A True Novel

by Minae Mizumura

  Maybe that idealism was still in the air; maybe that was what I found so refreshing when I first stood in front of Seijo station.

  The Shigemitsus had once lived near the Andos in central Tokyo. In the late 1920s, when the Odakyu Line opened, their children, Noriyuki and Yayoi, began commuting to Seijo Academy’s elementary school, in the care of a live-in student or one of the maids. In 1930 the family moved to the Seijo area and, soon, into a new Victorian-style house. Only a couple of years later, however, the entire family, along with the Demon, moved to London, where Mr. Shigemitsu was transferred by his company. They ended up renting out their scarcely lived-in house to a retired politician and his wife.

  Not long after they left for London, the Saegusas arrived in Seijo. Given the delicate constitution of the youngest daughter, Fuyue, their doctor had advised them to move to a neighborhood where she could breathe good country air, and they decided on Seijo, where all three daughters could go to the school there. After renting for a while, they bought a piece of land that happened to be next to the Shigemitsus.

  That coincidence was the beginning of all that followed.

  I can well imagine how seeing the Shigemitsus’ mansion on its large plot next door must have affected the Saegusa girls. With the family far away in London, the girls could only fantasize about these glamorous neighbors of theirs. What was life like for them in a foreign country? What were the children like? When they came back from England, would they become friends? The girls spent one year, then another, and a whole year more, thinking about them, until one day the Shigemitsu family at last materialized. It was 1937. By coincidence, that was the year I was born.

  To see a girl about their own age dressed so fashionably must have impressed the Saegusa girls no end. The way her parents looked must also have struck them as astonishingly modern and à la mode—all the more so because of the singular depth of their aspirations, in ways both good and bad. On sunny afternoons, the girls used to peer through the hedge and watch their neighbors taking tea on the porch while an impressive number of maids fussed around them. In the evenings they would hear the family playing classical music in the parlor. The Shigemitsus’ stay in London had only enhanced their already considerable social standing, so the girls got to see the more prominent residents of Seijo, including some quite well-known writers and artists, come and go.

  How the sisters, especially the strong-willed Harue, must have longed to become friends with their newly returned neighbor! How delighted she must have been that Yayoi happened to be placed in the same class in school! How proud—and surprised—she must have felt when she realized that Yayoi went out of her way to seek their company! I could just imagine it all.

  Yayoi, for her part, was lonely when she first got back to Japan. Not long after her family had left for London, there was some trouble at Seijo Academy, which meant that she returned to find many of the teachers and students she’d known were gone. For a girl who was shy in the way that people who form intense bonds often are, making friends was no easy matter. But then living right next door to her were these three sisters, about her age, whose looks and talents everyone at school admired; what’s more, the sisters were more than ready to help her readjust to life in Japan. To Yayoi the three girls seemed heaven-sent, and she quite lost her heart to them.

  Eventually the two families grew close enough for Mr. Saegusa to buy half of the Shigemitsus’ lot in Karuizawa. The friendship with their neighbors must have given the Saegusas confidence. At a time when the majority of people were falling in with the increasingly militaristic and anti-Western government rhetoric, they flaunted their Western lifestyle. They built a Western-style villa, next to and almost identical to the one built by the Shigemitsus. Though the house was a fairly simple country place, nothing extravagant, it still wasn’t easy to get it built with the war industry gearing up, depleting supplies, and with more and more restrictions being placed on new construction; they had no recourse but to sell some of their holdings to cover the cost and at times even make under-the-table payments.

  With Karuizawa a second source of contact, the two families’ ties only grew stronger. And then there was Yayoi’s elder brother, Noriyuki. His presence even further attracted the three sisters and gave an almost predestined aspect to the family connection. Noriyuki returned from England ahead of the others to go to a preparatory school for the Imperial University, where he focused on the natural sciences. He had to live in a dormitory there, so, even after his family moved back, he hardly ever came home to Seijo. In Karuizawa, though, he was right next door to the girls for the whole summer.

  Militarism might permeate Tokyo life, but Karuizawa still maintained some of its freedom and openness. The Saegusa family always liked what was gay and flamboyant. With Noriyuki nearby, the girls came into bloom, and the circle of friends and admirers around them grew steadily, as though attracted by the scent of flowers. They were a lively group, welcoming a wide variety of people. The fact that Noriyuki played the clarinet and performed with other musicians from various countries was another asset, adding music and a cosmopolitan air to the charm of the place.

  This group got together in Karuizawa summer after summer, and it revolved around the three sisters. The elder two developed from young girls into young women. It was probably the happiest time in their lives.

  After graduating from Seijo Academy, Yayoi went to the Sacred Heart language school in central Tokyo. Harue and Natsue, saying they were fed up sitting in classrooms with the hoi polloi, hoped their father would send them to France to study dressmaking. They started learning the basics with Yayoi’s mother, who, from what I gathered, had been taught in London alongside other would-be seamstresses. They also commuted once a week to a French lady’s house to learn the language. The two of them even got lessons in European cooking from the Demon. In other words, they were trained for possible future careers while getting the grooming to become perfect Westernized wives. Meanwhile Fuyue devoted herself to practicing the piano.

  So that was their life when, overnight, Japan went to war against the United States. After two or three years of that war, and daily casualty lists, the freedom that had been so much a part of life in Karuizawa drained away. The families tried their best to ward off this reality and wait out the war, but then every illusion of normal life that they’d been able to hold on to came crashing down.

  Late in 1943, Noriyuki got his draft notice in the feared but familiar form of a red postcard. His family was still trying to adjust to this new situation when, early the following year, they received notice of his death. He died not as an officer in training but as a common soldier. Apparently, he had wanted to be a physicist and go to Cambridge after the war. Harue was twenty-two at the time, Natsue twenty-one, and Fuyue eighteen.

  “THEY WERE ALL so conceited!” the Demon told us. According to her, each of the three girls was convinced she would be Noriyuki’s bride. In that wartime period, men married less selectively than in ordinary times, knowing they would soon go off to fight—often only because a wife would be able to look after their aging parents if they never returned. Why Noriyuki hadn’t married anyone before he left for the front remained an unanswered question in the sisters’ minds. And because it remained unanswered, it has haunted them to this day.

  Noriyuki’s death also spelled the end of their youth and innocence.

  After he died, Yayoi and two of the sisters got married in quick succession. His death impressed on them the reality that time waits for no one. Harue and Natsue would soon be past the most eligible age for marriage in those days. And, besides, with each passing day young Japanese men were dying by the thousands. They must have been terrified of becoming old maids.

  Yayoi married Masao, the third son of the Andos in Koishikawa. Because her only brother was gone and her parents had no male child to inherit the family name, he took the Shigemitsu name as their adopted son-in-law; it was a common practice at the time. The two had grown up in the same neighborhood, and they’d
also spent time together on the ship back from Europe, the one my uncle worked on as a purser, so the Shigemitsus knew him very well. Unusually enough for someone from Tokyo, Masao had attended Kyoto University and studied something called “aesthetics.” He continued his studies after graduation—he even got apprenticed to a potter and dabbled in painting. When he was drafted by the Imperial Navy, he didn’t last long: he fainted while swabbing the deck of a battleship, developed a high fever, and got sent straight home. He had a sweet disposition, like Yayoi, but seemed so unworldly that one wondered whether he survived on mist alone, like the legendary Chinese sages in the mountains. He was thought to be a very suitable son-in-law, not so much because they could depend on him but because they felt comfortable around him. I think they also took some consolation in his physical resemblance to their lost son. Even the Demon could find no fault with the match, Masao coming from what was unquestionably a good family.

  Around the same time, Harue married a man who also took his wife’s family name. Her husband, Hiroshi, was the second son among six children of a cotton merchant in Yokohama. After graduating from Keio with a major in economics, he was hired by Mitsubishi, and it was through Mr. Shigemitsu (who also worked for the company, of course) that he was introduced to the Saegusas. I understand that at the time he was tall and slim, with slick black hair. In contrast to his younger brother, whose political affiliations had meant trouble with the law, Hiroshi preferred just to have a good time. He often visited the Saegusas in Karuizawa, where he would dance and chat away happily with Harue, but he was never taken seriously as a possible contender until Noriyuki died. He too was drafted and called to the front, not once but twice; the second time, he was lucky enough to come down with pleurisy before he even left the country. Grampy and Grammy questioned the match, saying that Hiroshi seemed too lightweight to adopt into the family. Harue prevailed with her usual stubbornness. The fact remained that fewer and fewer young men were available; her parents did not object too strongly. Hiroshi was never on quite the same wavelength as the Saegusas, though. He may have looked cultivated enough, but he always seemed slightly bored when the family started to chatter about this work of art or that piece of music or those books, and would take every opportunity to go out and practice his golf swing.

  Three months after Harue, Natsue married. She was passionately wooed by Takero, the only son and heir of old Dr. Utagawa, who ran a clinic in Kichijoji. Takero and Noriyuki had been preparatory school classmates. Once, when he was staying in Oiwake at the Aburaya Inn, where many Imperial University students used to spend part of the summer, he came over to Karuizawa to see Noriyuki, met Natsue, and fell in love at first sight. Being modest, he was convinced that with someone like Noriyuki around, he hadn’t the slightest chance with her. But then Noriyuki died. Takero persisted with the same singleness of purpose that he gave to his research, and his devotion paid off. Natsue, who for years had been overshadowed by her elder sister, was flattered at being pursued by a graduate of the elite Imperial University, a man who also happened to have been a friend of Noriyuki’s. Takero, with his poor eyesight, didn’t pass his physical and was able to stay on at his university throughout the war; he worked on the staff at the university hospital and sometimes helped out at his father’s clinic.

  Yayoi’s husband Masao got on well with both the Shigemitsu and the Saegusa families, while Harue’s Hiroshi was the odd man out, to some degree. But this young Dr. Utagawa was another case entirely. It was like putting an unglazed rice bowl in with fine porcelain teacups and saucers. When Takero was around, the whole family seemed at a loss, though he was surely the one who felt it most keenly.

  Luckily, for the weddings, both families had some white satin they’d bought before the war, but they had nothing for trousseaux, and, because of wartime shortages, store shelves were empty. Trucks and gasoline for civilian use were now out of the question, so the Saegusas had to hire a man pulling a trailer when the time came for Natsue to move her belongings to her temporary home in the Utagawa house, next to the clinic.

  Fuyue never married.

  After Natsue’s wedding, the fire bombings of Tokyo intensified, and the Saegusa sisters and their mother evacuated to Karuizawa. Yayoi, although her family had country houses elsewhere, joined them, along with her mother, despite the fact that Karuizawa wasn’t the ideal refuge, being freezing cold in winter. The war finally ended not long after they got there, but they all stayed on anyway. Then, with their husbands visiting them whenever they could, Yayoi, Harue, and Natsue all became pregnant around the same time, in the following year. The families spent that winter in Karuizawa too: food was more available there than in Tokyo.

  They had their share of hardships, and they loved telling stories about it, over and over, in fact. Luckily, the kimonos they sent ahead before leaving Tokyo arrived without being stolen, so they had something to trade for food. But they still had to grow cabbages and potatoes in their own vegetable patch, travel as far as Komoro to buy rice, and somehow manage to get hold of heating fuel. These heavily pregnant women ended up experiencing much of the same deprivation as everyone else. Naturally this strengthened the bond between their families.

  All three of them had their babies between January and March of 1947. It was only natural that, though he wasn’t related by blood, the Shigemitsus’ boy Masayuki seemed like an actual cousin to Harue’s Mari and Natsue’s Yuko when they were growing up. After they returned to the city, Harue had a second daughter, Eri, and Natsue had Yoko. Yayoi had only the one boy.

  THE DEMON’S TALES always turned into pure lamentation as soon as she started talking about the postwar years. Mr. and Mrs. Shigemitsu lost a great deal—and they had a great deal to lose. What they could never get over, of course, was that their only son was gone. The couple were never quite the same. To make matters worse, during the war, Mr. Shigemitsu had been asked by an acquaintance to do some work for the Ministry of Information, which led to his being purged by the Occupation Forces. This meant that he couldn’t get any serious work afterward. In the hope of somehow restoring the family’s former glory, he made some risky investments and ended up losing most of what they had left. After a spell of unemployment, at least Masao got a teaching job at the Tokyo University of the Arts, and a prestigious one too, since that’s the only national university for the fine arts and music. But during their leanest years, the family only managed by selling their belongings, including that tea set of matching cups, saucers, and cake plates which I saw on my first visit to the Saegusas—the one with the gold-and-blue design and gold rims. The Saegusas thought it was just too awful for the set to fall into other hands, and offered to buy it. They bought a number of other items from the Shigemitsus too, which ended up being one of the things the Demon held against them. Yayoi couldn’t afford to send her son to Seijo Academy, so he had to go to the local public school.

  As she listed the various trials the family had endured, the Demon sometimes let her guard down, saying, “I feel bad, because they keep me on even though they can’t really afford me.” But I must admit, I had a hard time feeling much sympathy for them. They still owned the land and the house we were sitting in in Karuizawa, along with furniture, an art collection, and all sorts of things from before the war. They also had land in Seijo. In fact, after I got to know them, the Americans left the area, and Seijo real estate went up in value as a result of people from all over Japan moving to the capital looking for jobs. The place became one of the most sought-after neighborhoods. The Shigemitsus, by tearing down the Victorian house and selling off more than half their land, managed to get back on their feet. Masao built a stylish house on the remaining plot. He also started to earn some extra money by writing for magazines. Both generations had happy marriages. As far as I could see, they were living the good life, a life that most ordinary people could only dream about.

  By contrast, the Saegusas never had as much to lose. Still, they’d done well, and they continued to do well after the war. They brought h
ome more each month than their neighbors did. Grampy’s company seemed to have had a few precarious years immediately following the war, but by the time I met them it had already recovered, thanks partly to the booming economy during the Korean War. Added to that was Primavera, the dressmaking school that Harue had started with Natsue’s help, which eventually made a healthy profit selling women’s clothes. Furthermore, though Harue liked to joke that it was only due to his skills on the golf course, her husband, Hiroshi, surprised everyone by rising to the top in the corporate world, getting one promotion after another. Fuyue, who had continued her formal piano studies during and after the war at Tokyo University of the Arts, left not long after I met them to study for a year in Germany. When she came back, she taught at a private music conservatory and also gave expensive lessons in her home. The family brimmed with the energy of talented and intelligent people. At a time when the rest of the country was still poor, money just seemed to roll into their pockets.

  Not only the Demon but also the Saegusa girls always kept the Shigemitsus on a pedestal. But when the two families began living in roughly comparable houses, they appeared on the surface, at least, to be of equal standing. A stranger would have thought they were just two well-to-do families, one much like the other.

  “I GOT THE raw end of the deal,” Natsue would often say. True enough, among the three sisters, she did have the roughest time—at least, I could understand why she would look at it that way. Working for them at the Chitose Funabashi house, I myself wondered why she had married into this family. It was only after I patched together bits of information from here and there that I could figure out what had actually happened.

  The Utagawas had been practicing medicine in Saitama since the Edo period. It was Takero’s father who, in the early twentieth century, moved to Tokyo, to a place called Kichijoji—in those days a village without a doctor—and opened a practice there. The Utagawa Clinic prospered. On the one hand, the father got involved in politics, frequented geishas, and enjoyed all the pleasures available to the well-to-do. On the other hand, in his capacity as a doctor he worked hard at caring for the local people: during the war, he treated them at no charge if the man in the family was on active service or had been killed. For someone who had set himself up locally less than a generation before, he was very well liked and respected.