At that point, I still couldn’t tell which was which. I was just fascinated by the photographs—page after page of beautiful women who looked like movie actresses. One photo had them posing in hats; in another they were clutching tennis rackets; yet another saw them sitting prettily in a field, skirts spread out around them. Some pictures showed just one of them, some two, some three, and some with other people. I could recognize Yayoi in many of them, and her brother Noriyuki too. In several of the pictures, Noriyuki was playing music with a group of foreigners. Harue reached over and pointed to someone in one of the snapshots.
“Is this the man you were talking about? His name was Peter Jansen,” she told my uncle.
“Let’s see … It was a quite a while ago. Yes, that might be him.”
Uncle Genji had known people like this since he was in his teens and he didn’t seem at all awkward about looking at their private photographs. In fact, he seemed to enjoy playing a role. He kept raising his voice admiringly: Is that right? Oh really? What a picture!
By this time the three sisters had come up behind us and were peering over our shoulders. Fueled by my uncle’s exclamations and their own lively reactions, they, and everything about them—little glances, the way they stood, their tone of voice—became more and more coquettish, if I may say so. As one of them bent to explain a picture, I could smell the sweetness of the powder or perfume on her neck. I was just dazzled by the glamour of it all.
I was probably infatuated, as Uncle Genji would not have been. He was used to these sorts of people.
One day many years later, after Uncle Genji had died, a thought occurred to me. That story he told about the foreign passengers speaking so admiringly about the sisters—was it really true? There was no evidence that it was. My uncle might just have heard Natsue’s name and made the whole thing up, based on that one scrap of information. I’ve no way of finding out now. But I do know without a doubt how aware he was of the effect a story like that could have. I saw it with my own eyes. Before that, we’d only been shown a certain politeness as the Shigemitsus’ visitors. As soon as he mentioned the foreign admirers on the boat, however, all three of them dropped their formal manner and treated him with an almost provocative familiarity. It was like a sleight-of-hand trick.
“This has been a real treat,” my uncle told them as he reverently turned the last page of the album. He then looked at each of the three sisters and said, gesturing my way, “I brought my niece along today in the hope that you might be able to find work for her. It would be a great favor if one of you would consider hiring her for your staff at home.”
All eyes at the table focused on me. The eldest sister, Harue, smiled graciously and said, “Oh dear, you haven’t been able to get a word in edgewise, with us going on about ourselves. I do apologize. Well, now that you mention it, my younger sister has been looking for someone.”
She turned to look at Natsue.
“What a happy coincidence,” said my uncle, slightly bowing his head toward Natsue. “At your place, Miss Harue?”
“I’m Natsue.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” He pretended to scratch his head in embarrassment.
“It’s quite all right. People do get us confused. Inevitably.” So saying, she gave a gracious smile exactly like her sister’s.
Apparently, in the first couple of years after the war, Natsue had two maids who, one after the other, came to work for her only to quit in favor of less savory kinds of jobs, leaving her in the lurch. After that, she found a woman who at least stayed for two years, and then one day she announced she was marrying the butcher who delivered to the house. Natsue at that point would only hire someone willing to stay for a good long time. She seemed pleased by the fact that I was only seventeen and looked, I’m sure, so obviously inexperienced.
“She certainly looks honest and diligent,” Natsue said, gazing at me with those big eyes like her sister’s. I know now that she was thinking less of my qualities as a servant than of how I would get on with her mother-in-law. For their part, Harue and Fuyue were probably asking themselves how useful I would be during their summers in Karuizawa.
When Harue piped up to say, “I think she’d be splendid!” that seemed to settle it. Natsue turned to me and said, “I think you’ll find the work is not too demanding. The house is just two train stops from here, back toward Shinjuku.”
That was a surprise. I had somehow assumed that I would be working in the house where I was sitting.
“The closest station is called Chitose Funabashi,” she said curtly, as though trying to get a bad taste out of her mouth.
My surprise grew.
“Our house is very small. My mother-in-law gets migraines, but we only have two children—the two girls over there,” she said, turning toward the group of children playing in a corner of the parlor. I had no idea which two were hers. Masayuki was the only boy among them. I counted, one, two, three, four—four girls. Like their mothers, they were all pretty, especially with the big ribbons in their hair and fancy dresses, the sort you only saw in magazines for little girls. They all looked so alike that they could have been sisters.
“Where is your husband?” Uncle Genji asked her.
“Where he always is—at the university. He even goes there on Sundays.”
“The university?” he echoed. “So he’s a professor?”
“Yes, he teaches at the medical school, but he spends most of his time doing research.”
“I see. A doctor and a teacher.”
Later, he told me, “You’re lucky he doesn’t have a practice at home. The less time a man spends in the house, the easier it is for the maid.” But I was simply impressed by the fact that Natsue’s husband wasn’t just a doctor but a university professor. It took some time before I learned that of the four little girls who were present, two were Harue’s daughters, another two were Natsue’s, and that Fuyue, the third sister, was single.
“I’m afraid we won’t be able to offer as much money as she earns at the base,” Natsue said, to which my uncle replied, “That doesn’t matter. The important thing is that she learns to behave properly.”
Just as he had finished thanking them and we stood up to leave, Harue cried out, “Oh, don’t go yet. We have something for you.”
She turned to Natsue: “What do you think about the dress with the sunflowers?”
“Oh, that would look very nice on her,” she agreed.
“Fumi? That’s your name, isn’t it? Come with us.”
I followed the two sisters along a corridor into what looked like a small, makeshift cottage. Inside was a good-sized room with a wooden floor, three dressmaker’s mannequins, a pair of black sewing machines, rows of worktables with round stools, and stacked bolts of cloth. Together, the sisters draped a dress—a white one with a sunflower pattern—over my shoulders.
“You see, it fits her perfectly!”
“She doesn’t have long arms and legs like us, so the sleeves are just right.”
At the time, I didn’t know that the cottage was the workshop of Primavera, Harue and Natsue’s dress shop and dressmaking school. They had made the sunflower dress to sell, but then someone scorched the hem while ironing it, so they were considering shortening it before putting it on sale. Never having dreamed that I would ever own anything this elegant, I was thrilled to have an outfit to wear on special occasions. Little did I know that it would be the first of many hand-me-downs.
Once we were back on the Odakyu Line, Uncle Genji wiped his forehead and said, “Whew! That was something!” He went on, “It’s great that they’re sophisticated ladies, but you’re also lucky that the wife is so good-looking.” According to him, working for a young, pretty wife with little girls was best. “If the husband’s with a missus who isn’t a looker, or if there are pimply teenage boys, there might be trouble. I won’t have to worry about you now till your wedding day.”
He seemed quite happy about my new job. Privately I was caught off guard by hearing marriage men
tioned, but I didn’t say anything.
TWO WEEKS LATER, on a Monday afternoon, I went on my own to Natsue’s house. (For a long time she was Madam to me, but now that so many years have passed and I don’t even work for the family anymore, I will simply refer to her as Natsue and to the young Dr. Utagawa, her husband, as Takero.) I got off the Odakyu Line at Chitose Funabashi station, crossed the footbridge over the tracks, and came out at a small plaza in front of the station. Ahead was a cluttered shopping street that looked nothing like the area around Seijo, the station near her parents’ place. In one hand I held the map Natsue had drawn for me, and a small cloth bundle in the other. I walked along the street beside the train tracks. There was a small assortment of the usual shops—a greengrocer, a fish shop, a stationery store, and so on. I followed the map to the right at one point and found myself on a road lined with sad little houses like snaggleteeth, some jutting out, some set back. I began to see a vegetable patch here and a field there, but nothing like the bright, refreshing scenery of Seijo. If anything, it reminded me of the fields back home, which smelled of manure. My heart sank. It was even more depressing—no, shocking—when I came to the house itself, marked on the gate with a nameplate reading UTAGAWA.
Since that afternoon in Seijo two weeks earlier, I had been expecting my future place of employment to be almost equally imposing, but in front of me was a house that even I could tell was nothing out of the ordinary.
Though a little less modest than the place Uncle Genji rented, it was basically your standard two-story house, with gateposts made of stacked concrete blocks and what could hardly be called a front garden. Still, at a time when so many people were reduced to living in houses no better than shacks, even a nondescript building like this one ranked pretty high. Also, as I learned shortly, behind the main house were two small rental properties they owned, so they were doing fairly well for themselves. At the time, however, I was so disappointed I just froze in my tracks. I stood in front of those gateposts with my little bundle clutched to my chest. My new master might be a doctor and a professor, but that did not make him rich.
I was still a child, really. If I was to be a maid, I felt it would be more respectable to work for a family of some consequence. The work would be more important; I’d learn more. I didn’t aim as high as the Shigemitsus—that family seemed too grand and even frightening, with the son’s death hanging morbidly over them the whole time. But why hadn’t I been sent somewhere glamorous like the Saegusas’? Why? I felt betrayed, almost as if the adults had all conspired to send me to this house.
The door opened, and there was another disappointment: an old woman who was as far from being fashionable and modern as you could imagine. Wrapped in a dark kimono like something a man might wear, she had her hair—which was streaked with gray—severely pulled back in a bun. Besides the grim clothes and hairstyle, I noticed two medicinal patches for migraine on her temples. The lady looked me over without so much as a smile or civil greeting.
Though it was hard to believe, I was told later that when she met the senior Dr. Utagawa, she’d been a geisha. She was only his second wife, thus a stepmother to Takero, my new medical-researcher master. Perhaps she was dressed so somberly precisely because she’d been a geisha.
“I’ve got a terrible headache,” she told me, to account for most of the shutters still being closed. She took me into a tiny, dank, three-mat room next to the front hall. The room faced north, and the tatami mats felt horribly cold under my feet. There in the middle of it sat the woven bamboo trunk, still tied with a cord, that I had sent ahead.
“Here’s the closet. This is the chest of drawers. I’ve cleaned them out. The toilet’s over there,” she told me. “Would you like some tea? Or would you rather unpack first?”
I said that I’d like to attend to my trunk first. I needed to be alone, even if it was just for a few minutes. The moment she left, I plopped down in front of my trunk. I could feel the damp, cold tatami right through my whole body. So this was where I’d be spending my days? I didn’t even want to start untying the cord around my luggage.
“Grandma!” came the piercing voice of a little girl.
“Coming!” I heard slippers patter past my room.
So there was a girl in the house, not just the grandmother. I decided to unpack later. I changed into work clothes, put on a crisply starched smock, and stepped out.
The voice came from a room whose sliding doors had been left open, and I could see the old lady sitting in there, her back to the door, her obi casually tied. Beyond her at the far end of the room lay a futon and, on it, a small, hardly raised bump under the covers. Here too the shutters were only partly open, but the room faced south, so there was a sharp contrast between blocks of sunlight and the areas in shadow. The bedding looked eerie in the semidarkness.
Sensing my presence, Mrs. Utagawa said, “Yoko, this is Fumiko. Say hello.”
The shape under the quilts was a little girl. She turned her thin neck to look at me but said nothing. “Hello,” I said. She returned my greeting by glaring at me with her feverish eyes. It almost made me recoil.
Either Mrs. Utagawa had lost her sense of smell or her headache was so bad that she couldn’t move about, for the room stank of sweat, fever, and stale air. The way the girl’s frizzy hair was matted on the white pillow looked filthy; her skin was dark and coarse; and her gaze, with the white of the eye fully exposed, had a look of savagery. It was hard to believe this creature had been among the pretty girls with ribbons in their hair who danced and fluttered like butterflies at the Saegusas’ place that day. Why did I have to end up in a house with a child like this? I felt doubly betrayed. First this house, and then this girl … Though I was used to babysitting, I wasn’t one of those people who just indiscriminately loves children. And yet I’d actually been looking forward to those pretty little girls.
There was disbelief, but also something closer to anger in me. I just wanted to run, get out of that house, leave the old woman and child behind. Quilts, tatami mats, sliding doors—everything swirled in a taunting circle around me …
But I suppose taking care of a sick child had long since become second nature for me. Even while trying not to cry, trying to push my heartache down, I also began to see what needed doing, one thing after another, and before I knew it, I was scurrying around, straightening the covers, opening the windows to let in some fresh air, adding ice chips to the cold compress, wringing out the wet cloth and replacing it on the girl’s forehead, wiping down her sweaty arms and legs, even changing her underwear. I also tidied up the round tray near the child’s pillow, putting the glass, thermometer, and medicines in order. Mrs. Utagawa seemed relieved to see me taking charge. She sat by Yoko’s pillow and chatted with her, while also explaining to me where I could find the things I needed.
Yoko, apparently muddled by her fever, was babbling on continuously. “There’re lots of fish. Lots and lots of them. And there’s a fisherman on the boat. See? Fish are all jumping in his net. All jumping and shining …” Her eyes wide open, she was dreaming even though she looked awake.
After a while, Mrs. Utagawa stood up, leaving the child, who kept on babbling.
“Thank you. I think it’s time we had some tea.”
I helped make the tea in the kitchen, and by the time we headed for the sofa in the main room, it was past four o’clock. As soon as we sat down, we heard an awful wheezing struggle for breath; it sounded like someone suffocating. I almost jumped. With a loud “Oh, no!” Mrs. Utagawa stood up instantly, which startled me even more. I had little choice but to follow her back to the tatami room, where I found her stroking the child’s back nervously. It turned out Yoko suffered from chronic asthma, and they were always afraid there might be an attack when she had a cold. When she stopped gasping, Mrs. Utagawa still sat with her. Red from the choking spasms, Yoko glared into her grandmother’s face, then mine, with the whites of her eyes exposed, just as she’d looked before. She seemed to want to talk but couldn’t let
herself, in case it made her gasp again.
“Yoko, be a good girl. Try to go to sleep, even if it’s for a short while.”
Hearing her grandmother’s words, she closed her eyelids only to open them again.
“Try, just try, even for just a bit,” Mrs. Utagawa repeated, with the same result.
After saying this again a few times, the old woman held her kimono sleeve back with one hand and spread her other hand over Yoko’s face, her middle finger and her thumb on the child’s eyelids to close them. It was like closing the eyes of someone who’s died, so it was horrible to me, but it must have been a ritual between the two of them. Her fingers still on Yoko’s eyelids, she began to sing a lullaby. Her voice was so low it was nearly inaudible, almost as if she were murmuring to herself.
Nennen korori yo okororiyo
Joya wa yoi ko da nenne shina.
(Hushabye hushabye
Good little girl, go to sleep.)
Maybe that was all there was to it or maybe she only knew the beginning: she sang the same words over and over. After the third time, she took her fingers from the girl’s face, and again Yoko’s eyes opened. Perhaps that was part of the ritual, to repeat the lullaby three times for this child who was so resistant to sleeping. The expression on Mrs. Utagawa’s face as she stood up seemed more resigned than dismayed.
When the two of us returned to the wood-floored room, the tea was not just tepid but cold.
The hands on the clock pointed past five. There was no sign of Natsue, or of her other daughter.
“When will Yoko’s sister be home?” I asked, thinking that it might be rude to ask directly about Natsue’s whereabouts.
I thought I detected a slight note of displeasure in her reply. Yoko, sleeping over there, she explained, was still in kindergarten, but her elder sister Yuko was a second grader at Seijo Academy. At this time of day, she would still be in Seijo with her mother.
A True Novel Page 29