Inheritance from Mother

by Minae Mizumura

  The day after tomorrow, she was going to meet Natsuki in Ginza. She went over to the telephone and called her.

  A MAKIOKA SISTERS DAY IN GINZA

  “The day after tomorrow, what do you say we make it a Makioka Sisters day?”

  Natsuki’s surprised voice sounded at the other end of the line. “You mean it?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “A Makioka Sisters day” was a family expression. Based on the Tanizaki novel about the eponymous four sisters, it meant that Mitsuki, Natsuki, and their mother would go on an outing dressed up in elegant kimono. After their mother became involved with That Man they hadn’t felt like having a Makioka Sisters day, and once he was out of the picture and their father had died, their mother’s back grew so pitifully bent that it was out of the question. Now when Mitsuki suggested reviving the practice, Natsuki’s response was unexpectedly sensible.

  “But wearing kimono at our age will seem like a totally middle-aged fashion statement.”

  “Of course it will,” Mitsuki said. “Who cares? We are totally middle-aged, and then some. Wear a semiformal or a formal one, will you?”

  “Really? Why make such a big thing of it? Putting on any kimono is a production.”

  “It’s been a long time, so why not?”

  When Mitsuki used to escort their frail mother to Ginza, she had always had her hands full as caregiver, so now she wanted to take pains and make an occasion of it to revel in her freedom. In the midst of the ordeal of finding a new place to live, she wanted to let in some fresh air and revive her moping spirits.

  The tea salon in the exclusive Wako Department Store was always crowded, so they met instead in the Wako coffee shop a block away. A cup of tea there cost a thousand yen, but even if she had to economize in daily life, Mitsuki intended to splurge on outings like this now and then, partly to reassure her sister that she wasn’t destitute.

  When she self-consciously removed her coat, revealing the five-crested formal kimono, her sister cried out in astonishment. “Don’t tell me…!” Natsuki was wearing their mother’s dark-blue silk crepe.

  “Yes, the Golden Demon kimono.”

  “Oh wow. It must have been way too small. When did you have it altered?”

  “There wasn’t time. I didn’t have it cleaned either. It was in perfect condition, so I decided to wear it tsuitake-style with the obi tied low.”

  “Tsuitake?”

  Mitsuki explained that this meant wearing a kimono the way men did, without folding and tucking it up under the obi. Women hardly ever did this, especially with a formal five-crested kimono. She was a little proud of her own daring.

  “See how short the sleeves are?” She spread out her arms like a kite. She had shortened the sleeves of her under-kimono so they wouldn’t show. To match the kimono’s formality, she was wearing a heavy obi woven lavishly with gold and silver thread—the finest of her mother’s obis, one her mother had borrowed from Auntie and somehow ended up owning.

  “I can’t afford to have it altered, so I’m not planning to. Nowadays there’s no real chance to wear a kimono like this anyway.”

  “Getting divorced has really made you ready to try anything.” Natsuki sighed and then spoke in her usual envious tone: “I’m sooo jealous.”

  “You are? Why?”

  “Because ever since talking to you on the phone that night, I’ve been thinking how nice it would be to be free. To have a place all my own—just the sound of it is lovely. You know, ‘a room of one’s own.’ ”

  Mitsuki started to laugh despite herself, the mounting melancholy of the past few days briefly forgotten. “So you were jealous when I married him and now you’re jealous again when I’m divorcing him?”

  Natsuki joined in the laughter. “That’s me, always discontent. I’m hopeless.” Pressing back her kimono sleeve, she stirred Campari and soda in the tall glass with a thin glass swizzle stick.

  “To tell the truth,” she said, “when I heard your news, I considered divorcing Yuji too.”

  How ridiculous, Mitsuki thought, and looked at her.

  Natsuki went on stirring her Campari soda. She’d figured that with her share of the inheritance from their mother she could find a place to live, she said, and if she took on a few more pupils she’d be able to maintain a minimal lifestyle. Fortunately, divorce had little effect on children’s marriage prospects nowadays.

  Mitsuki was silent. Her sister had never bothered her head about money matters in everyday life, let alone planned ahead about pensions and the like. With her indolent nature, her intractable eye disease, and her by now ingrained taste for luxuries, she would never be able to support herself.

  “But I asked myself what I would do if I couldn’t support myself and realized that somewhere inside I was thinking I’d go back to Yuji.”

  “Kind of defeats the purpose.”

  “I know. It made me laugh.” She was laughing now as she told the story.

  Then she’d recalled how even when her weight ballooned from steroids, leaving her with three chins and a body that was puffy everywhere but at her fingers and toes, Yuji would tell her affectionately how charming she was, never showing any trace of a frown. She realized then what a good husband he really was.

  “And that’s not all.” Natsuki stopped moving the swizzle stick and looked at her sister.

  As Mitsuki waited for what might come next, Natsuki suddenly asked, “How’s the apartment search coming, by the way?” Her tone was casual, but her eyes were probing.

  “Hmm.” The fanciful castle in the air she had described that night on the telephone, less than ten days before, had turned to rubble, but she wished to avoid mentioning this—not from pride, but from a desire not to disappoint Natsuki, who she knew had been entranced by the vision. She answered in as normal a voice as she could muster, “Haven’t found anything very good.”

  Natsuki said nothing, waiting for more.

  “I’m at a funny age. I mean, of course I’d like to surround myself only with things I love, but I still have to do all my own cooking, cleaning, and laundry—live a normal life. I’m not over the hill.”

  Natsuki looked down and went back to stirring her soda. In the old days she would have made a great show of blowing a stream of cigarette smoke sideways, but nowadays smoking meant you couldn’t get a good seat in a restaurant or ride airplanes. Before anyone knew it, she had quit.

  Watching the swizzle stick go round, Mitsuki continued. “So I got to thinking, and I decided to keep the paulownia chest since I can store my fabrics in it, and not buy a china cupboard after all. I can manage with the shelves over the sink.” She would give back most of their mother’s dishes to Natsuki, she said.

  Still stirring, eyes still downcast, Natsuki slowly began to speak. “Actually there’s something…” She hesitated, fingering the thin glass stick. After a short silence, she went on. “What I wanted to tell you is that I’ve decided to share my inheritance from Mother with you. My portion.”

  “No!” Mitsuki cried out softly. “I don’t need your money.”

  Natsuki looked up. “I’m not saying all of it. It’s a funny amount, but twenty-two million yen.”

  “I’m telling you I don’t need it.”

  “You need it more than I do.”

  After deciding against divorce, she’d come up with the idea of splitting her inheritance with Mitsuki, she said, an idea that now seemed completely natural. “And when I talked it over with Yuji, you know what he said?”

  Natsuki drew back her chin and looked her sister in the eye. Her expression slowly changed to one of irrepressible joy. Mitsuki waited.

  “He said why not give her all of it? He said it without a moment’s hesitation. You know, I’ve been married to the man for thirty years, and I never knew what a prince he was.”

  Her smile then faded, and her expression turned serious. Mitsuki too became serious. The sisters looked at each other for several moments, their eyes grave.

  Yuji’s words had ma
de Natsuki realize that for thirty years she’d felt inhibited for absolutely no reason. As far as Yuji was concerned, his money was hers too. She did want to pay for a Steinway grand piano out of her inheritance and also leave herself a bit of spending money. The piano would be about 10 million yen, the spending money another 5 million. That amount subtracted from the 36.8 million left roughly 21.8 million, which was how she came up with the odd amount of 22 million yen.

  “I can’t take your money.”

  “Yes, you can.” Despite the obvious unequal treatment Mitsuki had suffered as a child, she had ended up doing far more to look after their parents in their old age. Natsuki said she wanted to do what she could to make up for that imbalance as well.

  “You don’t have to do anything.”

  Various thoughts came and went in Mitsuki’s mind—how true it was that she’d ended up doing so much more; how surprising it was that her flighty sister should have come up with a gesture so thoughtful; how indignant Natsuki would be if she could read her mind now. Of course the gift was unexpected and welcome. Tetsuo’s face came to mind. If he’d been born to wealth like Yuji, and the situation was reversed, would he have said, “Let your sister have it all”? She strongly doubted it. The thought made her feel sad and sorry for him. She was ashamed that she had ever made light of her sister’s marrying into wealth and equally ashamed that she, Natsuki, and their mother had ever looked down upon Yuji and his straightforward good sense.

  Yuji probably didn’t love Natsuki the way she wanted to be loved. Like most men, he probably had no idea how a woman wanted to be loved in the first place—but that, Natsuki had apparently decided, didn’t matter.

  Mitsuki repeated feebly, “You don’t have to do this.”

  “I couldn’t bear for you to be struggling along in a miserable hole. Please use your inheritance to buy a decent place to live. And if you had a little over twenty million extra, that would help, wouldn’t it?”

  As Mitsuki nodded, tears trickled down her cheeks—the first she had ever shed in her sister’s presence as an adult. Pretending not to notice, Natsuki raised her empty glass in the air and ordered a refill.

  For dinner they went to Imamura, a traditional kaiseki restaurant across the street from Wako. They hadn’t been there together for several years, not since their mother stopped being able to sit at the counter. The owner ran the place exactly as his late father had done; they enjoyed the sense that as soon as they stepped inside they went back in time, becoming characters in an Ozu film. As they wielded their chopsticks, they savored the pleasure of dressing up and going out to eat fine food on fine dinnerware. After several small cupfuls of sake, held carefully in the fingertips as befitted ladies in lovely kimono, they hailed a taxi, pleasantly tipsy. Natsuki got out first. Glancing at the meter, she tried to slip Mitsuki a disproportionately large share of the fare. When Mitsuki refused it, she said, “Don’t be stubborn,” but in the end, knowing her sister’s temperament, pressed only her fair share into her hand.

  Traveling north on Ring Road 7, Mitsuki looked out on scenery she had seen countless times before from bus and taxi windows. The outlines of the buildings gradually blurred, along with the reflected glow of white, yellow, and orange lights. Before she knew it, she was crying like a child, her face crumpled.

  THE DAY THE CHERRIES BLOOMED

  Mitsuki reported to Masako over the telephone the next day, New Year’s Eve.

  “You’re super lucky.” Remembering the words from their last conversation, she hesitated over whether to admit that, thanks to her sister, she would now be officially “rich.” Masako was struggling as a single mother with a daughter suffering from an eating disorder. In the end Mitsuki decided to tell her, first because withholding the news would be a violation of their friendship, and second because Masako knew the world was unfair and so refrained from comparing herself to others. Besides, though her mother was still in vigorous health, Masako would eventually come into a small inheritance of her own.

  When she had heard Mitsuki out, Masako said, “That’s great.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “It’s every woman’s dream. You’re Cinderella—a Cinderella for our times.”

  “You think so?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “With no Prince Charming?”

  “That’s the beauty of it. Look at you. Still a girl in your fifties, not only your mother but your husband out of the picture, and rolling in dough. You’ve got it made, sister.”

  Having had enough of marriage, Masako had no attachment to the ideal of two people growing old together like a pair of well-worn husband-and-wife rice bowls.

  “To celebrate,” said Mitsuki, “let’s have dinner. My treat.”

  “Deal.” Masako lowered her voice slightly. “Tetsuo wrote to me and apologized. Said to tell you he’s sorry. Said he wrote you an email but you might not open it, so he asked me to tell you.”

  “I did open it and read it, I just didn’t answer.”

  “Oh.” A pause. “Well, have a happy New Year, this year for sure.”

  Toward midnight Mitsuki opened the window and heard the ringing of the temple bell at Myohoji to mark the passing of the old year. What a long journey she’d come on this year! Soon she would leave this neighborhood, never again to hear this sound—a sound that seemed to make the winter night air, warmer now than in her childhood, a bit more bracing.

  In mid-January, just beyond the Inokashira line, she found a condominium she liked. The building was far from new, but it faced a spacious park, one of the city’s finest, and even now in the wintertime offered a distant view of evergreens. Closer at hand, the branches of a stout maple tree reached toward her veranda, and through them she could make out the cherry trees encircling the pond. The real estate agent tried to gloss over the building’s age with the term “vintage condominium,” but the moment she saw the view, Mitsuki’s heart leaped. She envisioned how it would look in spring, when fresh green leaves came out and sunshine poured down. The apartment, two bedrooms with a living-dining area and kitchen, was fairly large at 62.5 square meters. Better still, the owner was in a hurry to sell, so Mitsuki could afford it even if she had the interior renovated. She had to use her married name on the contract since the divorce wouldn’t be official until March, when Tetsuo returned. But on her mailbox and on the door she boldly wrote KATSURA.

  After that she and Natsuki held a memorial service for their mother in the restaurant in the Shinjuku Park Hyatt Hotel, where they used to celebrate each other’s birthdays. She also made a farewell visit to the university and took a big box of sweets with her to Toride to say goodbye to Tetsuo’s parents. When they started to apologize for his behavior, she hastily interrupted and thanked them for all they had done. She meant every word. Their other son and their daughter-in-law she thanked too, since they had been providing care for the old couple and would continue to do so.

  In between such errands, she oversaw the renovation of the “vintage condominium” and, wearing gloves and a face mask to protect against dust, packed up her things in the old apartment, leaving everything she thought Tetsuo might want. Soon the plum blossoms came out, then the peach blossoms, as with mechanical speed and precision the natural world rolled toward spring.

  On a day when despite the tang of winter cold the air held a foretaste of spring, she was in the library packing paperback books brown with age into cardboard boxes. She paused to look at the name of a well-known literary publisher. This was the publisher that had asked her old professor with the striking forehead to translate Madame Bovary a dozen years ago. No new translation had yet come out, so perhaps the project had been shelved. She had seen the editor once or twice in the professor’s office but had no way of knowing if he still worked for the same publishing house. She thought about calling on the publisher once she was settled in. Unused as she was to promoting herself, the idea seemed strange, yet she could see herself doing it.

  The room faced north, and winter chill clung to
the walls. Mitsuki sat for a while on a filled box, her back to the cold, examining the front and back covers of various paperbacks.

  The money from Natsuki had given her a condominium beyond her dreams, plus some extra cash. But she wouldn’t have quite enough to manage until her pension payments started, so she needed to do more patent translations. What to do with the rest of her time she hadn’t yet decided. Her health having been particularly poor over the past year, all she’d had in mind was getting well.

  She looked again at the paperbacks, brown with age.

  People didn’t live to do what they wanted; becoming an adult was a process of learning to give up things you wanted to do. But some abandoned dreams left a persistent ache. Her failure to accept the professor’s “rather nice offer” still caused her twinges of pain. Perhaps she could revive that offer even at this late date. It was Madame Bovary, after all. Why not translate the first few chapters, and if they came out well, take them to the publisher? The media occasionally ran stories of divorced women who lived with flair, turning their hobby into a business. She wasn’t looking for a fresh start that exciting; but if she devoted herself to regaining her physical strength, her mental energy surely would rebound as well. Then she could do something. She could at least make a stab at translating the book.

  A small step, yet an outrageously bold one too.

  Her mother had been about this age when she took up chansons. Perhaps her mother’s rejection of old age had made Mitsuki too ready to embrace it. She didn’t want to resist aging the way her mother had, yet she did want to follow her soul’s yearning, reach her arms to stars above. She had been given so many things that her mother had been denied—given them thanks to her mother, as often as not. The times were different, and her innate gifts were also different. Perhaps she owed it to herself to dream new dreams, dreams that were more ambitious, more outrageously bold—her dreams.