Inheritance from Mother

by Minae Mizumura

  “Did something happen to your mother?”

  She died.

  Mitsuki didn’t want to write those words, but neither could she bring herself to lie and say that her mother was fine. She wrote only that she herself was so exhausted that she’d come to a hotel in Hakone to relax for a week or so.

  He responded immediately—he must be in an Internet café—expressing relief and asking again about her mother. “So she’s getting along okay?”

  Mitsuki pondered before writing, “She’s completely beyond anyone’s reach now.” It took a few seconds for the reply to pop up. While waiting she stared at the screen in confusion, feeling Tetsuo’s presence very near.

  “Sorry to hear that. Are you at the same hotel where you and she went before?”

  “Yes, on Lake Ashinoko.”

  “That’s the one with the O-Miya connection?”

  “Yes. Swarming with ghosts.”

  “Anyway don’t get worn out—you never were very strong. Take good care of yourself, okay?”

  That was all. The solicitousness of his last words was like a box of Valentine chocolates, tied with a pretty bow. And all the time he had to be asking himself how to broach the matter of divorce. She couldn’t help shaking her head as she closed the laptop.

  EVERYONE IS SUSPECT

  The next day was cloudy when she woke up, and soon a light rain began to fall. The monotonous gray of the sky showed no sign of brightening. Being cooped up all day by rain suited her mood, she thought, as she looked at the sky from her window. She went to the Japanese restaurant for breakfast and lunch, and twice in one day ran into the old couple who were like a pair of husband-and-wife rice bowls. The others had come by car, so they could leave the hotel to eat out. She decided just to order dinner from room service.

  The rainy day spent shut in was about to end in unremitting gloom when around eight in the evening she gave in to the urge to go down to the lounge. She changed her clothes, put on some makeup, and took the elevator. While descending the stairs to the lounge she glanced around the room, and her eye landed on a figure in a dark suit. Her gloom lifted. As she hesitated, he noticed her and motioned for her to come join him.

  Mitsuki sat down with unconcealed pleasure. “I didn’t see you yesterday.”

  He swept his hair back, a habit he had. His face seemed pale and gaunt. “I stayed in my room all day. Didn’t feel like going out. There was an article I needed to read anyway.”

  Keeping to himself all day had perhaps drawn him even further into a private realm; he had an absent air, as though loath to return to this world. A grim statistic crossed her mind: after the death of a spouse, life expectancy remains the same for widows, but for men it is shortened; many a widower dies quickly, as if impatient to follow his wife to the grave. She dropped her eyes to the whiskey and water in his hand—the same drink as the day before yesterday. Was he someone who, once he’d made a choice, stuck with it? Was that why he always dressed the same way?

  “I can’t help noticing you always wear a dark suit,” she said, her tone slightly teasing.

  “Oh, well.” He swept his hair back again. “My wife used to say an ordinary man like me should dress the part. Wouldn’t let me wear anything else. I’m afraid I don’t even own any what you might call leisure clothes.”

  Mitsuki smiled. How different from Tetsuo, who was so particular about his wardrobe! Remembering the intensity in his eyes when he picked out what to wear, she felt a bit jealous of Wakako for having had a husband who willingly dressed as she wanted him to. She felt like making an irreverent observation—This way you can wear mourning the rest of your life!—but that would be in poor taste. She asked a question instead.

  “Did your wife like to dress up?” Was she pretty, she really wanted to ask.

  “Yes. Yes, she did.”

  “How would she dress?”

  “That I couldn’t tell you.” At a loss, he tilted his head, trying to remember. “She always looked the same to me. Used to scold me for not noticing when she had on something new.” Again that abashed smile.

  To avoid talking about herself, Mitsuki kept asking questions and learned to her surprise that Wakako had studied voice at a conservatory. That Mr. Matsubara was a fairly serious classical music fan. That his favorite lunch was a bowl of noodles. That he was the father of two grown sons.

  “My, look at the lovebirds!” sang out a voice.

  Kaoru joined them. Only then did Mitsuki realize how much she had been looking forward to an evening alone with Mr. Matsubara. Kaoru seated herself by them with nonchalance, and Takeru joined them too, a little more reticently.

  “How are you this evening?” said Kaoru. She leaned forward as Mr. Matsubara was responding, “Just fine, thank you.”

  “We’re fine too,” she said, looking back and forth at them. “Except that it’s the most bizarre thing. All of us long-term guests are suspect. We could all be on a list of potential candidates for suicide!” She said this with inappropriate, unconcealed glee.

  She went on to confide what she had found out about the others, beginning with the close-knit mother and daughter. As she and Takeru stood around chatting with them before lunch, it had emerged that they had never been to the nearby Fujiya Hotel. And so despite the rain they had all gone there for lunch, Takeru driving.

  Mitsuki had been to the Fujiya Hotel once. It was built in 1878, just ten years after the Meiji Restoration—Japan’s first Western-style hotel, well known for its eclectic architectural style with an imposing tiled roof like that of a Buddhist temple. Notables from around the world had stayed there, including Prince Albert of York, Charlie Chaplin, and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. She and Natsuki used to take their semi-invalid father on little outings, feeling sorry for him since their mother ignored him, and one time they’d stayed overnight at the Fujiya Hotel. They’d dined at The Fujiya, a French restaurant with a high, traditional coffered ceiling that greatly appealed to foreign guests.

  Kaoru had had lunch at The Fujiya with the others, and over dessert, while offering congratulations on the upcoming nuptials, she’d brought up the psychic’s prediction, adding with a laugh, “Of course this wouldn’t apply in your case.” But before her eyes, the mother’s face had turned the color of ash.

  “I was horrified,” she said. “I thought I was going to need my Nitorol spray. It was such a shock.”

  Takeru spoke up. “For all we know, she may have just thought the subject was unlucky, with a wedding coming up and all. But there’s definitely something strange going on.” In the car on the way back, the mother’s responses to his aunt had been short and vague, he said, as if her mind was elsewhere.

  “What about the daughter?” Mitsuki asked.

  “She’s kind of ditzy,” he said. “Spacey. The mother did all the talking about the wedding, too.”

  There was nothing they could put their finger on, but something about the two seemed not quite right. This was Kaoru and Takeru’s conclusion.

  Kaoru then moved on to the elderly couple.

  After returning from the Fujiya Hotel, she’d rested in her room and then gone down alone to the lounge for tea. As she was looking for a table by the window, the elderly couple walked in. Deciding she might as well take advantage of the opportunity to find out their story as well, she’d waved and invited them to join her.

  “Obviously I was the last person they wanted to chat with,” she said, “but as I’m sure you can imagine—I don’t take no for an answer!”

  While the husband remained silent, the wife had gradually opened up under Kaoru’s questioning and soon was pouring out their story. She even dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. Her husband had cosigned a loan and, as happens all too often, the other party defaulted. Now even if they gave every penny they had, it wouldn’t be enough to pay off the debt. As the wife talked, the husband began to fill in details, and what had started out as a brief interlude stretched into a marathon two-and-a-half-hour tea break.

  “We
had pot after pot of tea.”

  The husband, the eldest son in a large family, had worked in a sheet-metal plant for many years. After retiring, the two of them were caretakers for a condominium building for another ten years, and just two years ago they’d moved into a house they finally built for themselves. Then a few months ago his youngest brother, who ran a business in Nagoya, suffered a severe stroke, was hospitalized, and went bankrupt. After losing his job over a dozen years ago, this brother had gone into business for himself but had no luck at anything he tried; then his wife left him, taking the children, and remarried. The years of stress had taken their toll. And the husband had been cosigner for his brother’s snowballing debts.

  The cosigner shares equal responsibility with the original debtor to repay the amount owed in full. If the husband declared bankruptcy, they would lose their new house and savings, but he would be free of his obligation. Still, after a lifetime of hard work, bankruptcy was a bitter pill to swallow. They were parents of a married son and an older single daughter. To escape the stream of debt collectors coming to their door, they had put their house up for sale and moved into the daughter’s apartment to hide out. She was a hard worker but had a weak constitution, so they’d always planned to have her come look after them once they grew old and infirm, and in return they were going to leave her the house. (Their son had readily agreed to this, partly because he shared their concern over her future and also because after she died the house, if it was still there, would go to him or his children.) Now their plans had gone awry. They hadn’t told their son anything. They were afraid to, since they knew he would insist on helping out, but he had his own family to provide for, and they didn’t want him taking on debt on their behalf. But he assumed everyone would be gathering at their place for New Year’s as usual, so it was all going to come out in the open very soon.

  Kaoru looked at her listeners and concluded, “After the way that other woman reacted at lunch, I couldn’t very well bring up the predictions of a Harley-Davidson psychic, now could I?”

  Mitsuki shook her head.

  “And what do you think happened?” Kaoru continued. “The husband had a smile on his face, but he said that if he died, there’d be enough insurance money to cover the whole debt. His wife’s family is long-lived, he said, so he took out a hefty policy.”

  An alarming remark to say the least.

  To keep their son from suspecting anything was wrong, they’d had a landline installed in their daughter’s house with their old telephone number, but then they started getting bombarded with threatening calls from debt collectors—yakuza hired by loan sharks. That was why they’d come here, using money set aside in the wife’s name for emergencies. They needed to get away and sort through their options in peace and quiet.

  The words “small business failure” rose in Mitsuki’s mind—words made so familiar by Japan’s troubled economy that they had lost all impact until now. She had not expected the grim reality behind them to intrude on this fairyland hotel.

  Mr. Matsubara, who had been listening silently, now spoke up. “It doesn’t make sense to me.”

  Everyone looked at him.

  “If he’s the eldest in a big family, then there are plenty of other siblings. Even if they have no legal responsibility, surely they could share some of the burden.”

  “Very true,” said Kaoru. “Apparently he’s so used to looking after the others that it’s become second nature for him to shoulder all the burden himself.”

  Mr. Matsubara frowned. “That’s a shame.”

  Mitsuki reflected. What about the emotional calm she had observed in both the old husband and his wife? Was that a silent way of providing solace to each other? Human unhappiness was often banal, its banality an affront to the sufferers and to the nature of their suffering, something that could be reduced to a mere statistic. Yet knowing this didn’t lessen the misery one whit. The banality of the unassuming couple’s predicament didn’t make it any the less pitiable.

  For a while silence fell on the foursome, each of them absorbed in private thoughts.

  Then Kaoru announced playfully, “What it comes down to, my dears, is this—there isn’t one of us who’s in our right mind!”

  “What about me?” asked Mitsuki in some surprise.

  “What about you? My dear, just last evening you sat here for hours, staring into the fire with a positively lethal look on your face!”

  PAPA AIME MAMAN

  “No one making a face like that could possibly be in her right mind!” Once again Kaoru tittered gracefully. “I had taken you off the list, but I’m afraid you’re back on it now.”

  Mitsuki forced a smile, but no words came.

  Last night she had indeed sat here forgetful of time, her eyes on the fire while her thoughts drifted darkly from Tetsuo to the wasteland of her life to back before she was born. The look on her face must have been grim; small wonder if anyone took her for a potential suicide. She’d never thought of herself as a candidate, but coming here had brought her to the realization that she had no strong incentive to keep on going.

  Indeed, why must she go on?

  Even after she had parted from the others, returned to her room, and was preparing for bed, the question dogged her. Suddenly Mr. Matsubara’s eager remark the other night came back to her: “Charity is very good.” She had no desire for Tetsuo to end up with her inheritance, she realized—and this discovery led to the further discovery that she was unafraid of death. Yet there was nothing the slightest dramatique, as Kaoru might say, about any of it.

  The next three days passed uneventfully.

  If it didn’t rain she went for walks or read Madame Bovary, dictionary close at hand. Sometimes she considered how a certain sentence might be rendered in Japanese. Other times she would close the book, lie back in bed, and ponder various things till her head got hot.

  At night she went down to the lounge. Kaoru was always there, a different scarf draped elegantly around her neck each time, usually knitting while she listened to her iPod. Her name was written with a Chinese character meaning “fragrance,” Mitsuki learned, and Takeru’s with one meaning “military strength.” It didn’t seem to suit a young man with wavy brown hair and a delicately chiseled face like his. He never ordered anything to drink but mineral water. She sometimes looked around for Mr. Matsubara, but either he went out to eat or he used room service, for she rarely saw him. After that one time they were never alone together in the lounge again. The lack of opportunity for a tête-à-tête suggested only that he preferred to keep to himself, and vaguely disappointing as this was, she was glad in a way; she would have expected no less of him.

  She did have a chance to talk directly with the elderly couple.

  The day after hearing their story from Kaoru, she woke up too early for breakfast, so she was out taking a turn in the garden when she ran into them. The three of them walked together for a while before heading for the Japanese restaurant. During the meal, Mitsuki asked after their son and his wife, whom she had seen with them before. She made no reference to what Kaoru had said about their impending financial disaster. The husband himself brought up the topic.

  “Seeing that you’re friends with that lady,” he said, “you may have heard something about our troubles.”

  Mitsuki nodded sympathetically. She didn’t know what to say.

  “Honestly,” he went on, “to have to face such a calamity at my age…”

  “You worked hard your whole life,” his wife said consolingly.

  “As did you. I feel bad to put you through this.” He stroked his bald head.

  He was from rural Niigata, he said, and had gone to work in Tokyo after graduating from middle school, first as a newspaper carrier for a relative who was a former prisoner of war in Siberia and kept a little newsdealer’s shop with his wife. The work was hard. Roads were icy on winter mornings and steamy on summer evenings; he had to work even in heavy rain and wind; some customers tried to welsh on their bill. Fortunate
ly his relatives treated the carriers well. Mitsuki asked where he lived in Tokyo, and he said Machida, a town way out on the Odakyu line where his wife’s family used to run a laundry.

  “I grew up in Chitose Funabashi,” said Mitsuki, “on the same Odakyu line.”

  “Fancy that!” the wife exclaimed. “Were you born yet when the Romance Car used to be called the Music Box Car?”

  Her question was so unexpected that, for the first time in a long while, Mitsuki laughed out loud. “Oh, ages before that!”

  The couple laughed along with her.

  “Work was tough,” the husband said, “but you know, hearing the sound of the Music Box Car while I delivered papers helped. Gave me something to dream about.”

  Mitsuki nodded.

  They’d talked about taking the Romance Car to Hakone on their honeymoon but couldn’t afford it, and then for years they’d been short of money. When they finally saved up enough to travel, they took occasional trips to places farther away as a break from their routine. This time, about to lose everything, they had decided to come here to fulfill the dream of their youth.

  “The way the Romance Car affected me—it made me feel like my job delivering papers was pretty darned important. That’s how it was back then.”

  Indeed, back then life without newspapers would have been unthinkable.

  The clang of the mailbox lid closing after you took out the paper was an essential part of the morning cacophony, along with the chink of milk bottles, the cry of the tofu seller and the sound of his horn, and the whoops of children scampering off to school.

  On Sunday morning Mitsuki’s father would make coffee in the aluminum percolator and read the newspaper end to end. As children, she and her sister had looked forward to the daily four-panel comic strip.

  Their mother would glance through the paper, muttering when she came to the serial novel, “Utter trash.” Sometimes she offered faint praise: “Not too bad, for a change.” The illustrations came in for comment as well: “Awful…no imagination…disgusting.” She was a harsh critic, having grown up in the golden age of girls’ magazines with illustrations by Jun’ichi Nakahara and others that had a refinement forever defining for her what an illustration should be. Those artists, heirs to the aesthetic sense and techniques of the still-vibrant ukiyo-e tradition, had created sophisticated illustrations inspired by Western realism.