A True Novel

by Minae Mizumura

  Busily savoring one slice of sashimi after another, we speculated about how much Taro Azuma was worth—a few million, at least. Ten million, maybe—at which point he materialized at our table to say goodbye. Flustered, we stood up this time and thanked him.

  As for the extravagant treat, we were unable to finish it, however hard we tried; so we had the waiter wrap it up with the sushi we’d ordered ourselves. Nanae gleefully stroked the top of the brown paper bag and said, about her cats, “If I open this in front of my babies, they’ll go crazy. They won’t let me eat! They hardly ever get to eat fresh fish.”

  “So have it in your bedroom with the door closed. They’ll never know.”

  “I couldn’t do that. We always eat together as a family. You just don’t seem to understand.”

  NOT LONG AFTERWARD, I finally went back to Japan. It was not without a guilty conscience that I left my sister with her two cats in America. Around the same time, my mother’s boyfriend happened to be transferred home, and she returned to Japan as well. I, naturally, no longer felt comfortable with her, but there were things we had to work out as a family; neither of us was willing, for financial and emotional reasons, to let the family dissolve entirely. My mother and I agreed that we couldn’t expect Nanae—more spoiled and helpless than her younger sister—to be burdened with all the miscellaneous chores that came with having a father in a nursing home, so we decided to move him back too, and got him into a comparable place, to the far west of Tokyo. He had to share a room with seven other men, but that was all my mother could afford. My mother herself rented an apartment, since buying a decent condominium in Tokyo was out of the question, let alone a proper house, even the ordinary kind we used to live in before our exodus to the States. My parents, who had spent generously on their daughters, were improvident by nature; they had been further encouraged in this by the expectation that the pension they’d be getting in U.S. dollars would allow them to live comfortably once they were back in Japan. By now a dollar was worth less than a third of what it had been when we left the country. I cried bitterly at night, thinking about my father, who deserved better.

  One day, I noticed that there was no smell of the earth in Tokyo now, either.

  Back in America

  I DIDN’T THINK I would ever live in America again after I returned to Japan. A few years later, however, when I was working part time teaching students to read and write English at a Japanese university, which was about the only way I could make a living back home, an offer came from Princeton to teach modern Japanese literature. This was the result of an academic paper on literary theory that a kind professor in the States had solicited from me and arranged to be published. Theory was a subject which I, like many others, felt much too ill-equipped to deal with, but I had tried my best. Schools never suited me despite the ridiculously long years I had spent in them. And the timing was bad: an idea for my first novel was finally beginning to take shape. I felt honored, yet I could not make up my mind to go back. Then Nanae said, in an international call, “You have to take it. It’s not the kind of offer you get every day.” The tone of her voice made me realize how guilty I’d been feeling about leaving her behind on her own. My mother encouraged me to go back too, tacitly agreeing to take better care of my father while I was away. For her, I was the daughter who helped around the kitchen and, once out of the kitchen, did nothing but read novels while munching on rice crackers. She was surprised that someone like that could become a college professor; I suppose she was proud, like any other mother. I packed all my things again and left.

  As it happened, the stint at Princeton turned out to be only the first of several jobs at American universities.

  I HADN’T USED a car in years, so I started my second life in America by learning to drive again. Princeton, though only an hour and a half from Manhattan, was semirural; you needed a car even for buying groceries. School would start in September; I got to New York toward the end of August, and Nanae gave me driving lessons.

  “You’re doing just fine,” Nanae reassured me in English from the passenger seat, puffing on her cigarette. Acting the big sister and rising to the occasion, she managed to seem unconcerned that her life depended on my uncertain driving skills. Also, she was in a good mood, pleased about my return to the States. Her hair was a little shorter, only down to her shoulders, because “long hair doesn’t look good on women my age,” but she still smoked, showing off her long fingers.

  “I hate this thing,” I said, blaming my incompetence on Nanae’s huge old car. The driver’s seat was actually too far back for me, and my foot barely reached the brake pedal and accelerator. And I’d been thrown into the chaos of Brooklyn streets. Nanae had lived in a loft in SoHo, but, finding it more and more difficult to make ends meet, she sublet it to a young couple who worked on Wall Street and moved herself, her two cats, the Steinway, and her sculptural equipment to Brooklyn. There the streets were even more ravaged than in Manhattan, with potholes everywhere, and trucks came bearing down on us from every direction.

  “I really hate it,” I repeated.

  “Well, what am I supposed to do about it? I’d rather have a decent car too, you know, if I could afford it.”

  I had assumed that this car would break down while I was away, but she had nursed it along. As for myself, I was planning to take out a loan and buy a new Civic, since I would finally be getting a steady income.

  “I’ll let you have my Civic at a good price when I leave the States.”

  “Depends on how cheap.”

  “Ten percent off the Blue Book price.”

  “No way! I don’t have that kind of money, and, besides, I prefer a bigger car, like an Accord. They’re safer on the highway. I have to think about my babies. They depend on me, so I have to be careful.”

  “An Accord?”

  Accords cost at least three thousand dollars more than Civics.

  “You should be relieved that I didn’t say a Mercedes.”

  “Are Mercedes that safe?”

  “Well, that’s what people say. But actually they’ve got a negative image here in the States too. Nouveau riche. So even if I could afford one, I guess I wouldn’t buy one. I’d take a Volvo or a Saab instead.”

  “If I were rich, I’d definitely get a Jaguar,” I said, proud of my recently acquired ability to tell a Jaguar from other cars.

  Nanae ignored the remark and said, as if just remembering, “Oh, yes, that man, Mr. Azuma. People used to say he ‘rode around in a big Mercedes.’ Remember?”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  The image of him in his dark suit when I last saw him at the sushi place came back; I hadn’t thought of him the whole time I was in Japan.

  “Have you seen him since then?”

  “Nope. Not once. Why would I?” As we were approaching a traffic light, she added, “Let’s take a right again.”

  “But we’ve been going round and round in circles!”

  “Sorry, these are the only streets I know.”

  Taking driving lessons from Nanae meant just going in circles: I realized for the first time that though she drove more smoothly and skillfully than most men, she had as little sense of direction as I did. I took the right turn, and she started talking about Azuma again.

  “Apparently he’s far richer now than he was when he was riding around in his Mercedes. Filthy rich, they say.”

  “Really?”

  The bleak townscape shimmered under the intense sun of late summer. “Where do you hear these stories about him?”

  “Every Japanese person I know talks about him.”

  “Oh, I do wish I was rich.”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  Indeed, who doesn’t? Yet what I actually had in mind were specific and modest wishes. I thought about my father in the nursing home, living with seven other men in the same room. I also thought about Nanae, living alone in this foreign land. No one expected her to make money as a sculptor, but these days she wasn’t even getting much work construc
ting architectural models, which was how she earned her living. She told me, laughing, that with so much free time, she played the piano for hours every day. “I don’t think I’ve ever practiced so much and so hard in my life. It’s amazing how you improve when there’re no guys around.”

  I didn’t join in her laughter. “How’d he get so rich?” I asked.

  “I wish I knew.”

  Nanae said something about a venture-capital business, but it was still an unfamiliar term to us, and she didn’t know any details.

  “So he can buy a Jaguar or whatever he wants, with cash,” I said.

  “Absolutely. He could even buy a Ferrari if he wanted. But it looks as if he’s not so much into conspicuous consumption.”

  “So he is tight with money after all,” I said, wondering to myself about that unforgettable array of sashimi.

  “I wouldn’t know,” Nanae answered after reflection. Then, after another pause, she said, “In any case, he must have saved a lot of money. He still lives in that same penthouse … But you know what else I heard?”

  We stopped at a red light, and she lit yet another cigarette. “He goes back to Japan a lot.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. First class, of course. People run into him at the airport and so the news spreads.”

  For a while, neither of us spoke. We were stuck behind a car trying to turn left and sat through another red light. Drivers behind us were honking their horns. When the light finally turned green and traffic started moving again, I glanced over at her.

  “I wonder if he still looks so happy and dumb.”

  “I have no idea. But I did hear that he’s still single. I’d say it’s almost criminal. So rich and handsome and forever available …”

  “So he is gay after all?”

  “I’ve never heard anyone even suggest it.”

  I sighed. “Must be nice to have that kind of money.”

  “Yeah, really. I wish I were so rich that people gossiped about me. They could call me filthy rich or fucking rich all day long.”

  IN SEPTEMBER, WHEN school was starting, I heard some more about Taro Azuma from our old friend Mrs. Cohen. She had driven all the way out to Princeton just to bring me some boxes of household goods she thought might be useful, which otherwise would have languished in her attic and basement. We hadn’t been in touch for some years. It was an unexpected favor, but she did it with the generosity of those capable people who simply get things done. She looked in mild amazement at the less-than-luxurious concrete building the prestigious university provided as housing, but quickly got the cartons inside. A cup of green tea in one hand, she started chatting. America had already ushered in the era that saw smoking as a moral failing; she must have quit for, though her nails were painted the same bright red, no smoke rose between them. Sitting across from her, I couldn’t help comparing her with Nanae and thinking how sensible and mature she was.

  From my apartment window, we could see woods lit by the late-afternoon sun and, through the foliage where summer’s green still lingered, the gleam of a large artificial lake. In the early 1900s an oil baron had donated money to create the lake so that students could practice rowing in the tradition of the old British universities. In contrast to my apartment building’s dreariness, the surroundings were rather beautiful, especially if one could forget that the lake was man-made.

  “This reminds me of when I used to pack my car and take my boys to college every September,” Mrs. Cohen said. “Time passes so quickly.” The conversation soon shifted from her two sons, who had long since graduated, to my parents’ current situation, then to news of those who used to work at the office, and finally to Japan’s roaring economy, which had caught the world’s attention. Stock prices kept shooting up; real estate changed hands at increasingly exorbitant prices—to the point where some idiots in Japan boasted that, by selling Japan, they could buy America not only once but twice over; to which the Americans replied, with understandably wry smiles, “But who wants to exchange America for Japan?” Not a day went by that American newspapers didn’t have an article admiring or censuring our extravagance.

  Mrs. Cohen picked up one of the packets of rice crackers that I’d brought from Japan and held it up to the sunlight streaming through the window.

  “Look at this! Japan is so rich now that every cracker comes in its own little sheath. Talk about extravagant!” She tore open the cellophane with her bright-red nails. “They say people in Japan eat things with bits of gold leaf scattered on top. Do you, Minae?”

  “Of course not.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.” Looking relieved, she abruptly switched the subject to Taro Azuma. “With so much Japanese money floating around, he decided to find himself some Japanese investors.”

  “So that’s why he goes to Japan all the time,” I said, recalling what Nanae had told me.

  “That’s right. Seems he started going there just around the time you left America. Right when Japan was beginning to get rich.”

  She picked up her cup and drank the rest of her tea.

  I couldn’t tell whether the touch of resentment I detected in her voice should be ascribed to his getting filthy rich—to borrow Nanae’s expression—or to the distance that might have grown between them because he was filthy rich.

  “What exactly does he do? Nanae couldn’t tell me when I asked her,” I said, heading toward the kitchen to put the kettle on again.

  “That doesn’t surprise me. You two girls wouldn’t understand it. I barely understand it myself!” she said with a laugh, and over a fresh pot of tea she tried to explain what Azuma once told her.

  It started with the company for developing medical devices that he and the Jewish-American businessman founded. Then, at some point, they brought in an Israeli physician known for his brilliant innovations, forming the business around his creative ability. The physician, leading a team in Israel, would design advanced devices that were mostly either inserted in or attached to the body, such as tubes to prevent urinary incontinence, or miniature pacemakers. The connections Azuma had made selling endoscopes would be the pipeline for selling the new products. These were first tested on human subjects in Russia, where regulations were less stringent. Should the tests prove to be successful and U.S. official approval likely, Azuma and his partner would raise capital from investors and start a new firm to produce and market the new devices. Once one of these subfirms took off, they put the company, complete with employees, on the market and sold it, usually to a large corporation.

  Naturally, the difference between the initial investment and a firm’s sale price constituted the profit. Sometimes Azuma and his partner were able to pay their investors a second million for every million dollars they put in. With such high profit margins, attracting investors from across the States was never a problem, but, since they always had a number of projects in hand, they remained on the lookout for new investors. The greater the investment capital, the more projects they could handle. Thus, when the so-called bubble economy started to expand in Japan, Azuma began going there for investors, and later, with the rise of other Asian economies, they joined forces with the overseas Chinese, and Azuma added Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong to his regular itinerary.

  I listened to her story, lost in wonder. It was twenty years since I had first met him. In those two decades, he’d kept extending his range until it was almost worldwide, while I was cooped up in the insular world of the Japanese language, aside from a halfhearted detour into the declining realm of French.

  I sighed, then murmured, “What a man …”

  Mrs. Cohen immediately translated my admiration into numbers: “He must have made tens of millions of dollars by now. Super rich.” Her tone was detached, not showing any grudge she might bear him.

  “But he lives rather simply for a man that rich, right? I heard he just saves his money,” I said, remembering my conversation with Nanae.

  She put her mug down on the coffee table and looked at me pityingly.<
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  “Honey, people that rich don’t save their money. When they’ve got some spare cash, they either invest or speculate.”

  MY STAY IN America lasted almost two and a half years that time. I worked at my first novel between classes. On weekends, I drove over to the Institute for Advanced Study—a near-mythical place owing to Einstein’s tenure there—to go for a walk in the woods, wearing much-too-sturdy hiking boots from L.L. Bean. Sometimes I watched a herd of deer, clustered protectively around two or three fawns, move stealthily through the forest. Sometimes I encountered joggers, running with the faces of ascetic monks. Princeton is far enough south of New York for the seasons to shift without the violent extremes of the America I had known.

  My life was relatively calm as well: I had a steady job and was happy with the progress I was making on my novel, which I was writing in Japanese. Once a week I also wrote a letter to my father, in language so simple that even a child could understand, and sent it via my mother. She was still involved with her boyfriend, but she visited my father to take care of his laundry or to pay his bills, and, every time she went, she read my letters aloud to him. I called her once a week.

  “I don’t know if he understands your letters,” she would tell me, hinting at the futility of the undertaking.

  “That’s okay,” I would reply. At least he knew a letter from his daughter arrived every week.

  Nanae often drove down from New York to see me. She would spend the night on the sofa and, in the morning, head home, saying, “Bye! See you soon,” with a look of contentment on her face. After she waved her hand and drove off, the putt-putt-putt of her beat-up car would linger in the air; I always had to suppress a twinge of guilt about my new Civic.

  THE SEASONS DULY took their turns, and when it was near the time for me to leave, I called Nanae and told her I was willing to lend her whatever I made from selling the Civic and, if necessary, would ask my mother to advance the rest, if she wanted to get herself a new Accord.