A True Novel

by Minae Mizumura

  “They made twenty or thirty times more than the Chinese,” he said, sounding less scandalized than amazed—or even slightly amused.

  “Maybe the Asians were day laborers, the ones called coolies.”

  “Probably.”

  About a quarter of San Francisco’s current population was Chinese-American. Some of those people had to be descendants of men who worked in the wine country. Some of the Asian-American students I saw on campus might also be their descendants.

  “I understand the Japanese-Americans had a rough time of it too. I heard they weren’t allowed to own land.”

  I nodded, appreciating his interest in these Asian immigrants. Most of our fellow countrymen were too smugly occupied by the here and now of contemporary Japan, their interests confined within its boundaries. But I also appreciated the absence of any too-easy outrage or sympathy in his voice.

  “And yet the American dream can actually be more than just a dream.” Saying this, he looked at me intently again, as if searching for something in my face. Then he said: “I believe you knew Taro Azuma when you lived in New York.”

  This was not a name I was expecting to hear.

  “You mean the millionaire?”

  “Yes.”

  He was watching my reaction carefully.

  “Do you know him?” I asked.

  “I met him three years ago. Actually, two and a half.”

  Then it might have been just before Azuma disappeared, I thought. Yusuke continued to watch me with his long, narrow eyes. I stopped eating and stared back.

  That this person had met Azuma did not sink in. Not easily. The name itself evoked memories—happy memories, I suppose, now that I thought about them—of the white Colonial-style house on Long Island, of my father and mother in the breakfast nook, and of me in a miniskirt, my hair in long bangs, primping and daydreaming endlessly in front of the mirror. What could the Taro Azuma I’d known then have to do with this young man from Japan?

  “In New York?” I asked him after a pause, still nonplussed.

  “No, it was in Japan.”

  Another surprise. “Oh? Where?”

  “In Nagano.”

  I was at a loss. Of course, I’d heard of Nagano. There would be the Nagano winter Olympics this year; the place was known for miso and soba noodles. Yet all that came to mind was a vague, idealized image of the “Japanese countryside,” with its mountains, streams, and fresh air, as it might be represented in a grade-school textbook illustration. I was unable even to locate the place on my mental map. I remained silent.

  Yusuke continued, “I was in a place called Oiwake, in Karuizawa.”

  It was a relief to hear the name “Karuizawa” mentioned. At least I knew about Karuizawa from the old novels I used to read, and of its association with foreign words that had entered the language at the dawn of Japan’s modernity, and still sounded Western and evocative: “highlands” and “horseback riding”; “birch” and “larch” trees; “barons” and “counts.” Yes—there was even a novel set in Karuizawa whose title, The Wind Is Rising, was taken from a poem by Paul Valéry: “Le vent se lève, il faut tenter de vivre.” But what did this literary Karuizawa have to do with the Taro Azuma I knew?

  “It was pure coincidence that I met him,” Yusuke said quietly, almost to himself, and picked up his chopsticks, only to lay them down a moment later. “I understand you knew him personally,” he said.

  Could our relationship be described as “personal”?

  “I only knew him a little,” I answered.

  “When was it?”

  “A long time ago.”

  “How long?” he persisted.

  “Just after he came to America.”

  “Really? That long ago?”

  Yusuke’s reaction pushed my girlhood much further into the past than the way I experienced it in memory. But, for the person in front of me, it would inevitably have seemed “that long ago.”

  “Yes, way back then.”

  “So, before he got rich?”

  “Long before.”

  “If you don’t mind my asking, how did you happen to meet him?”

  Yusuke didn’t seem to realize that he was doing all the questioning.

  “My father knew him much better than I did,” I answered and briefly explained their connection.

  “I see.”

  He was quiet for a moment. His smooth face, so typical of East Asians, showed no emotion.

  “What did Mr. Azuma say about me?” I asked.

  “He mentioned your name and that’s about it. When I told him that I worked for a publisher, he asked me if I happened to know a novelist named Minae Mizumura. All he said was, ‘She’s someone I used to know.’ ”

  Still in some shock, I was in no mood to find anything funny, but the phrase “someone I used to know” sounded like a line from an outdated pop song.

  Yusuke hesitated. He turned his eyes away and reached out to pick up the metal teapot—the kind found in every Chinese restaurant in America—and poured some more oolong tea for both of us. It was more lukewarm brown water than tea, with no smell or taste.

  The restaurant was not all that big and, this being Friday evening, it was almost full. Waiters hurried back and forth, balancing large, round trays heavy with plates of food. The rain must have been sheeting down, but all we could hear inside that brightly lit place was the orders being shouted in Chinese to the kitchen and the conversations of diners enlivened by alcohol and hot food.

  Yusuke did not go on, so I took the lead.

  “I heard last fall that he no longer lives in New York.”

  The unspoken words “he’s disappeared” made an ominous echo behind this. Yusuke gave a faint sigh and nodded, apparently aware of the fact.

  “Yes. He seems to have disappeared.”

  It was then that I remembered he might be in California. When I first arrived at Stanford, the idea that Azuma could be somewhere in the area had occurred to me, but I hadn’t given the possible coincidence much thought.

  “Someone told me that he might have moved here to California.”

  Yusuke nodded again.

  “Oh, so you already knew that too?”

  “Yes, I heard something of the sort.” He looked at me directly. As if he’d at last made up his mind, he enlarged on this a little. “In fact, that’s why I decided to come here.”

  It all became much clearer now.

  This young man had not wanted to see me; he had appeared because he’d heard that I knew Taro Azuma. Nothing in his attitude had suggested that he was interested in meeting me personally, yet I still had the nasty feeling that I’d somehow been deceived. At the same time, a renewed interest rose in me. Nursing my bruised feelings, I asked in the most natural way I could, “Are you looking for Mr. Azuma, then?”

  “No, not really.”

  He seemed not to know the answer himself.

  “Ah, I know! He told you to go to America and make your fortune!” I said with a little laugh.

  He smiled. “I’m afraid not.”

  Still laughing, to sound less accusing, I said, “Then you came to see me because you wanted to find out more about him.”

  The smile faded from his face. After a moment, perhaps searching for the right way to put it, he replied: “I didn’t want to know more about him. I wanted to talk to somebody about him.”

  I gave him an encouraging look.

  “It was in the summer, two and a half years ago.”

  “Yes?” I nodded and kept my eyes on his.

  At that moment, a couple sitting next to us, an Asian man and a white woman, burst out laughing. It was obvious that they’d recently fallen in love: I’d been monitoring their lively interaction out of the corner of my eye. On the other side was a big Chinese family sitting at a large round table, talking loudly in Chinese. Among them was a man with a thick neck, red and creased, looking like the illustration of the pig character I remembered from the famous Chinese classic Journey to the West I’d re
ad as a child. He was almost spitting out his words, speaking excitedly and swinging his arms around. Farther away, at a table against a wall, sat a middle-aged, very shortsighted American who never raised his face from his newspaper as he ate by himself.

  Under the red-tasseled lanterns, a colorful collection of lives was on display, but Yusuke seemed impervious to his surroundings, too preoccupied apparently with his own memories.

  “That summer, I needed a break from work, so I went to Nagano, and by sheer coincidence I met Mr. Azuma there.” With a long sigh, his face looking more worn out than ever, he told me, “Even now, I have a hard time understanding what happened that week.”

  I nodded again.

  “It was during the Bon festival …”

  I waited for him to go on, which he did, with that tired face of his.

  “It’s hard to explain. It’s not that anything special happened. Basically, I just listened to a story from the past.”

  “Whose past? Mr. Azuma’s? He told it to you?”

  “Not exactly. The woman who was there with him told it to me. She’d known him since he was a little boy.”

  I tried to come up with an image of this woman, but all I got was a vague shadow—no face, no age, nothing.

  “It was such a strange week. I wasn’t feeling too well, so that probably made it feel even stranger than it really was. And I’m not over it yet.”

  He spoke less hesitantly now.

  After he returned to Tokyo, he tried to talk to the friend who went to Nagano with him about what had happened, but doing so only deepened his feeling that the whole thing might well have been a hazy dream. A year later, he came to the States, still haunted by the memories of that week. Then, just a few days earlier, he’d seen my name on the university Web site and decided on the spur of the moment to contact me, for the chance to talk to someone who also knew Taro Azuma. The decision had become an obsession.

  “I thought that talking to you might help me get back to normal.” The bright lights in the restaurant seemed to emphasize the exhaustion on his face. His eyes wandered over the table, strewn with plates of uneaten food.

  The couple next to us burst out laughing again.

  “Is that why you had to quit your job?”

  “I would have preferred not to quit, but I ended up having to.” He glanced over at the lovers, then asked, changing the tone of his voice: “I’m sure you’re familiar with it—the lottery for green cards?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  Even people who have lived in America for many years can have trouble obtaining the official right to permanent residency. Yusuke had decided to enter the green-card lottery, a program created by the government to encourage ethnic diversity among those entering the country, giving all nationalities an equal chance of success in America. A surprising number of Japanese enter the scheme, though few people are even aware of its existence.

  “After I met Mr. Azuma, I began to think that going to America might not be such a bad idea—or, rather, just leaving Japan for a while. So I applied for a green card, though I didn’t think there was any chance I’d get one.”

  “And?”

  “By some fluke I got it on the first try.”

  Not wanting to let the card go to waste, he asked for a year or two of leave without pay, but his employer refused on the basis that it would set an undesirable precedent. Yusuke decided to resign. He put together all the money his work had made him too busy to spend, and moved to California.

  “Since I was a science major, it’s fairly easy for me to find a job anywhere.”

  “So what are your plans?” I asked. “Will you stay in the States permanently?”

  “I haven’t decided. I might get more serious and look for a full-time job, or go to graduate school here. Or I might go back to Japan. As for making a living, it’s hard to say which place would be easier.”

  By this time, we had both picked up our chopsticks and were eating again. There was still so much food left: chicken with cashews, stir-fried broccoli, the neat mound of steamed rice which was nearly untouched. My appetite, however, was gone, and I soon put down my chopsticks. Yusuke followed suit.

  “If you wanted to talk about Azuma, I wish you’d said so from the beginning.” I might have sounded more annoyed than I intended, as he promptly apologized.

  “You’re right. I should have told you right away. I’d been thinking so much about meeting you that when I actually saw you, I didn’t know how to begin.” He added quietly, “Then I realized I might be forcing my obsession on you, and you’d probably be bored.”

  “Of course not. And, besides, I’m a good listener,” I said, throwing in some English for fun, as Nanae often did.

  “Well … yes, it seems like it.” He was looking at me as if trying to decide whether he should take this at face value, though he did seem relieved to have at last arrived where he wanted to. His face relaxed a little as the bustle around us began to register.

  “I have time this evening, if you’d like.” I looked down at my watch. It was a little after eight.

  “That’s fine with me, but …”

  “Okay, why don’t I listen to the story this evening. Luckily, it’s Friday, so I guess you don’t have to work tomorrow.”

  Yusuke nodded. Then, looking around him, he saw a line of people waiting at the door. He turned back to me. “Let’s go somewhere else,” he suggested.

  “If you like, we can go to my place.”

  “You mean your house?” His long, narrow eyes widened slightly.

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t mind?”

  “It would be more comfortable there.” I called a waiter over and asked for a doggie bag. The waiter returned shortly with the check and a warm brown paper bag smelling faintly of grease. When I reached out to pick up the check, Yusuke pounced on it. In the end, we agreed to split it. This was the age of gender equality, as they say. Then we left the restaurant and its red-tasseled lanterns.

  HEAVY RAIN CURTAINED the twin houses, with their wavy tile roofs. I saw blue light glinting between the slats of the venetian blinds at the other house, where Jim was probably channel-surfing as usual. We parked on the street and walked up the wet pathway to my front door.

  The door opened directly onto the living room. In a corner sat a white plastic bucket full of tall flowers too gorgeous for their container. Nanae had ordered them from Japan for my birthday. “I specifically asked for the kind you’d find in an English garden and not the exotic ones grown only in greenhouses,” she told me on the telephone from Tokyo. “Is that what they sent?” A little corner of springtime in my living room, the bouquet seemed as much a celebration of her fresh start in Japan as my own birthday.

  “Flowers! Only a woman’s house would have them.”

  It may have been nervousness that made Yusuke come out with this awkward compliment.

  “I don’t usually have flowers in the house,” I replied.

  With the efficiency of a man who’s lived by himself for a long time, he helped me put together some drinks and snacks in the tiny kitchen. We soon had an open bottle of California red, wineglasses, a pot of black tea, two mugs, a few bricks of cheese, and some sliced dill pickles on the coffee table in the living room. Yusuke took the armchair and I chose the sofa at right angles to it. Though I liked wine, I was a poor drinker: it went to my head too quickly. I would have loved to curl up with a blanket and sip wine all night, listening to Yusuke’s story; but I had long since passed the age when a little tipsiness can be appealing—a reality that no woman is happy to face. Regretfully, I decided it would be wiser to alternate between wine and tea.

  Small yellowish bulbs—ten watts, maybe less—on all four walls cast a muted light. When I had moved into the house, I changed the lightbulbs for brighter ones in all the rooms except the living room, where I never tried to read. A faint glow, as of candlelight, enveloped us and, combined with the rain and darkness outside, cut us off from the rest of the world.

&nbs
p; Yusuke took a long time before beginning his story. Instead, he asked me how Azuma had established himself in New York. He wanted to know my first impressions of him. He spoke as little as possible but was oddly persistent in his questioning, as if he wanted to take over my memories and make them his own, distant and fragmented though they were.

  As I gazed at Yusuke’s pale face in the muted light, it occurred to me that if a man were in love with another man, this is what he’d look like.

  Rain beat hard on the roof. With no wind, it spilled straight down like a cascade, as though it meant to submerge the entire area.

  At long last, Yusuke started to tell me his tale, beginning hesitantly but then going on as if unable to stop. I listened with the stillness of deep sleep. The present disappeared. The place where we were disappeared. Even Yusuke and I disappeared. With my sense of the solid reality around us dissolving, the yellowish glow from the small bulbs on the walls looked like will-o’-the-wisps, ghost fires. The wildness outside the little house now seemed distant, as if the power of nature couldn’t penetrate our world.

  YUSUKE TALKED ON into the night.

  A LOUD PULSING jarred me out of this trance. I recognized it as the sound of the sump pump buried in the front yard, chugging and spewing water into the street. The landlady had installed it to prevent the house from getting flooded, and every time it rained hard, the pump started up its loud thumping. Thinking it might be making all that noise to no good purpose, I once asked Jim, my next-door neighbor, whether he thought the thing did any good. He just smiled and shrugged his shoulders.

  Yusuke also noticed it, just as he came to the end of his account.

  “What’s that sound?” he asked, suddenly conscious of his surroundings. When I told him about the pump, he said in an oddly clinical way, “You’d need a generator to keep it working if the electricity gave out.”