“After all, it’s the perfect night,” Kaoru added in a hushed voice. “Don’t you think? The absolute perfect night.” She looked from Mitsuki to Takeru and back again. “It’s my fault. I should never have passed on what that psychic said. Those two looked so happy.”
With that she stood up, turned her back on them, and walked with faltering steps up the stairs. At the top she went directly to the elevator, pushed the button, and cried out over her shoulder as if in anguish, “Takeru!” Mitsuki saw the assistant manager and other employees exchange startled glances. She thought of Kaoru’s daughter and her lonely death.
Mr. Matsubara said sensibly, “Since you two are back safely anyway, we should retire.”
He, Takeru, and Mitsuki headed toward the elevator too.
Back in her familiar top-floor room, which unlike the Hyatt restaurant was not completely shut off from the outside world, Mitsuki could hear the rain lashing the roof and windows. It was indeed “the perfect night.” She laid her hat, coat, and gloves on the bed and washed her hands, then went straight to the desk and turned on her laptop. After doing a brief search, she wrote out a few lines on hotel stationery, glancing up at the screen every so often. She used her own fountain pen.
It was still only ten-thirty. Masako would be awake.
On the telephone Mitsuki began by asking if there was a storm there too.
“Storm? It’s just raining. What’s up?”
She hardly knew how to continue. “I’m sorry to call so late, but I need to ask you a favor about my divorce.”
Masako had quarreled bitterly with her ex-husband over distribution of property, custody, and child support. Mediation failing, they had gone to court. She had even developed alopecia areata, patchy baldness, all because her husband, determined to keep up appearances, had been unwilling to grant her a divorce. She’d done so much research that by the time the divorce came through she knew as much about the topic as any specialist. And being Masako, she had kept up with subsequent changes in the law.
Mitsuki explained the woman’s proposal for distribution of assets.
“She sounds a bit desperate.”
“I think so, too.”
“You’re super lucky, you know. All that money coming to you without your having to say a word. Going head to head over assets is an ugly business.”
“I can imagine,” said Mitsuki, and then confessed she was thinking of quitting teaching.
After a pause, Masako said, “Be glad you have the option. At our age, usually there’re no jobs to be had. The best most women can hope for is a minimum-wage job at the local supermarket, cleaning fish.”
“I know.”
“You’re such a bourgeoise, you have no idea what a great thing it is to have fixed employment till age sixty-eight.” Don’t say anything just yet to the college, she advised, and Mitsuki realized this was good advice.
Teaching meant going all the way to the end of the Chuo line, then taking a bus or a taxi, both ways; lecturing till she was hoarse; writing endless exam questions and grading answers. Ever since her health had become shaky, all of this exhausted her more than before. Beyond that, on some level she wanted to quit in sheer defiance. She knew that in order to quit teaching and live on her savings for the next ten years, she would have to double her patent translation work. So be it.
She asked Masako to handle her further dealings with Tetsuo. In the meantime she would make notes regarding distribution of assets, using the woman’s calculations, and asked to have Masako’s divorce lawyer, a woman, take a look at them. Masako readily agreed to both of these requests.
“Oh, and one more thing.” Casually, she broached the main topic. “I just wrote my will.”
“You did what?”
Mitsuki explained the fear that had come over her on the drive back through the storm. After checking online, she had verified that if anything happened to her, three-quarters of the inheritance deposited in her bank account would go straight into Tetsuo’s pocket. She wanted to prevent that from happening at all costs. Her sister, though she was entitled to the remaining one-quarter, had no need of any more money. Therefore, following a form she’d found online, Mitsuki had written out a will specifying that she wished to bequeath her inheritance to JICA, the Japan International Cooperation Agency. She’d dated it and signed it, naming Masako as executor. Having left her official seal and ink pad home, she was going to set her thumbprint on the document using lipstick, then write “Will” on the envelope and seal it. “I’ll put it in the mail tomorrow, so promise me that if anything happens to me, you’ll be the executor.”
There was silence at the end of the line.
“I know it’s going to be a while until the divorce comes through,” Mitsuki said. “And I just can’t have that money going to him.” She had begun to feel as if the inheritance from her mother were her mother’s very soul.
Masako remained silent.
A dark shadow loomed in Mitsuki’s mind. A thick cord hanging from the ceiling; a body dangling beneath, the neck broken. The professor’s wife who hanged herself, the one Masako had told her about in Paris. At the time they both had railed at the faithless professor and pitied the abandoned wife, but found nothing particularly strange in her decision to end her life. With a lack of imagination typical of the young, they had assumed that a woman past middle age whose husband left her would naturally turn suicidal. Was Masako, still silent, also remembering that incident? Mitsuki had not the slightest intention of following that unfortunate woman’s example. She wasn’t that meek, nor did she have any desire to deal Tetsuo such a blow. But the dark shadow had arisen in her mind, and that was unpleasant.
After her long silence, Masako said with purposeful brevity, “Okay. Sure.” Then she added, “Call me in the morning, will you? I want to make sure you’re still alive. D’accord?”
“Okay. D’accord.”
When she got into bed, she felt the stiffness in her back even more than usual. Perhaps her circulation had worsened, for she felt awful, as if she were being dragged down into an abyss. Her health made her highly sensitive to barometric changes. She placed a hand on her belly. Colder than ever, as if immersed in ice water.
In this storm, where could the mother and daughter have wandered off to? Perhaps by now they lay at the bottom of the lake, tangled in seaweed. She imagined the girl’s flesh, rosy from the hot spring waters, now chilling quickly in the winter lake and turning grayish white. Unless soon found, her flesh would swell and turn dark purple, then be nibbled by fish and dissolve into lake water until all that remained was white bones. Mitsuki’s mother’s firstborn daughter had drowned in a lake at age twelve; in what state had she been found? “A stunning little thing”: the words still grated. Yet, indeed, Mitsuki’s imagination could only conjure a little girl of stunning beauty, her body adrift, intact and serene. The innocence of children was a myth, she believed, yet in that mental picture she saw the undeniable beauty of true innocence.
Then, as if by conditioned response, she saw her mother as she lay dying, her eyes wide open and staring, until the nurse mercifully closed them. No trace of innocence in those eyes. Something as far removed from innocence as possible had emanated like a noxious vapor from the figure lying so flat under the sheets it had seemed scarcely human. Mitsuki had known that her mother would die before the day was over, yet the long, torturous wait had made her death seem an impossible miracle. Those hours had been filled with an air of unreality.
She’d felt the same way a dozen years before, when she’d sat alone at her father’s deathbed. Then too she had waited so long that when death came, it had scarcely seemed real. Still filled with a sense of unreality, she had arranged an informal memorial service at her apartment. On the cabinet housing the television she had spread a large piece of white silk shot through with gold thread—fabric purchased in India on a short trip with Tetsuo—to make something like an altar. She had set out her father’s photograph and the urn containing his ashes, flanked by
candles. Then she had laid out white lilies in baskets of all sizes, some on the floor and some around the photograph. The white flowers, blooming against a background of deep green leaves, were like a requiem for her father. On the night before the service, Natsuki came over to help, and long after she went home Mitsuki had continued arranging the blooms. In time the reality of her father’s death began to sink in a little. His sadness was gone from this earth, and surely someday her sadness too would ease. As she gathered up green leaves fallen on the floor, she’d prayed that the day would come soon.
Her mother hadn’t gone to the hospital while he lay dying, nor had she attended his cremation, but she insisted on coming to the memorial service.
“What? You’re coming, Mother?”
“Of course I am.”
Her mother’s stern expression and voice had brooked no argument. After all, Mitsuki thought, That Man was now out of her mother’s life. Why have words with her?
The night of the memorial service, dressed in black, the ever-present cane at her side, her mother had sat in the central armchair quite as if she were the chief mourner, and graciously chatted with guests. Some of them must have known about her years-long entanglement with That Man, but if so they didn’t let on. As Mitsuki served food and drinks, all she could hear was her mother’s voice, then still clear and ringing. Her laughter had been especially jarring. How many more years would her mother be alive, she’d wondered then.
The noxious vapors that filled the room emanated from her mother’s laughter, but the white lilies had been pristine and pure, like the lotuses of nirvana.
LIGHTS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA
Her nerves were in a state of peculiar excitement. Undoubtedly the other long-term guests were awake in their rooms, their nerves on edge as well. Kaoru would be continuing to reproach herself for ever having mentioned the psychic to that mother and daughter. Would the others also be thinking of the two women who had vanished into the storm, or would they, like Mitsuki, have been prompted to examine their own lives?
“Today, Mother died.” The desire to be able to say those words for real had been part of her ever since that horrible telephone call: as her father lay in the hospital with pneumonia, her mother had blithely suggested using his life insurance money for a trip—a mother-daughter trip, of all things—to Paris. But later on after he died, as she saw to her mother’s needs day by day and month by month, that fierce desire had often receded into the background—especially on days when Mitsuki was reminded that Noriko Katsura was just another old woman living alone and trying to get by.
Some days her mother would deny herself delicacies to economize. “Tonight I was a good girl; instead of flounder sashimi I had instant noodles from Seven-Eleven.” When Mitsuki heard such tales her heart softened, and she was able to say gently, “You should eat what you want, Mother.” At other times her mother might gaily announce during their nightly telephone conversation, “I felt good today, so I bought myself some flowers! Gerbera, a kind of daisy.” Mitsuki would automatically think, Another waste of money—yet she was glad her mother treated herself to such small pleasures now and then. Sometimes her mother would call in the middle of the day, distraught because a man at the grocery store had been rude: “Hold your horses, Grandma.” Mitsuki would feel an urge to rush over and console her, knowing how wounded her pride must be.
When she did drop in unexpectedly, her mother’s wrinkled face would light up. Natsuki and I are all she’s got: the realization always made her sad. The calendar by her mother’s desk was often marked with their names: “Mitsuki,” sometimes “Mitsuki, Natsuki,” less often just “Natsuki.” She penciled in their names not only when she knew they were coming but also on days when one or the other of them stopped by unexpectedly. Every time Mitsuki saw her name written in her mother’s round hand, she would feel a pang of guilt for not coming more often.
Yet the sight of her mother being tortured even in old age by desperate desires—never giving up, watching like a hawk for any chance to feel fully alive—she found horrifying. Old age was cruel: no matter how one might wish for the mind to soar and the blood to rush, the chalice that held water from the fountain of life grew shallower year by year. Her mother’s unending quest to be moved by something gave her the semblance of a lost soul condemned to eternal hunger and thirst. Or she was like someone no longer capable of sexual profligacy who sought it all the more fervently, chasing the thrill of a momentary pleasure. When Mitsuki saw this side of her mother, her blood froze.
The guilt she continued to feel over her father worked on her in ways she little understood, so that even as she wished for her mother’s death she felt perversely compelled to keep her mother’s old age from being bleak like his. But as satisfying her mother grew more and more difficult, her death wish for her grew stronger in a compartment of her mind separate from resentment over the past. To free her mother from frustration that could only continue to mount, and to free herself as well, she longed for her to die.
But…Mitsuki lay in bed, feeling the raging mountain storm with every fiber of her body, and stared up at the ceiling. But what if her mother hadn’t been that tortured person?
Blessed is the daughter who, when her mother grows old and becomes a burden, doesn’t wish for her death. Surely most daughters, no matter how admirable their mother might be, have moments when they wish she were gone. The older one’s mother got to be, the more frequently such moments must occur. And Japanese women lived longer every year, lingering like specters. Little wonder if more women started wishing for the death of their mother and not just their mother-in-law, whose care in old age fell disproportionately on the wife. Mitsuki pictured women in cities and rural areas across Japan, their faces shadowed with fatigue, longing in secret for their mother’s death. Such women wanted freedom not just from their mother but also from the trauma of seeing the cruelty of old age up close—the trauma of having one’s own future self thrust under one’s nose.
To the young, old age was a mere abstraction, but anyone caring for an aging parent could plainly see that growing old was an assault not just on body and mind but on all five senses. Was that all that awaited one at life’s end?
The sound of rain beating on the roof continued.
Out of nowhere, scenes from the past arose in her mind. In her present state she could not, like Mr. Matsubara’s Wakako, tick off on her fingers the times she had been happy. Memories wrapped in shining light—she had enough of those to fill several notebooks, and yet on this stormy night the scenes from the past that came to her were uniformly bleak. The shaking of the subway train she took to the hospital after the emergency call from her father’s colleague. Her father sitting on the bed in the eight-man ward, bored, time on his hands. KATSURA written large on the breast pocket of his pajama top. The jarring sound of her mother’s laughter at his memorial service. Her mother crying like a little child after announcing her intention to live in a nursing home. Her mother’s back, further stooped from sadness and frustration she no longer even understood. Her open eyes on her deathbed. Then Mitsuki saw Tetsuo walking away from her in the ocean breeze on the pier in Calais, his figure growing smaller and smaller as she sang on alone. His heavy breathing as he lay beside her asleep in bed on the night after she received the “rather nice offer” to translate Madame Bovary. His telephone call with the first woman. His emails with the current woman. Numbers lined up in a row…
She crawled out of bed, threw her coat over her shoulders, and went to stand by the window.
She opened the window and heavy rain came at her. Raindrops were falling with great vigor, reflecting the light in the room, and when she stuck her head out they battered her on the forehead, the eyes, the cheeks. She forced her eyes open. Her gaze was drawn to faint glimmers below, scattered in the darkness. They came from lamps illuminating the garden, but they looked like something glowing at the bottom of the sea. Glowing and calling to her. Last night she had reached out to the stars, but tonight she was
transfixed by the glimmering lights below. As she leaned out in fascination, the rain implacably soaked her hair, her neck, her coat. The farther out she leaned, the more she felt swallowed in a world of water, as if she also, like the mother and daughter, lay adrift at the bottom of the lake.
How much time might have passed, she had no idea.
Inside the room the telephone was ringing. The same sound had drawn her from the window the previous night also. Remembering, she checked her watch: midnight. Who could it be, Masako again? The sound seemed to summon her back from the bottom of the lake.
“Did I wake you?” Natsuki’s voice.
“No, I was up.”
“I couldn’t sleep. Something’s been bothering me.”
“What?”
“You.”
“You don’t need to worry about me.”
Natsuki was not a strong person, but she had Yuji as well as her children, Jun and Ken, to support her. Even if she, Mitsuki, disappeared from this earth, Natsuki would be all right. Realizing what she was thinking, Mitsuki felt a slight shock. Her face, her hair, and her coat were dripping wet. She told her sister to hold on while she finished washing up, and fetched a towel from the bathroom.
When she picked up the phone, Natsuki went on. “I was thinking. Wondering what sort of life you’re going to lead now.”
Mitsuki couldn’t reply.
“Will you get to keep the Suginami condo?”
Inheritance from Mother Page 36