Gradually I learned about Mrs. Utagawa’s history, overhearing fragments of the three sisters’ endless chatter: that she’d been a geisha and the late Dr. Utagawa’s mistress. She only became his second wife after the first Mrs. Utagawa, Takero’s mother, died of the Spanish flu. She was from a samurai family, but when her parents died (young, of tuberculosis), she was passed around among her relations and ended up being sold as a geisha to pay off a family member’s debts. Nothing about her suggested her past, though; she was determinedly unforthcoming and withdrawn. Once, there was a moment when I thought I saw a glimpse of her geisha days, but even so, it was that one time only. Takero did his best to give Mrs. Utagawa the respect a stepmother and grandmother was due, but her merely being in a position where her stepson had to make an effort to do this was in itself unfortunate. A three-stringed shamisen, wrapped in cloth and collecting dust deep in her closet, was the only reminder of her past; maybe she couldn’t face letting it go.
As if it weren’t bad enough being the protégée, so to speak, of this grandmother held in lesser esteem, Yoko failed to inherit the “Hirano face.”
Elegant Grammy’s maiden name was Hirano, and the Hiranos prided themselves on having produced beautiful daughters for generations. Harue’s children Mari and Eri, and Natsue’s daughter Yuko, all took after their mothers and had the Hirano face, making three out of four: only Yoko was different. She had frizzy hair, dark skin, and a round face. For some reason, she didn’t look like her father or anyone else in the family. Among people who thought that having the Hirano face was the best thing in the world, Yoko, naturally, was seen as being a little defective. When she gashed her forehead, you could just feel it, the way everybody was relieved that it was her and not one of the other girls. I should have objected to that relief, but my first reaction was the same. Besides, the three sisters, having grown up as a close trio, probably felt that Yoko, a fourth, was the odd one out.
Perhaps because my first impression of her had been so disconcerting, I was never able to feel any deep affection for Yoko. Still, I realized that instead of going to school in Seijo and having lively people for company, she was stuck here with an old woman and a housemaid. I had seen the way her eyes sparkled when her mother and sister came home in the evening, and how animated she became when her father was in the house on Sunday mornings. I did feel sorry for her. So I was happy for her sake that when she started elementary school, she also began piano lessons with Fuyue on Saturday afternoons. That way, she at least spent part of one day each week in Seijo. On Saturdays, she came back from school at midday, changed into better clothes, and left the house with her piano books, looking slightly nervous. At night she came home with her mother and Yuko—happy.
ONCE AGAIN, SUMMER arrived—time to put up the mosquito nets!—and again we made the big move to Karuizawa. After another season there, we came back for autumn in Tokyo, got through another winter, and started a second school year in April. Not much changed in the Utagawa family. As for me, Mrs. Utagawa taught me enough about Japanese dressmaking for me to sew together a yukata, and, thanks to Natsue’s coaching, my knitting improved. What I appreciated most, however, was that the family gave me time to read every day—about an hour between the mid-afternoon snack and dinnertime. Mrs. Utagawa, seeing that there was always a half-read book on the dresser in the maid’s room, and that some mornings my eyes were bloodshot from staying up late reading, told me, “If you like books that much, by all means take some time off for it. We’re not that busy during the day.” Takero also encouraged me to read any of the books around the house. Even though, at the time, I didn’t fully appreciate what an unusual family they were to give me this kind of break, I did know enough to feel grateful. Once every two weeks, when I had my day off, I’d go to the local library and sit surrounded by high school students studying for college entrance exams. Somehow I couldn’t help feeling more guilty than embarrassed about pretending to be one of the crowd. Luckily, since they were close to my own age, I knew at least that none of them would suspect it was a maid sitting in their midst.
ANOTHER YEAR PASSED. It was now 1956, the year that the Shigemitsus and Saegusas both sold off part of their land in Seijo, and the Shigemitsus’ Victorian house was demolished. In the fall of that same year, Fuyue went to study in Germany.
Around the time the air began to have a tang of autumn to it, the Utagawas’ old rickshaw man, Roku, appeared at our back door, with a solemn look on his face. That was the prelude to our having Taro involved in our lives.
It took me a while to understand the relationship between the Utagawas and Roku. I assumed in the beginning that he was simply some old man who used the common well out back and did odd jobs around the neighborhood to earn some extra cash. I also thought of him as a very humble man, unusually deferential to the Utagawas. Only later did I learn that he had been employed by the late Dr. Utagawa for years as his rickshaw man, and that the little house he lived in and the identical building next door were rental properties owned by the Utagawas.
According to Mrs. Utagawa, one of the trickiest problems after the doctor’s sudden death was what to do about Roku. The Utagawas had taken him in when he was just a boy, from a poor family with too many children. He’d worked for them from then on, and the clinic grounds became his home. In the early years, he ran errands. As he got bigger and stronger, he was given the job of pulling the rickshaw when Dr. Utagawa made house calls. After cars replaced the rickshaw, Roku stayed on as a handyman, helping around the property with work like pounding sticky mochi rice, splitting logs for firewood, and mending fences. In return, he was given a hut on the clinic grounds. Apparently he lived with one of the scullery maids for a while when he was the rickshaw man, but they never had any children and the woman eventually moved on. By the time the Utagawas sold the clinic, Roku was quite elderly and without anyone to look after him. The family couldn’t bring themselves to let him go, so they brought him along when they moved to Chitose Funabashi.
“A loyal servant to the bone,” everyone said of him. He was so devoted to the family that when his young master became disillusioned for some reason with the Buddhist establishment—“All those damn monks care about is money!”—Roku took to visiting the Utagawa family grave at the temple cemetery in his place, cleaning the headstone and lighting some incense for their ancestors. He was not only a loyal servant but a sweet man—perhaps good-natured to a fault.
Takero had used about a third of their land for the two rental properties. He let Roku live in one house and rented out the other; the little they got from this was reserved as old Mrs. Utagawa’s spending money. Though originally a geisha, she had been married to the doctor, and was the lady of the house, for nearly three decades. I imagine that her stepson, especially because they weren’t related by blood, wanted her to feel supported and at least reasonably independent.
At the beginning of each month, the middle-aged working couple who rented the other house would knock on the back door and pay their rent. I understood how money matters were settled in the family when I saw Mrs. Utagawa take the envelope full of cash and put it in her chest of drawers. Apparently, she gave a certain amount to Roku to spend on food. To their credit, the Saegusa sisters were relaxed when it came to money, and Natsue seemed to have no objection to this arrangement. For one thing, Roku was still useful around the place, and, in the end, Natsue and her husband would get all the income from both properties when Roku and Mrs. Utagawa passed on.
So—to return to the story about his appearance at the back door that day—he’d come to ask a favor of Mrs. Utagawa, after saying, “You’ve done so much for me already that I hate to be asking for more.” Roku had a nephew who had recently returned from Manchuria—the son of his younger brother, who died young. He didn’t expect the old lady to remember, but before this nephew went overseas, the late Dr. Utagawa had helped him out once as well. He was the only family Roku had left in the world. When the war ended, he’d tried to come back to Japan but could
n’t get on any of the repatriation ships. Then, finally, two or three years ago, he and his family made it back. They lived in temporary housing for repatriates for a while, but there was no work, so they were now staying at his wife’s parents’ place down south in Shimonoseki, where he was helping out with their fishing business. But it was a rough position for a man to be in, depending on his wife’s family. When he found out that Roku was living in Tokyo in a house all by himself, he asked whether he and his family could move in with him. Before he went out to Manchuria, he used to be a turner—operating a lathe at a factory—and he was sure that finding work would be no problem once he got to Tokyo. He would, of course, start paying the appropriate amount of rent as soon as he was employed.
That evening, Mrs. Utagawa discussed Roku’s request with her stepson, who eventually agreed to it.
Roku was around seventy at the time. As they saw it, the house could be rented out after he died, but if he was bedridden before that, he would need to be taken care of. If Roku’s nephew and his family were under the same roof, they could at least look after him until then. Besides, it wasn’t likely that the nephew, who was still in his thirties, would take that long to find work.
Takero asked again, to make sure, “Will he really pay the rent once he gets a job?”
“That’s what he promises,” she said. “Just because we’re Utagawas, we don’t need to take in every stray. They’re not our kith and kin. We’re not under any obligation.”
“Anyway,” Takero went on, “we’ve no idea what sort of people they are, so let’s have it in writing. We’ll feel safer. We can say: ‘They are to vacate the premises without contest should we find their stay unacceptable in any way,’ or words to that effect.”
In the end they decided that if the nephew did start paying rent, it wouldn’t be a bad deal for all concerned.
LATE IN THE year, the nephew and his family arrived. A wooden fence separated the Utagawa home from the two rentals, but the fence only extended as far as the well they all shared, so that both the landlord’s and tenants’ families could have easy access. This meant that from certain places in the Utagawas’ back yard one had an unobstructed view of Roku’s narrow veranda and front door.
That day, I was sweeping up fallen leaves in the yard when I happened to glance over at Roku’s house. What I saw made me grip the bamboo handle of my broom tight: people who looked like beggars, dirty, in rags.
More than a decade had passed since the war ended. “The postwar period is behind us” was the year’s slogan, and indeed the raw and painful memories of the days immediately after the war had mostly faded. But on that day, on Roku’s doorstep, they all came back like returning ghosts.
Roku’s nephew and his wife were each carrying large bundles in both hands and had filthy loads wrapped in ropes that crisscrossed their chests and shoulders. Roku had told us that the nephew was in his thirties, but to me he looked over fifty. They had three boys with them, all of whom had the same grimy cloth-and-rope things weighing down their shoulders. The older two appeared to be of middle school age, while the youngest was still quite small. All three of them had light reddish-brown hair, a clear sign of malnourishment. The youngest stood apart from the rest, as though to show he wasn’t one of them. They were all hollow-eyed from hunger, but his eyes had a hollowness beyond hunger, a blankness, like a pair of glass beads.
That little one was Taro.
ON SUNDAY MORNING, Roku appeared at our kitchen door with his nephew, to introduce him. I looked over and saw, out by the well, the wife and the two older boys peering intently at our house. The thought of nice old Roku having this burden foisted on him filled me with dismay. The Utagawas had built Roku’s lodging with the idea of eventually renting the place out, so it had two four-and-a-half-mat tatami rooms, a tiny kitchen with a wooden floor, and a toilet. In those days, this was a more than adequate setup for a single elderly person, but it was in no way suited to a family of five, plus Roku. Having a three-mat room of my own, I’d become positively spoiled. It was suffocating to think of them all sleeping practically on top of each other in that limited space. I wondered whether they had enough futons to go around; no one had seen any other belongings of theirs being delivered. And sure enough, we soon began to suspect that they didn’t even have their own bedding, so Mrs. Utagawa, sighing, repaired some old quilts and futons for them to use—but they still weren’t enough for the whole family.
ALREADY, THE MORNINGS were frosty; at dusk, chilly winds blew fallen leaves along the ground. Winter was drawing near. Luckily, Roku’s nephew did find a job fairly quickly. Since he’d worked a lathe when he was in his teens, it came back to him easily enough even if he was a bit rusty, and early in the new year he started working at a factory on the Koshu Kaido Road.
Once they had some income, they started to pay the rent, which Mrs. Utagawa had set well below the going rate. Being a conscientious person, she didn’t keep the extra money for herself, either, but passed it on to cover the household expenses. Before long, the nephew’s wife also got a job, at a small factory that made chinaware nearby—actually, more a workshop than a factory. Sometimes on my way to the market I’d walk past it. Out in a field, amid squawking chickens scurrying about, a group of women sat on straw mats, tying stacks of large, heavy rice bowls together with cord, chattering as they worked. But even after the wife started working, Mrs. Utagawa went on giving Roku money. My guess is that she wanted to make sure that the old man, who out of kindness had let his relations move into his house, couldn’t be treated as a nuisance once they got their life going in Tokyo.
Roku’s surname was Azuma, written with the character for “east,” and we called his nephew Mr. Azuma. His wife’s name was O-Tsune.
I soon began to pay special attention to the youngest boy.
O-Tsune was an ill-natured woman. She was born that way, and her character had been further soured by the endless misery she’d experienced: defeat of her country on foreign soil, long internment, and difficult repatriation. She said very little and kept her head bowed low in front of the Utagawas, who gave her things they no longer wanted—pots and pans and bits of fabric—but she was far from docile. Since I spent much of my time in the kitchen and back yard, I quickly learned what she was really like. Her voice was loud. Sometimes I heard her laughing, but more often she would use her deafening voice to yell at her boys. When she took it out on the smallest one, there was such spite in her voice I wanted to block my ears.
This boy, Taro, was not like the rest of them. His brothers had rather dull, commonplace faces, while Taro had surprisingly mature, well-defined features and darkish skin. His arms and legs were thin and long, his movements quick. If you looked closely, you realized that he was the best-looking among them, but he was by far the most shabbily dressed, in clothes that must already have been handed down a few times before they reached him. It also seemed as if they hardly ever took him to the public bath: his neck and hair were always grimy. And though he was the youngest, O-Tsune had only him doing chore after chore.
There was something odd as well about the way the older boys bullied him. I couldn’t bear to hear their shrill, not-quite-young-men’s voices howling at him; even worse was the sound of punching and kicking. The middle-aged couple in the other rental house were always as quiet as mice, which made the ruckus that much harder to bear. Sometimes I would hear Roku telling them to break it up. They were only mean to Taro when Mr. Azuma wasn’t home; once their father returned, the place usually fell quiet.
I wondered whether the boy was a stepchild.
Taro not only went to the same local elementary school as Yoko, he was also a second grader like her. And he was placed in the same class. Yoko, already embarrassed that this scruffy little boy lived just behind her own house, avoided him on the way to school.
One day, Yoko arrived home from school, kicked off her sneakers in the hall, and, without even taking her red backpack off, came running to me.
“Break the cir
cuit! Quick!” she said.
Forming rings with the thumbs and index fingers of each hand and then joining them like links on a chain, she held them up in front of my face.
“What are we doing?”
“Just break it.”
“How?”
“Just break it with one hand like this,” she said, demonstrating a karate chop with her right hand and then returning her fingers again to their original position. “One of the girls touched Taro by accident, and she gave his cooties to another kid, but then I got them. So I have to get rid of them. You have to break the circuit.”
I’d never played this funny game before, but I did the cutting motion with my hand as I was told to do. Yoko let out an exaggerated sigh of relief, and slowly lowered her backpack to the floor.
I could picture Taro being bullied at school.
I felt sorry for him, but even I was reluctant to go near this grubby child with the snot from a perpetually runny nose on his upper lip. And those glassy eyes of his made it difficult even to greet him. One morning, I opened the kitchen door to take the bottles from the milkman and heard a shrieking voice say, “Why the hell do you keep wetting your futon?” followed by the sound of someone being whacked. With the boy getting that kind of abuse, it was no wonder he wet his bed. After then I noticed that whenever I heard a really nasty dressing-down and a beating in the morning, there would be a sad, thin cushion hanging in the veranda, its dirty gray cotton batting showing from torn seams. It was never an actual futon drying outside, only this square cushion. It turned out they made Taro sleep on a row of worn-out cushions on the kitchen floor.
Taro, I eventually learned, was the son of Mr. Azuma’s younger sister. What’s more, he wasn’t entirely Japanese. The fish seller—the “Hey, how about going out with me sometime?” one—told me this, stealing a moment when Mrs. Utagawa wasn’t around. He sat down on the raised kitchen floor and, grinning at me in his rather dirty-minded way, told me the story in a lowered voice. The Utagawas didn’t have a lot to do with their neighbors—obviously—so even I only knew people to say hello to as we passed. We were probably the last to learn about Taro and his storybook history.
A True Novel Page 34