Inheritance from Mother

by Minae Mizumura

  As the sisters grew, their father achieved social and financial stability, and in time the marriage acquired respectability. Relatives from his side of the family started showing up during the auspicious first three days of January. The antique set of ceremonial lacquerware, including the sake decanter and cups, began to make an appearance. But at the same time, slowly and imperceptibly, the marital bond weakened.

  As the holiday approached that year after her father was shunted off to the remote hospital, Mitsuki had suggested, “Shouldn’t we bring him home for New Year’s, anyway?”

  “No.” Her mother had been firm. “I don’t want him in the house.”

  Every year from then until her father became bedridden, Mitsuki would spend the last day of the year in Toride with Tetsuo and his family, and then bring her father home to their apartment on New Year’s Day. Since her mother’s sordid relationship with That Man wasn’t public knowledge, her father’s side of the family would show up as usual. Her mother would entertain the guests, putting on a wifely smile as she calmly plied her festive chopsticks.

  The box of poetry cards never did turn up when they emptied out the house in Chitose Funabashi. No telling when it had been discarded.

  Natsuki’s slide show was a poignant reminder of those bygone days, days that seemed to have no bearing on the present. Time had cleansed and beautified the distant past, while the recent past was wretched in every respect. Very much like the difference between her mother in youth and old age, Mitsuki thought.

  TWO POSSIBILITIES

  Three days passed uneventfully.

  On the third evening, Mr. Matsubara again did not appear in the lounge. Mitsuki retired to her room early for once, flopped on the bed, still dressed, and ticked off the days since her arrival in Hakone. This was the seventh night. She had come planning to stay nine nights in all, so there were only three left, including this one.

  She closed her eyes and made herself face head-on the thoughts that over the past few days had risen persistently in her mind only to be quickly suppressed.

  Tetsuo’s attitude puzzled her. Why was he hesitating? The final line of his most recent email rose in her eyes: “Anyway don’t get worn out—you never were very strong. Take good care of yourself, okay?” What lay behind those tender words?

  Was he hesitating because he loved her—even if not in the way she wished? No, that wasn’t possible. Absolutely not, she murmured to herself. He might still have faith in her character, but he didn’t love her. He didn’t yearn to be with her, to see her smile and hear her laugh. She for her part had long since fallen out of love with him. Indeed the thought of him now evoked only bitter emptiness. Yet admitting his lack of love for her was still painful.

  There could be only two possible explanations. One was that he felt guilty. He was not so heartless as to cast off his wife of many years without a pang. He’d gone to live in Vietnam months ago, yet they were hardly communicating. He might sense that she had her suspicions, but surely he had no idea she knew he was over there hatching divorce plans. Broaching the topic would be difficult. And to top it all off, when he last saw her she’d been coping with a mother sinking rapidly into dementia, and her own health had been even worse than usual. In that case his hesitation—including those tender words—signified gentleness, not weakness of will.

  One other possibility remained. She took a deep breath. Even to entertain the notion seemed a desecration not only of him but of herself, and yet banish the thought as she would, it kept on coming back: he might have his sights set on the inheritance from her mother. More precisely, he might be calculating the chances of her coming into an inheritance sometime soon. That might be what was making him put off talk of divorce. He didn’t know her mother was gone. He could put two and two together though, and surely realized that even after the expense of installing her in a nursing home there would be plenty left over if she suddenly died.

  How much did it matter to Tetsuo whether or not Mitsuki received an inheritance from her mother?

  After staring up at the ceiling for a while, Mitsuki dragged herself out of bed, went over to the desk, and sat down. She lifted the lid of her laptop with both hands and switched the machine on. With a faint hum, the screen began to glow. She went to Tetsuo’s email account and slowly scrolled down until she came to the message from the woman with an attachment concerning division of property. Once more, she opened the attachment. As unpleasant as it might be, she needed to grasp the figures the woman, bless her heart, had worked out in such detail.

  First, the 72.3-square-meter condominium where he and she lived: by the woman’s estimation, at current prices it was worth at least 30 million yen. They had been paying back the loan regularly, so only 10 million or so remained. By selling, therefore, they stood to gain some 20 million yen. Next came savings and investments, amounting to roughly 18 million yen. Since they had no children and didn’t indulge in expensive pastimes like golf or cruises, the money had piled up without their having had to economize. Added together, the assets they had built up during their marriage came to 38 million yen. Even though Tetsuo earned many times more than Mitsuki, since the initial down payment on the condominium had come largely from her parents and since he wouldn’t need to support her after the divorce, and above all since the cause of the divorce was his unfaithfulness, Mitsuki’s compensation, in the woman’s opinion, would be adequate if the assets were split fifty-fifty. In other words, 19 million yen apiece.

  Also Tetsuo should promise to split his pension. The woman recommended granting Mitsuki another 10 million at the time of the divorce as an advance on his retirement bonus, for a total of 29 million. She further advised him to allow Mitsuki to keep the pension money she’d been building up at JPB, the Japan Post Bank, since the divorce would end her entitlement to a survivor’s pension. How awfully considerate, to be thinking already of what might happen to Mitsuki in the event of Tetsuo’s death! Of course the woman was only bending over backward to make it easy for Mitsuki to sign the divorce papers. Unless Tetsuo could obtain a divorce by mutual consent, there would have to be arbitration, or else they’d go to court. The potential cost of the divorce mattered less to the woman, Mitsuki sensed, than the need to keep Tetsuo from leaving her before it came through.

  “The devil himself would agree to these terms,” she wrote.

  And yet Tetsuo seemed unpersuaded. “This is awfully generous.”

  Mitsuki thought about the calculations from his perspective. Indeed, if he gave her 29 million yen, that left him with a measly 9 million representing all the assets he had managed to accumulate while indulging himself here and there along the way. After all that studying as a child and all those years of teaching college, he would have reached his mid-fifties with less than 10 million yen to show for it. The size of the woman’s nest egg wasn’t clear, but she was living at home, and that would have allowed her to save up quite a bit. Yet she hadn’t worked steadily. Putting it all together, Mitsuki estimated that she too had under 10 million yen—probably no more than Tetsuo did. Their combined worth would be only about 18 million yen at the outside.

  But what if Mitsuki’s mother were to drop dead? Then Mitsuki’s inheritance would be added to the 38 million yen she and Tetsuo were presently worth. He couldn’t be sure, but he could guess that she would inherit something over 30 million yen, for a grand total of 70 million or more now in their combined marital assets. With that much on hand, by stretching a bit he could finance a dream condominium worth nearly 100 million yen.

  If Tetsuo left Mitsuki, he was looking at about 18 million yen in total assets for himself and the woman. If he stayed married to Mitsuki and her mother died, the Hirayama assets would come to 70 million yen or more. What a temptation! That might well be why he was dragging his heels. The woman knew all there was to know about the Hirayama finances, with one omission: he clearly hadn’t told her about the plot of land in Chitose Funabashi.

  If Tetsuo was stalling because he felt bad for Mitsuki, tha
t was one thing. But if he was stalling with an eye on her mother’s money, he was…what? Mean. Despicable. A total rat. She tried to work up some indignation, yet deep down she couldn’t bring herself to really blame him. Sadly, aging had taught her the importance of money as well as the untrustworthiness of the human heart. What if he now found out she had come into her inheritance and did an abrupt turnaround, dumping this woman? Would he be at all shamefaced? Not likely. He’d convince himself that he had abandoned the idea of divorce out of his tender regard for his wife. That was how the human mind worked, she thought simply and without cynicism.

  She left the computer, went over to the window, opened it, and let the night air cool her cheeks as she looked down at the lake, now shrouded in darkness, and then up at the crystalline sky above. As her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, the stars above the lake grew brighter. On such a cloudless night they seemed close at hand, inching closer all the time. Before she knew it, she was leaning against the windowsill with her arms extended out toward the ever-brighter stars, as if reaching for salvation.

  The stars remained indifferent in their icy beauty.

  The night was not yet far along, but Lake Ashinoko was set so deep in the mountains that silence reigned and stars in their millions sparkled. It felt like the middle of the night. When she closed her eyes, the stars’ bright afterimage lingered behind her lids.

  The telephone rang. Startled, she drew back inside, shut the window, and went over to the desk to pick up the receiver. It was Masako.

  “You sound as depressed as ever.” Masako herself was as blunt as ever.

  “Well, I have good reason to be.”

  “Cheer up, will you?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Come on.”

  “I’m managing. I’ll be okay.”

  After a short silence, Masako said in a lowered voice, “You know his girlfriend? She has a blog. ‘Carefree Travels in Vietnam,’ it’s called.”

  “How’d you find out?”

  “A hunch. I googled ‘Ho Chi Minh City,’ ‘sabbatical,’ and ‘divorce.’ Bingo. It’s gotta be her.”

  “Well well.”

  “I don’t know if I should tell you this, but she’s dead serious about getting him to divorce you.”

  “I know.” She couldn’t bring herself to confess that she had read their emails.

  “What’re you gonna do?”

  “Ask him for a divorce. What else?” The words popped out before she had time to think. In her heart she must have already made her decision.

  “Mitsuki! Bravo!” Masako sounded happy and relieved.

  She should have left him long ago; it had taken her all these years to see it. Knowing that she deserved no praise, Mitsuki simply said, “Thanks.”

  Masako didn’t chatter on the telephone, so Mitsuki ended up speaking more concisely too.

  “She doesn’t seem like a bad person,” said Masako before hanging up. “I mean, she even writes about air pollution over there.”

  HUSBAND OR POVERTY?

  Mitsuki stood still in front of the telephone.

  “Ask him for a divorce.”

  She had settled on that course long ago, she now realized, but only when she spoke the words aloud to Masako did their meaning sink in. She stared at the telephone, ruminating, and slowly sat down at the desk. Sadly, she felt no sense of liberation. In fact, anxiety washed over her. How would she live?

  The array of figures in the woman’s email now took on greater significance.

  The inheritance from her mother was a heaven-sent boon. It meant she could divorce without becoming poor. For a woman of her upbringing, a woman lacking Masako’s toughness, it was a relief to think that she might be able to cling to her cozy, middle-class way of life.

  She thought of friends her age stuck in loveless marriages. Friends whose parents had fallen on hard times or for whatever reasons died without leaving them an inheritance. Lacking full-time jobs and having led sheltered lives for the most part, they faced the choice between a provider-husband and independent poverty, and had been forced to choose the former. Compared to “love or money” or rather to “money or something more valuable,” the choice of “husband or poverty” had a decidedly dreary ring—a dreary and unromantic ring befitting an unhappily wed, middle-aged woman about to slide into old age.

  The ramifications of that choice varied. One of Mitsuki’s more self-assured friends from high school had, as soon as her children were out on their own, initiated a quasi-divorce: when her husband was home she would make dinner for the two of them, but she ate in her own room as she pleased, watching television. A friend from college, a quiet type, had declared with a straight face that she was developing a “wet-tissue relationship” with her husband. That was how Mitsuki learned of the myth then circulating that a wet tissue placed over a sleeping husband’s mouth and nose would cause death by suffocation. Another college friend made no complaint about her marriage, but when Mitsuki said, “You two seem to be getting along,” her friend had sighed. “Don’t be fooled. Ever hear of domestic violence? I’ve had bones broken more than once.”

  Apart from free spirits like her mother, most women of the previous generation couldn’t bring themselves to contemplate divorce in the first place, regardless of the economic consequences. They had quietly endured unhappy marriages to the end. Mitsuki remembered a musical event at Golden at which a woman around ninety years old kept asking her sixtyish daughter, “When’s your father getting home?”

  Each time, the daughter patiently replied, “Mother, he’s been dead for seventeen years.”

  Eventually Mitsuki had been moved to say, “Perhaps she might find it reassuring if you told her he’ll be home soon.”

  The daughter had smiled wryly. “On the contrary, that’s exactly what she’s afraid of.”

  Once upon a time, divorce had been a casual matter in Japan. Then, under Western influence, it had fallen out of fashion, become taboo. Mitsuki was fortunate to be alive at a time when divorce was increasingly accepted, to have work to do, and to have her inheritance from her mother to fall back on as well. She should try, anyway, to consider herself fortunate.

  Mitsuki brought the memo pad by the telephone over to the desk and wrote the figure 29, representing 29 million yen, the amount she stood to gain from Tetsuo at their divorce. Beneath it she added her inheritance from her mother: 36.8. The total came to 65.8.

  People truly differed in their sense of the value of money. Natsuki’s sister-in-law was worth a billion yen in movable property alone, but she was always complaining about being hard up. An old man in Mitsuki’s neighborhood would come home from the public bath with a plastic basin under his arm and climb the steps into the shabby wooden apartment building where he lived, looking like he had not a care in the world. Mitsuki secretly called him “Happy Grampy.” For someone like her, 65.8 million yen was an enormous sum. She wrote it out with all the zeros: ¥65,800,000. It looked like enough to buy a castle in France. And yet without bothering to do the math, she knew it wasn’t anywhere near enough to live in the lap of luxury. The magic aura of the zeros lasted only a moment before fading away.

  She intended to use her entire inheritance to buy a place along the lines of what she had now, if a bit smaller. Somewhere by a station not too far from the heart of the city, on a street that wouldn’t overly offend her aesthetic sensibilities, in a building that didn’t look too run-down, with a view that would set her heart somewhat at ease. That’s what she wanted.

  She also wanted some of the small luxuries that her mother had enjoyed in old age. For that, she would set aside the 29 million from Tetsuo. Once she turned sixty-five, her JPB pension would give her 50,000 yen a month, and her national pension would give her almost 70,000 yen more. But 120,000 yen per month was depressingly little to live on. Even adding in her share of Tetsuo’s pension, it wouldn’t be enough. And what if she lived another thirty or forty years? That possibility, till now a mere statistic, began to scare her. She r
emembered that Masako had purchased an annuity, using a small inheritance from her father; she could earmark 10 million of Tetsuo’s 29 million for the same purpose. That would give her a little more per month anyway. The remaining 19 million she should save, and when her pensions kicked in, start using a little at a time, as her mother had done with her savings. How to manage over the next ten years or so: that was the problem. Once she had used her inheritance from her mother to buy a place to live, she would have to manage without eating into that 19 million yen. But how?

  Until now, on top of her own earnings there’d been Tetsuo’s annual before-tax salary of 13 million yen. From now on there would be only her combined income of under 3 million yen before taxes—a pittance. She’d taught as many classes per week as a full-time professor, but what a difference in salary!

  Once again, she began to scribble figures on the memo pad.

  She’d gotten a late start on the JPB pension plan, so she would need to deposit roughly 40,000 yen a month from now till she was sixty-five. For the national pension, she would need to deposit 15,000 yen per month until she was sixty-two. Besides that, adding in residence tax, national health insurance, nursing insurance, private hospitalization insurance, utilities, apartment maintenance fees, and whatnot, she would need more than 100,000 yen per month. That left her very little to live on. The more or less affluent lifestyle she had enjoyed until now must end. No more eating out. Fewer trips to the hairdresser, not to mention fewer purchases of everything from books and herbal medicines to the disposable heating pads she used to ward off the cold. Acupuncture and massage sessions would be a luxury, even once a month. Foreign travel had never seemed like a huge extravagance, but from now on she would have to plan it carefully. And however much she economized, right off there would be the substantial expense of moving. Plus she would have to replenish some of her furniture and appliances. In time her laptop would break down, and other unforeseeable expenses were bound to arise. Each time she dipped into her savings she would be robbing her old age.