced around the lounge, grating on her ears. Coping with her mother had drained her of vitality, Tetsuo’s betrayal had been a hard blow, and now here she was, turning into a disapproving, clucking hen.

  She went back to her room, still lost in her thoughts. When she inserted the card key into the wall slot, the lights came on, and at precisely the same moment, the telephone rang. It had been after midnight when she left the lounge.

  “I called twice before!” Natsuki’s familiar voice drew her back to reality. “The second time, they offered to look for you in the lounge, but I said not to bother. Why haven’t you called? It’s been three nights already.”

  “Hotel phones cost so much. I figured I’d wait for you to call.” This was only half true. She felt guilty for coming here alone, but with Tetsuo on her mind she hadn’t been in the mood to call her sister.

  Then of all things Natsuki said, “You forgot about me, but I bet you’ve been talking to Tetsuo.”

  “No, just sending emails.” When would she be able to tell Natsuki the truth?

  “Is he managing all right? This is the first sabbatical he’s taken by himself, isn’t it?”

  “Trust me,” she said coolly, “he’ll be fine.”

  Natsuki changed the subject. “How about you? How are you doing?”

  “I like this hotel a lot.”

  “Getting some rest?”

  She sighed. “I don’t know. So many memories come back, I feel worse than ever.” The sound of her sister’s voice triggered a conditioned reflex, bringing back that day and the figure of their dying mother, her withered fingers floating in empty space. “I can’t get Mother out of my mind.”

  Natsuki seemed to feel equally besieged by memories. Her response was quick. “I know. I feel worse now too. Are we ever going to be free?” Then, “You haven’t checked your email, have you.”

  “No.” She hadn’t touched her laptop since going through Tetsuo’s email correspondence with the woman.

  “Go take a look.”

  “You mean right now?”

  Natsuki said she would wait, so Mitsuki switched on her computer, went to her email, and found a message with the heading “Katsura Family Memories.” She clicked on it and to her surprise found links to a number of Web albums. Natsuki had always been fond of making family albums. When they emptied the house in Chitose Funabashi, she’d taken home five cardboard boxes packed with photographs. She said she was going to sift through them; it had never occurred to Mitsuki that she might post any online. The albums bore titles like “Before Father and Mother Were Married” and “When the Sisters Were Little.”

  “I’m impressed that you’re so technically savvy.”

  Mitsuki sometimes received such links from acquaintances, but she would never have expected this from Natsuki, who, like their mother and herself, was generally hopeless around the new technology.

  “Jun taught me. I only picked out the good ones. She says everybody makes albums like this nowadays. The hardest part was peeling photos out of the original albums without ruining them.” Mitsuki hesitantly clicked on the slide show for the album “Before Father and Mother Were Married.” Every few seconds, another sepia-toned old photograph appeared.

  “Jun scolds me—says I’ll ruin my health—but I work on them every night till all hours. I’m obsessed.”

  Natsuki too was facing up to the past, Mitsuki realized, trying in her own way to come to terms with her emotions.

  The slide show began with their father, showing him as a plump, naked baby; as a five-year-old dressed up in kimono with a formal haori jacket and pleated hakama trousers, the chill of the heavy silk almost palpable; and as a youth, standing with his father in student cap and uniform to commemorate his entrance into middle school. There was a photo taken at the grand funeral his father had been given, followed by the photo they’d used at their father’s memorial service, taken in his university days. Their mother had grown up in a household where photography was a luxury that the family could ill afford, so the earliest shots of her Natsuki could find were from around the time she entered girls’ higher school. In every frame, she looked strikingly happy.

  “She always used to complain about her childhood, but you know what? She got more than I ever did.” The resentful words slipped out before Mitsuki knew it.

  “Well now, wait a minute,” Natsuki said. “She got more than I did too. All she ever did was shove her dreams on me. And you know how Grandma doted on you. She was such a sweetheart, nothing like Mother.”

  “A shame there aren’t more photos of her.”

  When their grandmother ran off with their grandfather, she’d left all her photographs behind. The only ones they had of her were taken after Mitsuki was born, when she was already an old lady. With her kimono collar loose at the throat and her sparse white hair pulled into a bun, not even a trace of her former beauty remained. How could such a dried-up old husk have thought she was O-Miya?

  As a child, Mitsuki had known nothing of her grandmother’s life story. She had gone to “O-Miya” with all her loneliness—the loneliness of a little girl not getting enough attention from her mother or her father—and always received unstinting love. “Good girl. Grandma’s good little girl.” No matter what, she’d always been her grandmother’s pet.

  Could her grandmother ever have imagined that her precious granddaughter would spend her life unloved? That she would put up with a loveless marriage for nearly thirty years, never facing up to the sad truth? As she contemplated the photograph, Mitsuki felt that she had somehow betrayed her grandmother’s unconditional love. At least her grandmother had died not knowing the full extent of her mother’s—Noriko’s—capacity for folly. People left this world, blissfully unaware of how their bovarism seeped into the lives of others.

  “While I
was making the albums,” Natsuki said, “I wondered—what kind of person was Mother, really?”

  “Good question.”

  “Remember the photo of her hanging laundry outdoors? She’s in a casual summer dress, no stockings, wooden geta on her feet. I put that one in.”

  Mitsuki sighed. “I remember. I always liked that one.”

  The photograph showed their mother outside the house in Chitose Funabashi, wearing an apron and hanging something on the line to dry, like any other mother. Their father had snapped the picture from the side, so she didn’t have the artificial smile she usually wore for the camera. She looked completely natural. The yard was flooded with light.

  “All my impressions of her are from after she got old,” Natsuki went on. “I can barely remember what she was like when we were little.”

  “Me neither.”

  “That picture makes me think she was more normal back then.”

  “I’m sure she was.”

  “She had to be, or you and I would have turned out a lot more twisted.”

  As Mitsuki watched, photograph after photograph came on the screen showing their mother as a young woman. Each one evoked nostalgia but seemed sadly remote from the way she’d been in old age. Mitsuki tried but failed to recall the attachment she must have felt for her mother in childhood, back when her heart was still soft and squishy with no hard corners.

  “Make sure you see them all, okay?” her sister said and hung up after promising to make more albums.

  For a while longer Mitsuki watched the slide show with mixed emotions. Then she exited and went back to her email. A new message from Tetsuo caught her eye. She gulped. It had just come in the last few minutes. He’d called home a number of times, he wrote, and had also been trying her cell phone with no luck.