A True Novel

by Minae Mizumura

  “Maybe he retired to somewhere like Beverly Hills, with all the other rich people,” Mrs. Cohen wondered.

  Beverly Hills would be perfect for him, I thought, since he would be new money, like everyone else there.

  “Or maybe he started a venture-capital business with young people in Silicon Valley,” she continued. “Anyway there are lots of Japanese-Americans in that area.”

  For a few moments, neither of us spoke.

  Her mention of Japanese-Americans made me wonder whether he was still a Japanese citizen.

  “I wonder what his nationality is now,” I said.

  “I’m not sure,” she replied, tipping her head to one side. But then, practical as always, she made a likely-sounding guess. “In terms of tax-planning, sometimes it’s better to remain a foreign firm. That can apply to individuals too.”

  Later that evening, I called Nanae from the hotel.

  “What! He’s moved to California?” she said.

  “That’s what I heard.”

  “Huh … To California.” Her tone was relaxed, which I put down to her now being settled in her own country. She had, in the end, returned to music and was teaching, eking out a living. Framed in the rectangle of my hotel room window was the night-lit, big-city scene outside, skyscrapers standing shoulder to shoulder yet solitary, each of them.

  In California

  SOME MONTHS LATER, in January 1998, I was in California.

  At the center of Stanford University’s campus was a quadrangle, a courtyard surrounded by a cluster of Spanish Colonial–style buildings with orange-red tile roofs and colonnaded arcades. The campus extended in all directions from the quad and was dotted with picture-perfect palm trees, just as you see them on postcards. Instead of East Coast–type professors with tweed jackets and old leather briefcases, Stanford professors could be seen pedaling their bicycles and wearing colorful helmets and shorts, legs tanned and muscular. And, as if to compete with those bicycles, motorized wheelchairs whizzed about, making me jump whenever they passed. Asian-American students were everywhere. Sometimes I saw nothing but black hair and Asian faces, yet everyone spoke Californian English.

  The novelty of the West Coast made me feel like a tourist for weeks.

  It seemed strange that once off campus, I saw hardly any high-rises. Palo Alto, where the campus was located, was the heart of Silicon Valley, and a few minutes’ walk took me to a street lined with computer-related companies whose names even I knew. The one- or two-story buildings with spacious parking lots stood as if in quiet disdain of the bustle of New York City. The neighborhood residents must have included some who had made fortunes while still quite young, but all I saw were incongruously modest houses.

  California sunshine was another source of surprise. I arrived during the rainy season, so the sun shone rarely, yet when it did come out it burned, no matter how low the temperature. I learned that here the sunlight, when rain didn’t intervene, hit the earth without anything to filter it: the air itself was perfectly dry.

  PACKING AND TRAVELING across the Pacific was becoming more and more of a hassle as the years went by, and returning to the States, therefore, less and less attractive. I had forced myself to accept this short-term teaching post at Stanford because I had the feeling that it might be the last time I’d come back for anything but a visit. I had no professional obligation that bound me to Japan; my mother and Nanae were learning to tolerate each other a little better and could manage in my absence for a reasonable length of time.

  My teaching at Stanford was hardly what one would call work. A weekly graduate seminar was all that was asked of me, and I was even allowed to do it in Japanese. I planned to use my free time to write a third novel, whose odd-sounding title I had already decided on: An I-Novel from Top to Bottom. The project—a memoir of my childhood—made slow progress, though. As I had left Japan just as my childhood was ending, my memories of those years were locked away in a magic chest deep inside me. When I moved back to Japan and faced its day-to-day reality, my desperate longing for my home country quickly dissipated into thin air. But the locked chest remained. When, once in a while, some random happening pried the lid up, I would be overwhelmed by the bright jumble of things inside—by their aura, sounds, and smells—qualities that only childhood memories possess. By bringing out these memories in the form of a novel I felt I could atone for all the time that had passed, time that weighed on me. I just didn’t know why I had such difficulty writing it. Was it because I felt uneasy writing about my life in such an unmediated way, uneasy writing in the “I-novel” tradition of Japanese literature, where the author is too readily forgiven for—no, indulged; no, not only indulged, actually encouraged in—wallowing in his own life? With plenty of free time and abundant memories, I made hardly any progress.

  My laptop on the small desk was often in sleep mode, a picture of falling cherry blossoms on the screen, while I spent most of my time curled up with a book or doing chores around the house.

  And the house gave me plenty of chores to do.

  Built in that same Spanish Colonial style with orange-red tiles on the roof, it certainly looked splendid, though it was as small as the gingerbread cottage in the Grimm’s fairy tale. Right next door was another little house, the mirror image of mine, which was occupied by Jim, the young Japanese-literature teacher who had invited me to Stanford. Jim’s life in the twin house seemed to be perfectly civilized, but my German landlady—nice but evidently extreme in her environmental concern—was opposed to all modern conveniences. The lamps might as well have been candles, with their low-watt lightbulbs, and the “fully furnished” place had no microwave, no vacuum cleaner, no washing machine. And no television. Listening to National Public Radio on the little transistor I bought, I spent a great many of my waking hours doing housework—cooking, mopping the floor, and washing laundry in the kitchen sink. I didn’t have a car this time in America either, and the supermarket was some distance away, so there were long walks with groceries in a backpack.

  When there was no shopping to do, I took walks around town, weather permitting. It rained a lot, though—maybe every three days. Sometimes I was shut up in the house for days on end. The rainy season that year, apparently, was particularly sustained; some thought the reason might be El Niño. Sometimes even the highways were closed off because of downpours.

  THE END OF my stay in California was nearing. It had rained for three days solid, but it was Friday and my seminar started at two o’clock. A little after one, I put on my raincoat and waterproof shoes, took out the huge American umbrella that made me feel like a first grader, and headed for the quad, where I opened the door to the building housing the Asian Languages Department and climbed the stairs to my office. Just as I reached the top, someone addressed me in Japanese.

  “Professor Mizumura?”

  It was a young man who I assumed was Japanese. A wet black umbrella stood against the wall by my door.

  I felt a little disconcerted that he recognized my face, but I reacted more when he mentioned that he used to work for a major literary publisher; the name, for a moment, put me back in Japan. The young man himself didn’t have much of Japan about him, though. One could usually tell, as there’d be an unspoiled air about the new arrival, like a package wrapped in the fresh, crisp paper of Japanese department stores. This man was not like that. He looked tired in spite of his youth, as though life abroad had already started to wear him down. He had on jeans and a light blue button-down shirt—the universal uniform of young people—providing little clue as to when he had left Japan. Those days were gone when you could tell how long a person had been in the States by what he wore.

  He looked back at me as I stared at him, confused. Hearing the name of the publishing house, I wondered if we had met before. I had no recollection of him. He struck me as just one of those young men you see everywhere back home nowadays—in the subway, on the street, in restaurants—far better-looking than the older generation, but usually featherbrained. />
  “Have we met?”

  “No, I’m afraid not,” he replied with a bashful smile.

  He explained that he had quit his job with the publisher and was living in San Francisco. One day not too long before, while reading online about a lecture series at the Stanford Humanities Center, he had come across my name. I had given a talk about my novels to a small crowd at the Center.

  “That talk was a while ago.”

  “I know. But that’s how I learned that you were here. Then I looked at the class schedule and saw that you teach on Fridays. Which is why I’m here today.”

  “Were you standing here waiting the whole time?”

  “No. I was sitting on the floor.”

  I laughed. American students often sit on the floor, their legs stretched out in front of them, waiting to see their teachers.

  He laughed, seeing me laugh.

  “I’d decided that if I didn’t see you, I’d leave a note in your mailbox.”

  “I see.”

  He didn’t seem to have any urgent business. He must have just decided to drop by, having recognized my name. Living abroad, I too had been feeling a bit lonely, and I decided that just having a conversation with this person, who seemed neither silly nor stupid, shouldn’t be too much of a bother. In fact, everything about him—the way he stood, talked, and looked at me—seemed all right. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time.

  “I’m very sorry,” I said, unlocking the door, “but my seminar starts in five minutes.”

  I invited him in and asked him to have a seat. The room, lined on all four walls with Japanese and English books, belonged to an American professor of Edo-period literature who was on leave. The young man was about to sit down when he stood upright again and introduced himself as Yusuke Kato, explaining which Chinese characters were used in writing his name. Apparently no longer in the habit, he had no card to hand over.

  I glanced at my watch as I sat down.

  “Excuse me a second. I have to change my shoes.”

  I pulled off my wet walking shoes, placed them on some newspaper to dry, and put on a pair of high-heeled boots. When I sat up again, my eyes met Yusuke’s. They were long, narrow eyes, with single-fold eyelids—a feature generally unappreciated by Japanese people nowadays but which appealed to me, with my fondness for things Japanese. The skin below his eyes looked slightly dark from tiredness.

  “Could you give me a little time after your seminar?” he asked.

  I felt relieved. I would have been embarrassed to have him sit in on my seminar.

  “Of course. But it lasts three hours.”

  “That’s fine. I can go to the Hoover library. I sometimes read Japanese magazines in there.” The library had a fine collection of books from East Asia.

  “Then I’ll see you in three hours.”

  “Thank you.” Yusuke took his umbrella and turned to leave. The back of his neck was refreshingly young.

  When he returned later, I was sitting alone in my office drinking a cup of black tea. After class, I always came to the annoying conclusion that someone like me had no business speaking in front of people. Since I could use Japanese in the seminar, my aggravation wasn’t as bad as when I had to mumble in English, but even so I needed a few minutes to soothe my nerves with a cup of steaming-hot tea.

  Yusuke said, as soon as he took a seat, “Japan seems so far away.”

  His hair, hanging over his pale forehead, was wet from the rain, glossy black “like the wet wings of a raven,” as the Japanese expression has it.

  “I find that I’m no longer interested in the news in Japanese magazines.”

  He looked at me with those elongated eyes. I asked him when he had come to the States. He said he’d arrived in September of the year before last, that is, a year and a half earlier—which surprised me. I thought he’d been away from Japan for at least three or four years.

  “I’ve read your books,” he announced.

  “Really?”

  “Both of them.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I thought—I …” He paused, looking for words, then came up with the lamest thing one could possibly say. “I thought they were quite interesting.”

  He fell silent again, as if he’d done his duty.

  “Thank you,” I said again, not knowing what else to say. I had sensed from the beginning that he hadn’t come to see me because of my writing. But—given that he had taken the trouble of coming to see a writer—it would have been nice if he could have been a little more obliging and eloquent.

  He mentioned that he was surprised the library didn’t have the literary periodical published by the firm he’d once worked for.

  “Shame on them! I’ll make sure they subscribe to it.”

  “It’s okay. It doesn’t really matter,” he said in a tone that confirmed his indifference.

  “Why did you quit your job?”

  “I didn’t want to, but I ended up having to.”

  He didn’t continue. I could tell that it was an effort for him to talk; he seemed to be taciturn by nature. He was studying my face. I felt uncomfortable, though the little he’d said seemed normal enough.

  “Would you like a cup of tea or coffee?” I asked, not wanting to be the only one with something to drink.

  “No, thank you.”

  The conversation had come to a standstill again.

  “Are you going to some university here?” I asked.

  “Oh, no. I didn’t have a definite plan when I came to the States, so I’m taking some English-language classes. But I also have a job.”

  “A job?” I asked, the image of a waiter at some Japanese restaurant in my mind’s eye.

  “Yes, at a small software company in San Jose.”

  “Software? Really?”

  “Yes. An Argentinian I met in the English class gave me an introduction to the company. It’s not full-time, but the pay is good.”

  “I see,” I said, nodding, inwardly blushing at the old-fashioned view that had made me imagine him only as a waiter. But how does someone who worked in publishing get to work at a computer-related company? I wondered. My puzzlement must have been evident, for he was quick to explain.

  “I majored in physics in college.”

  I glanced at his face again; he looked somehow brainier than before.

  “I didn’t know publishers hired people with science degrees.”

  “They do.” He smiled, showing white teeth. “I was an editor on their science magazine. But then it went out of circulation, and I was transferred to their literary journal. I wasn’t too happy.”

  “You don’t like literary journals?”

  “It’s more that I wasn’t cut out for it.”

  I waited for him to elaborate, but he said nothing more about it. The dismay I’d felt at his lack of interest in my writing dissolved. I was relieved to know of his indifference to contemporary Japanese literature, since that meant he wouldn’t expose my ignorance by rattling off names of up-and-coming writers, who popped up like bamboo shoots after a shower. At the same time, I felt even more mystified about why he’d come to see me. If it was just a matter of missing having a conversation in Japanese, San Francisco was full of people who could oblige.

  After saying so little about himself, Yusuke proceeded to ask when I had arrived, where I lived, whether I had a car, and how I was getting Japanese food in town. He did not seem to be particularly enjoying the conversation, or my company, for that matter. Even so, he appeared to be prolonging his time with me. I couldn’t think what I ought to do. Silence fell yet again. I sat fiddling with the empty mug in my hands.

  It was getting dark outside.

  I furtively glanced at my watch and saw it was a little past six.

  The rain that had begun pouring down that afternoon was now heavier still, and, with the night approaching, everything around us seemed to be dissolving, blurring—a world drenched in water.

  I remembered a time when I often encountered new people in unf
amiliar places and spent hours with them. Who it was or where the place was did not matter; what mattered was that those hours cut off from routine could be as intoxicating, as blissful, as time spent drifting on the surface of a deep sea. But after I reached my mid-thirties, this happened less, and I began to feel that new encounters were often just repetitions of old ones. I hadn’t experienced meeting a stranger as a pleasure for a very long time.

  “Would you like to have dinner with me?” I asked.

  “Are you sure?” His tired face brightened. When I saw this, that sensation of cutting some time off from everyday life, of being set pleasantly adrift, began to revive. Life was again something to celebrate. Though still clueless as to why this nice young man was here in the first place, I at least felt sure that he wanted to spend more time with me. I couldn’t help smiling.

  “If you happen to be too busy …,” he ventured.

  “No, no. I happen to be not busy at all,” I answered, laughing.

  WE HEADED OUT in Yusuke’s Volkswagen to one of his favorite Chinese restaurants, which turned out to be in Mountain View, the next town. The place was gaily lit, with ceiling lights and red Chinese lanterns decorated with tassels, also red, hanging from the ceiling. After we were seated, Tsingtao beer arrived, followed by plate after plate of Chinese food served American-style—haphazardly but generously. Yusuke gradually relaxed and started talking about how the sunfish at the Monterey Bay Aquarium were grotesquely big, and how he’d visited a resort area just across the Golden Gate Bridge.

  The previous fall, he had driven around Napa Valley, the wine country nearby, where grapevines hung low in perfect order like soldiers in line. There, the bigger wineries competed for visitors by offering tours and providing free tastings to lure them into buying wine by the case. At one of these, he saw an exhibit that included an early twentieth-century ledger listing payments to workers. The left-hand column showed wages in dollars, and in the adjacent column were the laborers’ signatures verifying receipt. Together with signatures in English, he spotted some characters for Chinese names like Wang and Chang, clumsily written by obviously illiterate hands. The Asian workers were paid from fifty cents to a dollar a week, while the other names all had wages of eight, ten, or even fifteen dollars a week alongside them.