Her sisters, in the meantime, gave her lots to do.
“None of my classmates has to do as much housework as me.” Fuyue meant her former classmates at Tokyo University of the Arts.
“Really?”
“Yes! Other musicians are treated like royalty by their families.”
“Really?”
“It’s true. Look how dry my skin is. Just look at my hands!”
“Poor child. But you know what they say—the more you suffer when young, the better off you are when old.”
“But I’m not young anymore!”
Fuyue was younger than her sisters by several years. She was also the only one who’d been to college—she graduated after the war—so she kept a certain distance from the others. She was the most modern of them. In the long years I spent with the three sisters, she was the one I became closest to.
Grampy still worked in those days, so he got to Karuizawa only intermittently and unpredictably. He was so wired with energy that, even in Karuizawa, he would get up before anyone else and grind his own coffee to make his morning brew. He would then take his easel out to the porch or into the yard, wearing his customary beret on that shiny black hair of his. He had dozens of other interests—fishing, hiking, horseback riding, gardening, photography—but painting was his passion. As a student, he had wanted to become an artist; instead, he was an avid Sunday painter. He also moved around constantly, as that kind of energetic person does. When I thought he was standing in front of his easel, the next moment I’d see that no, he was working in the garden, the beret still on his head. By the time I noticed that he’d gone out, he was already back from his walk to a stream somewhere, after picking some watercress. “Fumi, could you boil this tonight?” he’d say.
Unlike Grampy, Grammy woke up late, and though she always took pains to look elegant, she wouldn’t join in any activities or have a plan for the day, except perhaps to lie on a sofa with a novel or halfheartedly play the piano. She even let her daughters plan all the meals. If I had to specify her daily routine, it might be to take Chizu on a leisurely stroll down the main street in Karuizawa, buying unnecessary things.
Grampy’s favorite daughter—also the one who happened to look most like him, and who was most like him in character—was Harue. Grammy depended on Harue but was a little afraid of her too; she seemed to be most comfortable dealing with Natsue, who was the most like her of the three. Yet Natsue herself had some Grampy in her; she had his energy, so she was quite a bit more active than Grammy.
The Shigemitsus, next door, also spent their summers in Karuizawa.
Other than a cluster of trees between the two villas for privacy, nothing marked the property line, since the two families both wanted to make the most of their outdoor space. Still, they respected each other’s privacy; and, though they could hear one another laughing there, they didn’t set foot in each other’s gardens in the morning. In the afternoons, the older generation would play a game of bridge on the porch of either house. But the children always played together. There was a tennis court, which hadn’t had to be turned into a vegetable garden during the war like the one in Seijo, but needed constant weeding. Here the children tried to play tennis. Luckily, they were mostly girls, four out of five, so things were fairly quiet.
Yoko was something of an outsider among the five, probably because she didn’t go to Seijo much and was the youngest. She also wasn’t very agile, maybe because she spent so much of her time sitting on the floor next to her grandmother. My first summer in Karuizawa, this all resulted in her getting hurt. She used to carry a teddy bear around with her when the other children were leaving her out. On one of those days, Masayuki grabbed the bear and ran with it; Yoko, naturally, ran after him to get it back. Calling back to her, he made fun of the clumsy way she ran, continuing to run farther and farther ahead. Yoko was so intent on catching up that she tripped over a tree root and fell flat, hitting her forehead on a rock. The cut turned out to be deep, and she had to be taken to Karuizawa Hospital to get stitches. Masayuki’s mother, Yayoi, who came with me, was so upset that she looked as though she might pass out. The doctor prescribed rest, so when Yoko got home, she was put to bed in her room in the attic. Wearing a bandage around her head, she stared unhappily at the ceiling.
On the evening of her second day there, Masayuki came up to see her. I was feeding her some rice porridge when I heard a voice behind me: “Yo-ko.” He had tiptoed up the stairs. In the dim corridor I could just make out the wispy figure of a boy. Apparently, after resisting his mother’s appeals, he had finally agreed to apologize. Stepping into the room, he said in an undertone, “I’m sorry,” and then turned and darted down the stairs, his footsteps clattering. Yoko looked as if she had seen an apparition. I suppose she was shocked that the only son of the Shigemitsus should deign to visit her. I still remember the sight of him, standing like a shadow of himself in the dim light. It was as if some messenger had silently materialized, descended from the night sky.
Eventually, the wound on Yoko’s forehead healed and only a faint white scar remained.
The two families used to have lunch together on Sundays. It started later than usual, at one o’clock, and was called Sunday lunch, in English. It was always at the Shigemitsus’, served on the porch or in their dining room, but prepared by all of us, in the Shigemitsu kitchen, under the Demon’s supervision.
Foreign travel before the war was all but unheard of, and of those lucky few who went abroad, none came back without having mastered some aspect of the “higher culture” they’d been exposed to. The person returning from the West inevitably became a kind of teacher—even women; even maids. So, in London, while Mrs. Shigemitsu learned dressmaking, the Demon learned how to cook Western meals. The weekly cooking lessons she gave Yayoi and the three sisters back then evolved into the whole business of preparing Sunday lunch at Karuizawa. Without a full staff after the war, they all agreed on having nothing elaborate, but it was elaborate enough, especially as there were sometimes up to twenty people. Chizu from the Saegusas and I worked under the Demon on those days; the way she ordered us around gave me a glimpse of what she must have been like back in the days when there was a big staff and she was the head maid. After Sunday lunch our employers put their evening meal together themselves; they called it, again in English, supper—which basically amounted to putting out the leftovers. Instead of the usual day off every two weeks, in summer we maids were off from the end of Sunday lunch until Monday noon. It was after those lunches that the Demon sat down with us in the servants’ hall and told her stories about the two families.
The Saegusas sometimes invited neighbors over, but, as they were always saying, “The good people are disappearing one after another,” so there were guests only two or three times a summer. The sisters divided humanity into two groups: those who “fit in” and those who didn’t.
Before the war all three rooms in the attic were used by maids. They were a bit of an oddity in that their windows, doors, walls, and ceilings were in the Western style but the floors were Japanese, with tatami mats. After the war, two of the rooms were converted into children’s rooms: Eri and Mari had the big one in the middle, Yuko and Yoko the one on the east end. The one remaining maid’s room, on the west end, was shared by Chizu and me. The children’s rooms had bedsteads with straw mattresses on iron frames, while Chizu and I slept on futons laid side by side on tatami, the way maids always had.
Sharing a room with Chizu, I almost immediately came to know everything about her. We shared an old dresser, and on the small desk we also both used, my half didn’t have much of anything, but lined up on Chizu’s half were bottles of Shiseido lotion, face cream, lipsticks, and other cosmetics; the extravagance of it was rather a shock to me. She also had a pile of thick magazines full of pictures. Every night before she went to sleep, she would take a last look at a photograph of some man in the magazine, kiss him, and say in English, “Good nigh’, darlin’.” To see her lay her short, plump figure on her
side with a thud and poke out her lips to peck was like watching a hippopotamus kiss; it was embarrassing. Her figure, though, was to my advantage, since most of the hand-me-downs from the sisters came to me. Having been with the Saegusas well before I started, she used to pass on lots of silly gossip, saying that the Demon, who was over sixty, was a virgin, or that Hiroshi, Harue’s husband, seemed to have a mistress, and so on.
Old Mrs. Utagawa and Takero didn’t stay at the Saegusas’ house; there wasn’t an annex then, and it was crowded already without them. Instead they stayed at the Tsuruya, a traditional inn on Karuizawa’s main street. Mrs. Utagawa only came for ten days or so in summer. She’d have breakfast at the inn, then walk to the Saegusa house, even though it was quite a distance for her, and walk back again usually after afternoon tea. Once in a while she’d join them for supper and then take a taxi back, but she never stayed overnight. Takero, being always busy at the university, generally got to Karuizawa after his stepmother and stayed at the same inn for a few days during the Bon festival. He seemed to feel uncomfortable with the Saegusas, especially Harue, so he only went there once or twice.
“You know, I wonder about those people. I wonder how they can eat so much greasy food.” I used to hear old Mrs. Utagawa say this to him, when I accompanied her back to the inn. “It’s as if they’re foreigners.” The two of them would keep their dinners simple, sticking to things like soba noodles.
“It’s odd,” Mrs. Utagawa said one day, looking up at him. “They seem to think anything and everything that comes from the West is better. Are they right? Are things from over there really better?”
Ever the scholar, Takero answered thoughtfully. “Well, as far as medicine is concerned, yes. Western medicine is generally more effective than Chinese. I suppose you could say that the West is more scientific.”
Sometimes he took the local train to Oiwake. Many of his friends who’d died in the war had spent their summers there, at the Aburaya Inn, so his memories of them were bound up with the place.
“Maybe we should build our own summer house in Oiwake,” he’d tell his stepmother.
“It’d cost too much.”
“No, actually it’s rather cheap. Many of the owners are academics.”
“It’s still too much money.”
FOR ME THE summers in Karuizawa meant that I was almost next door to my childhood home in Saku. It gave me an odd feeling. The older generations in Saku knew that Karuizawa, which had once been a fairly active post town on the highway, had fallen into decline afterward. With a colder climate and a soil of volcanic ash, hardly any crops grew well there. Saku farmers used to believe the area was cursed. When foreigners and then wealthier Japanese started arriving and turned it into a summer resort, it became a place full of strangers who had nothing to do with them. And now I myself was staying there, in the household of some of those strangers.
I had been used to seeing Mount Asama from Saku, but that first summer I discovered that the mountain looked quite different from Karuizawa. In fact, Mount Hanare—a lower mountain shaped like a steamed bun—obscures the view, so one can barely see Asama at all. This too felt strange to me.
Those of us working for the Saegusa sisters usually took our vacation in spring or fall instead of during the Bon festival, the traditional time for maids’ vacations, since summer was the busiest season for us. But because I was so near my own family, they let me take a few days off after the festival, when their husbands went back to Tokyo and things slowed down. My parents had told me I didn’t need to send them any money after my job at the base ended, so I was saving my monthly pay, but I handed over my summer bonus when I came home. I also gave my little sister some of the hand-me-down dresses from Primavera that I thought would look nice on her. She had just started working at a transistor factory that was a little distance from our place but an easy commute by bus. While I was with them, she and I slept on futons side by side. Since she could live at home, she wasn’t having a hard time of it, and so, for better or worse, she remained as immature and innocent as I remembered.
Once the Bon festival draws to a close in mid-August, you start to get the autumn winds in Karuizawa. It was a mournful group, with the summer now over, that left for Tokyo the day before the children’s classes were due to begin.
MY LIFE IN the Tokyo house was the same as ever. We would be making breakfast when we’d hear the high note of the tofu seller’s little bugle, hawking his wares. The morning meal that old Mrs. Utagawa put together looked like something out of a home economics textbook: rice, miso soup, natto sticky beans, and grilled fish. After the family had breakfast, everyone rushed off in the usual order. Only Natsue took her time getting ready; she sat in front of her three-way mirror, leisurely putting on the finishing touches—lipstick, earrings. Not long afterward, the fish seller, who wore a twisted headband around his short, spiky hair, would appear at the door, carrying a shallow wooden bucket full of water and fresh fish. If he saw that Mrs. Utagawa wasn’t around, he’d sit himself down on the raised kitchen floor and start chatting me up—“Hey, how about going out with me sometime?” or whatever. There was also a butcher who wore a white apron and kept a pencil tucked behind his ear. To my amusement—it somehow corresponded with his newfangled trade of selling meat—he looked far less Japanese than the fish man did. The laundryman dropped by nearly every day too. Sometimes even door-to-door women peddlers came, with heavy bundles on their backs. Mrs. Utagawa proved to be a much kinder lady than I’d thought: she listened with some sympathy to their little sob stories, then bought a few small things like silk thread or elastic bands. Farmers from nearby used to come by with a yoke on their shoulders, dangling two buckets, and collect night soil. One time, we saw a trash collector with a handcart trying to steal an old bicycle from the garden shed; we chased him and made him give it back.
When I went upstairs to clean the master bedroom, Mount Fuji would still be faintly visible across the broad Kanto Plain.
It wasn’t long before we heard the boom of the big drum for the autumn festival echoing through the neighborhood. By the time we made a fire of fallen leaves or went out somewhere to pick up chestnuts, we could feel winter creeping up on us. Then you’d hear the sweet-potato seller—“Hot roast pota-a-a-to-o-oes!” He’d be pulling his cart around, with smoke puffing from the little chimney. And late on cold nights, nothing sounded better than the simple notes of the ramen vendor’s wooden charamela pipe. And, before we knew it, it was time for Christmas.
I’d never known any Japanese who celebrated Christmas before. The Utagawas put up a small Christmas tree strung with tiny electric lights in one corner of the main room. Takero and Natsue would take the children, wrapped in matching red coats (not many people, even adults, could afford coats back then), to the Ginza for Christmas shopping. On Christmas Eve, everyone would sing “Silent Night,” with Yuko playing the piano, and on Christmas day, shortly after noon, I went with old Mrs. Utagawa and Yoko to Seijo, carrying presents in both hands. There, the Shigemitsus came over from next door for the celebration, which did double duty as a party for Fuyue’s birthday, also in December. By the evening, even Takero would drop by. It was always lively. As if in exchange, in the period before New Year’s, when other people put pine-and-bamboo decorations on each side of their front gate and prepared a traditional Japanese feast, the Utagawas did nothing. Theirs wasn’t a Japanese New Year’s—a day that was, for everyone else, traditionally the most auspicious of the year.
At the end of December, I went home again. Even more than I had the time before, I felt the distance between us. My sister, next to me on the futon, didn’t feel it from her side, but when she chattered on about the same silly things as ever, I felt alone there in a new, starker way.
In the middle of February, there was a party for the Shigemitsu, Saegusa, and Utagawa children, whose birthdays all happened to fall in the first three months of the year. The party linked up with Yayoi’s birthday too, since her name was also the word for March in c
lassical Japanese.
Then in April, the new school year began.
To my surprise, the family decided to send Yoko to the local elementary school rather than to Seijo Academy. Health reasons, they said: she was asthmatic and too prone to fevers and colds. True, Yoko was not physically strong, but it seemed to me that Natsue used her health as an excuse for letting Yoko keep her mother-in-law company. It could have been Harue’s idea. It allowed Natsue to continue spending most of her waking hours in Seijo without feeling too guilty, since old Mrs. Utagawa would still have Yoko. Takero himself didn’t oppose this unequal treatment of the girls, apparently because he always believed public schools were perfectly good anyway, though he must also have realized that it would keep his stepmother from being too lonely. For Yoko, however, it was not welcome news. She’d been excited about going to school with her elder sister and staying in Seijo till after dinner. When she was told, she became hysterical, and her face turned bright red from crying. She ended up on her futon with a fever. “See, there you go, getting a fever again,” Natsue reminded her. Yoko, unwillingly, conceded her mother’s point. Naturally, sending her to the local elementary school must also have saved them quite a bit of money.
It was my impression anyway that Yoko was at a disadvantage, partly because she was seen as belonging, in a sense, to old Mrs. Utagawa, and was clearly the old lady’s favorite. Yuko, the elder sister, was Natsue’s firstborn. Also, she was born in Karuizawa just after the war, when old Mrs. Utagawa was not there, feeling her place was in Tokyo with her stepson. I believe she held back with Yuko in deference to Natsue, who doted on the girl. To make up for it, she showered her affection on the second child, who’d been put right into her arms by the midwife in Chitose Funabashi. Natsue always seemed less attached to Yoko, so that the girl became “Grandma’s child.” It would have been different, of course, if Grandma had been someone whose authority was never called into question. Mrs. Utagawa, however, was slightly looked down on by both the immediate and the extended family. Being the favorite of this person, Yoko inevitably got bracketed with her and suffered for it.
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