Inheritance from Mother

by Minae Mizumura

  Their father shared his wife’s low opinion of contemporary serial novels and, like many members of the intelligentsia, seldom deigned to read them. He used to marvel that the works of the great Natsume Soseki were first published serially in newspapers. “Just think! Newspapers offering their readers meaty reading like that.” He was fond of pointing out that the opening pages of Light and Dark, Soseki’s final, unfinished novel, contained ruminations on the theories of Henri Poincaré, an eminent French mathematician and contemporary of Soseki’s. “Back then a name like that could appear in a serial novel without any explanation, and no one thought anything of it.” Mitsuki and Natsuki, neither knowing nor caring who Poincaré was, would listen in meek silence. Only daddies needed to know such things.

  If the content of serial novels was no longer as impressive as it had been, neither was the style, which had often been of a rare sophistication. After their grandmother died, their mother said one day, “You know, the idea that she could have read that novel is unbelievable to me.” The Golden Demon was full of intricate Chinese characters and long sentences written in an ornate, archaic style. Even with the characters’ phonetic readings indicated by glosses, it would have been hard going.

  Over the course of a century, as newspapers increasingly became part of every household’s morning ritual, subscribers were exposed not only to novels patterned after Western novels singing of amour and amants but to articles full of new words translated from the West, among them words for “democracy,” “individual,” and “liberty.” Gradually, newspapers shaped a new language and a new breed of Japanese people.

  When he was a newspaper carrier, said the husband, he used to live with his employer and attend classes at high school while he worked, but the double burden of school and work had been too much. He’d decided to see instead that his younger brothers got through school and went to work in the sheet-metal plant, putting in longer hours but getting a bigger paycheck. From then on he’d worked like a dog, and now just as he was set to enjoy his retirement, his youngest brother, always a troublemaker, had dumped this unholy mess in his lap.

  “It’s beyond me.” The old husband repeated this, his expression calmer than that of his wife. Could he be planning to do something as radical as kill himself to pay off the debt with his insurance money? Mitsuki searched the placid face to see what might lie behind it. He was so solicitous of his wife, undoubtedly if it came to that he would choose some way to die that wouldn’t appear to be suicide—go out fishing alone, say, and capsize? They were on the edge of a lake, so that scenario came naturally to mind.

  Later that night she again saw the mother and daughter in the hot spring but had no chance to speak to them. It occurred to her that they might be deliberately avoiding her, knowing she was friends with Kaoru. But the mother beamed at the daughter, and the daughter responded with a smile of angelic sweetness. As far as she could tell they were a loving, close-knit pair, nothing more.

  Before she went to bed, she watched the slide show again. Among the photographs was one of the original house in Chitose Funabashi. Their young mother had had a sunny disposition then. In her second marriage, which gave her more freedom because it was unconventional, she’d tried to re-create, even if on a smaller scale, the life at “Yokohama” that had meant so much to her. Behind the house, on a plot of land half the size it once was, she’d made a round flower bed edged in bricks and planted roses, dahlias, tulips, and other Western flowers. They’d also had a grassy lawn and a collie, Della. For the house she’d ordered beds, still items of luxury at the time, and manufactured by a Japanese company whose name, France Bed, gave them extra allure. She also bought a shiny black upright Yamaha piano—a grand piano was beyond their means—and in time began taking Natsuki to “Yokohama” for her piano lessons.

  Perhaps to make up for bitter memories of her childhood, she not only dressed smartly herself but saw to it that the two of them always had nice things to wear. She sewed summer clothes that were simple but cute, humming as she worked the sewing machine pedal. For their winter clothes, she had a knack of finding fine-quality items at department store sales; fancier clothes with appliqué, beads, or lace she had a neighborhood seamstress sew by hand. She also gave Mitsuki and Natsuki new hats and shoes. “You two never ask for any clothes,” she used to say approvingly. “What good girls you are!” But she kept them provided with such nice things—they were almost always dressed better than their classmates—that they never felt any need to ask for more.

  Back then, able for the first time in her life to run things the way she wanted, their mother had glowed with satisfaction. She’d been on good terms with their father too. He and the dog Della were forever competing for possession of the sofa, so one Sunday she made an inadvertent mistake. As he lay on the sofa reading the newspaper, she set the dog’s food dish on the floor by him, cooing, “Here’s your dinner, Della sweetie.”

  He looked up from the newspaper and said, “Hey, it’s me!”

  The sisters, watching, had collapsed in laughter. Their mother also had laughed cheerfully and picked the dish up from the floor. “I beg your pardon!”

  A chanson popular around then contained the chorus “Papa aime Maman, Maman aime Papa,” sung by a little girl (supposedly the daughter). From then on, Mitsuki sang it altering one word: “Papa loves Mama, Mama loves Della.” Her father laughed—everyone laughed. If she’d only known what lay ahead for her family, she never would have sung those words.

  As photo after photo came up on her laptop screen, the Hakone night and the mountains vanished, replaced by memories of a time when she’d been happy without knowing it, memories that were as far off as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope, yet vivid all the same.

  They left her more desolate than before.

  POETRY CARDS

  Watching the slide show, Mitsuki realized something: there wasn’t one photograph taken on New Year’s Day in her childhood.

  The air always felt somehow different on that day—the most auspicious day of the year in Japan. Whether alone or surrounded by family, everyone on the archipelago always felt a little formal as they faced the New Year. That first morning, the atmosphere was charged with expectation.

  As a little girl, Mitsuki had loved the way the winter morning’s crystal cold enhanced that air of expectancy. And yet she had felt vaguely sad. She was proud of the way her family adopted a Western lifestyle ahead of everyone else, but on New Year’s Day she wished they could be more like a regular Japanese family. She wanted them to join in celebrating the day. Instead it felt as if they were putting up a quiet rebellion.

  How different from Christmas!

  When December 25 drew near, tiny lights used to twinkle on a modest Christmas tree in their house, and the entire family would troop to Ginza, she and Natsuki dressed in their best. On Christmas Eve they sang “Silent Night” to Natsuki’s accompaniment, and on Christmas Day the white damask tablecloth and napkins reserved for company would cover the Formica table (stylish at the time). The relative by marriage who called their father “Big Brother” would show up with his wife, and everyone would feast on Western food together, their father all smiles.

  But on January 1, only two things set the morning apart: the nice smell of the ozoni soup her mother made, and festive chopsticks at each place, in red-and-white envelopes decorated with fancy twisted cords. Her father, as head of the family, formally wrote their names on the envelopes with a calligraphy brush: “Noriko,” “Natsuki,” “Mitsuki.” That was all. No kadomatsu pine arrangement outdoors, no pile of round kagamimochi rice cakes indoors. No colorful array of foods in tiered lacquer boxes. In childhood she never saw the antique New Year’s set with mother-of-pearl inlay, which must have been packed away somewhere. The family neither paid nor received any holiday visits. The red-and-white chopstick envelopes that were the one tangible symbol of New Year’s in their house had been precious to her.

  New Year’s Day had always been an exceptional day in the
Katsura household, in a peculiar way. What made it so was their father’s mood. Three hundred sixty-four days of the year, life revolved around their sunny mother, but that one day they were ruled by his irascibility. Morning was the worst. He glowered over his ozoni soup as if he wanted to send Japan’s ancient holiday to the devil. Rice cakes displeased him, as did all traditional New Year’s dishes, including seven-spring-herbs rice gruel—a lovely name, Mitsuki used to think, although she’d never had any. You were supposed to eat it on the seventh day of the New Year, she knew, but she kept quiet lest she stir up her father’s wrath.

  His bad temper didn’t last, though. Gradually, as the sun rose in the sky and the festiveness of the day began to wear off, his mood would lighten. Eventually day turned to evening, and they sat down to dinner. After dinner the frown finally left his face as Mitsuki and her sister brought out a traditional card game for the family to play: the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu, a set of cards inscribed with classical waka poems, one from each of a hundred poets. That was the one New Year’s tradition that their father wholeheartedly endorsed.

  Before playing, they spread cushions in a circle on the wooden floor of the living-dining room and laid out the cards face up in the middle. For each round, they chose one person to read the poems aloud. As that person began reading, the others competed to be first to grab the card displaying the poem’s second half.

  Mostly their father was the reader. While the rest of them were fond of prose, he liked poetry, whether in Japanese or English or even Chinese. His readings of the ancient Hyakunin Isshu poems were of unmatched beauty.

  Aki no ta no kariho no io no toma o arami

  Waga koromode wa tsuyu ni nuretsutsu

  In the autumn fields, harvest huts are rough-thatched,

  And the sleeves of my robe are wet with dew.

  Her mother read with the lilting cadence of a prewar schoolgirl.

  Haru sugite natsu kini kerashi shirotae no

  Koromo hosu cho ama no Kaguyama

  Spring has passed and summer comes, it seems:

  Pure white robes hang out to air on heavenly Mount Kagu.

  The rules of pronunciation were different in these old poems. What looked like tefu, for example, was pronounced cho. Just knowing this made Mitsuki feel a little more grown-up.

  The Golden Demon has a strong association with the New Year’s poetry card game, which figures prominently in the opening scene. Despite this, Mitsuki couldn’t remember her grandmother ever having shown any interest as they played. Instead she would put a smock over her kimono and go do the dishes, or bring everyone tea and tangerines, or sit curled on one end of the sofa, dozing. When Mitsuki grew old enough to read the novel, she tried to imagine what might have gone through her grandmother’s mind as she watched the rest of them at play.

  The scene takes place on the evening of January 3 in a certain year of Meiji. The large room is hot and steamy: over thirty young men and women have formed two circles and are enthralled in the poetry game. The women are dressed in New Year’s finery, but some have face powder coming off, hair disheveled, and kimono in disarray. Some of the men have torn their shirtsleeves and cast aside their haori jackets. One young woman—O-Miya—hangs back in graceful reticence, her clear eyes wide, taking it all in. Then along comes a mustachioed gentleman wearing a gold ring with a huge diamond the like of which they have never seen. One person notices it, and a wave of admiring comments sweeps around the room.

  “A diamond!”

  “It’s a diamond all right.”

  “A diamond??”

  “Aha, a diamond!”

  “Gosh, a diamond.”

  “That’s a diamond?”

  “Look at it. A diamond.”

  “My goodness, a diamond??”

  “A fine diamond.”

  “A diamond sparkles something fierce, doesn’t it?”

  The word “diamond” is repeated so many times that the scene lingers long in the reader’s memory.

  When her grandmother was in her eighties, had her memory of that scene faded into oblivion, like smoke? Or had she simply grown so deaf that she felt obliged to sit on the sidelines?

  Once when Mitsuki was little and tried to take her turn as reader, everyone burst out laughing, wounding her small pride. She had retreated to the sofa where her grandmother sat thinking her unknowable thoughts, or perhaps thinking nothing at all, to receive comfort at her knees.

  By the time her grandmother died, Mitsuki had learned to read the poems with the same cadence as her mother. The sisters had their favorites and would surreptitiously lay those cards near where they sat. When they each realized what the other had done, they would trade taunts: “Cheater!” “You cheated first!” If they both liked the same poem, they would race to grab it. They liked the ones that even children could understand.

  Hito wa iza kokoro mo shirazu furusato wa

  Hana zo mukashi no ka ni nioikeru

  The human heart is beyond knowing, but in my birthplace

  The blossoms smell the same as in years past.

  Each card bore a classical portrait of the poet in color. Those of ladies in twelve-layer robes were pretty, and so without really trying the sisters learned which poems were written by female poets. They found it strange, and a bit disappointing, that the famous beauty Ono no Komachi had exactly the same face as all the others. “Ise no Osuke” they considered a funny name for a woman, but her poem, which began “Eightfold cherry blossoms in the ancient capital of Nara,” had an appealing feminine grace; the poem itself seemed to glow with beauty.

  Their house had no past—or rather, no history. In a way it symbolized Japan, which after losing the war set about trying to expunge its past. Their grandmother could only live on tatami mats, but after she died and before the house was rebuilt, all trace of that old lifestyle vanished—the full-length wooden mirror, carved and lacquered; the round porcelain hibachi; the kotatsu heater table; the floor cushions; and even the futon. The sole remaining pieces were their mother’s pair of paulownia chests. Instead, the house filled up with small, cheap, Western-style furniture, not to mention the “three sacred treasures” of the postwar era—a refrigerator, washing machine, and television set. Yet even after the house had been wiped clean of history, and even for a while after Natsuki and Mitsuki grew up, every New Year’s evening the same words that had been uttered a thousand years before would resonate quietly in their living room, connecting them to the Japan of long ago.

  Another ancient poet wrote, “the nation shattered, mountains and rivers remain,” but for the Katsura family it was “the nation shattered, poetry remains.” Or even “words remain.”

  The reason for their father’s irascibility on New Year’s Day was largely ideological: at a time when the word “postwar” was still raw, the Shinto aura hovering over various New Year’s customs revived memories of the horrific war.

  But as Mitsuki grew older, she came to see that his visceral dislike of New Year’s festivities was rooted also in his personal experiences. While her mother’s store of rich and finely detailed memories was a bottomless spring, her father remembered little and had little wish to speak of what he did remember. Therefore he told the same stories over and over.

  One story from his youth was surprisingly colorful—an account of the procession of geisha who used to come by to pay New Year’s greetings, their hair done up in the takashimada style and their faces painted white, lifting the hems of their black kimono slightly as they walked. Yakuza bosses came too, he said. The Katsura medical clinic, located on an old highway, had flourished from the Edo period on. His father, cosigner for various loans, was also a member of the Tokyo municipal assembly. Doubtless it wasn’t only geisha and yakuza who came to pay their respects on the first of the year; men dressed up in formal kimono must have streamed into the house as well. But when his father died they all scattered, leaving only debt collectors to swarm like flies. The family possessions were sold, the clinic changed hands, and his stepmother a
nd he moved into a small property that they had formerly rented out. How very dismal their first New Year’s there must have been!

  Had anyone been kind or crazy enough to call on the bereft pair?

  As Mitsuki sat in her hotel room in the mountains of Hakone, looking at old photographs in the hush of night, the thought of that bleak holiday, with no photographs to mark the occasion, struck her as a dream from a former life.

  Her father had been fourteen when his father died, her mother fourteen when her father walked out. They each divorced someone else to be together; perhaps their two souls found mutual comfort, both of them having suffered such a blow in adolescence. By marrying they threw other lives in turmoil, endured a storm of criticism from their relations, and made social outcasts of themselves. The cheerless New Years of Mitsuki’s childhood showed that not enough time had passed to soften those memories. The first three days of January, when no holiday callers came by, must have reminded her parents of how as newlyweds they’d stood together against public opinion. So those bare-bones New Year mornings with festive chopstick envelopes and little else had been happy, in their way, after all. Lingering memories of all they had endured to be together must have served to hold her mother’s self-indulgence in check and bolster the marriage.

  Why couldn’t time have stopped then?

  If time had stopped back then, her mother’s life might have been the enchanting story of a starry-eyed young girl who devoted herself to her dream and proudly brought it to fruition.