What would her parents say? That thought must have been uppermost in Mrs. Utagawa’s mind. She was pale and speechless.
The air was so thick with dust from the cloth and paper, floating in shafts of afternoon sunlight, that my throat felt scratchy. I didn’t know if it was because Roku lay sick in bed in the next room or because so many people lived together at close quarters without bathing frequently, but even with the sliding doors open the room stank of urine and sweat. Yoko had been sitting there a good half hour without so much as a cushion under her, but fortunately the day was warm, with lingering summer heat.
Realizing from Mrs. Utagawa’s reaction that the situation was more serious than she had supposed, O-Tsune probably regretted taking this risk. Yet a certain condescension in her manner suggested that she had heard from Mr. Azuma (who used to do odd jobs for the senior Dr. Utagawa) that the old lady standing in front of her was once a geisha. Her usual insolence showed through the lame excuse she offered with an artificial smile: “She said she wanted to have a try too …”
Taro sat gripping a doll by its rubber leg, his face burning with rage and humiliation as he looked back and forth between the two women. He must have wanted from the start to chase Yoko out of the house but held back in case she never wanted to play with him again. Whatever else was churning inside him, I don’t know. All I could suppose was that he’d been trying to finish up as quickly as possible. Yoko, for whom playing, helping, and working were much the same, must have chattered on, but I suspect he barely answered her.
Mrs. Utagawa was looking at O-Tsune in disgust.
Just then a sound came from the adjoining room, and the door slid open to reveal Roku, standing there in his night yukata like a ghost. His eyes were sunk deep in their sockets and the neck of his robe hung open, showing his bony ribcage. How much he understood of what was happening, I’m not sure, but in the toneless, frenzied way of the faint-hearted, his voice froggy with phlegm, he gave O-Tsune hell. For her part Mrs. Utagawa was so startled by how much he had wasted away since the summer that she couldn’t stop staring at this ghostly figure. Finally she said, “Roku, have you seen a doctor? You must have a proper checkup.” Then she swung her attention back to Yoko. Pulling the little girl up by both hands, she set her on her feet, saw that she put her sandals on, and led her home firmly by the hand.
This little episode had two results. For one thing, it was obvious that Roku’s remaining time was short. At Mrs. Utagawa’s request I spoke to Dr. Matsumiya, the doctor across from the station who always came to examine Yoko, and arranged for him to come over the very next day. He did some tests and found that Roku had pulmonary edema and his lungs were already filled with fluid, a bad sign. In fact the poor man only lasted till January. It was as if he lived just long enough to help the Azuma family settle in as the Utagawas’ tenants.
The other result was that Mrs. Utagawa made up her mind to take Taro under her wing. I believe she lay awake the whole night. For one thing, realizing how lonely Yoko had been all this time was acutely distressing to her. For another, seeing with her own eyes how badly the boy was treated must have come as a shock. Her late husband had lived a self-indulgent life, but he also did whatever he could for other people. After nearly thirty years at his side, she probably felt the same sense of responsibility that close contact with human misery had given him.
In the morning, everything was as usual until we had seen the others off. When I went into the sitting room, broom in hand to do the sweeping, I found Mrs. Utagawa leaning against the hibachi brazier she kept out all year round, smoking a thin kiseru pipe and looking preoccupied. Her sewing was nowhere in sight. Even when she saw me, her expression did not change.
That afternoon, when Dr. Matsumiya finished examining Roku, he came by to report to Mrs. Utagawa. Afterward she saw him out, and no sooner had the front door closed behind him than she turned to me with a severe look and said I was to bring O-Tsune to the service entrance. Before the doctor’s arrival she had changed her kimono and put on a more formal sash. I had been surprised that she would bother to do this for someone who was always dropping by to see Yoko, but then I understood: the change of clothes was for O-Tsune’s benefit.
When I ushered O-Tsune in, her eyes darted around as she took in her first sight of the Utagawa kitchen. Mr. Azuma was always the one who brought over the monthly rent. I announced her arrival, and Mrs. Utagawa emerged with slow dignity and stood looking down at her visitor in the concrete-floored entrance, not inviting her up into the house proper.
“I have just had word from Dr. Matsumiya,” she said. “He doesn’t yet know exactly what the trouble is, but apparently Roku is in a bad way.”
“Yes, ma’am,” answered O-Tsune, pretending to look humble and shrinking her shoulders.
Mrs. Utagawa kept her eyes trained on her as she continued: O-Tsune and her family owed their present circumstances to Roku and were to look after him with all due care until the end. From now on, she would be sending over her maid to check on Roku’s condition from time to time, and if there was any change, O-Tsune was to let her know. She spoke in her usual low, raspy voice, but there was something new in the tone, an unaccustomed forcefulness.
“Yes, ma’am.”
I could sense O-Tsune actually succumbing to this.
“And if the worst happens to Roku, and you and your family wish to go on living in that house, you may do so for the time being.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“At the same rent, for the time being.”
She said this with studied casualness, the effect being to impress upon her listener that the property was hers to dispose of, however and whenever she liked. Where she had been hiding this strength till then, I don’t know. Maybe it was a quality that anyone who has ever been a geisha acquires, or maybe I was reading too much into it, but I thought I detected in her the toughness of someone who had seen a great deal in life. O-Tsune was by then so tense that her shoulders were hunched, making her even smaller. Looking down on her from a step higher, the old lady spoke with such blunt force that even to me she seemed completely different from the familiar Grandma who always sat bent over her sewing.
Was it calculation on her part, pausing at that moment as if she had finished speaking? O-Tsune bowed. As she was preparing to go, Mrs. Utagawa caught her eye and held it a moment before adding, “One other thing. This concerns your youngest boy. From now on, when he gets home from school, send him over here to me. He can help around the house instead of Roku.” She paused again. “Besides that, I hear he is rather an unfortunate child, and for the time being I plan to oversee his schoolwork. All right?”
“Yes, ma’am, of course.” O-Tsune’s face was slightly flushed. She must have been aware that her abuse of her stepchild was common knowledge in the neighborhood, but since his father was Chinese, I suspect she thought the neighbors were on her side, sticking up for her. Realizing that she had just received an indirect rebuke seemed to leave her in a tangle of resentment and embarrassment.
Mrs. Utagawa let her eyes confirm the accusation, saying nothing to rub it in. Before letting O-Tsune go, she even offered a word of support. “Things aren’t easy for you either, I know … Anyway, that will be all.”
When she returned to her room, she sat there again for a long time, leaning against the hibachi and smoking her pipe. Acting tough went against her nature. The performance had clearly left her exhausted, and something in the slump of her shoulders made her look older than ever. She soon complained of a headache, and when Yoko came home she was lying down, her head on a folded cushion.
That was the first and last time I ever saw her take that tone with anyone.
O-Tsune could put two and two together as well as the next person. Once she calmed down and thought things over she must have realized it was owing entirely to old Mrs. Utagawa’s goodwill that they were able to rent that place so cheaply. With two men in the household already earning wages, the extra income to be gained by forcing a schoolboy
to do piecework was next to nothing, as she well knew. It was sheer spite that made her try to keep Taro from going out to play—a way of getting even for having had to take him in. But if the old lady objected to his doing this work at home, why should she insist? And if the old lady meant to take him under her wing, then there was nothing to be gained by knocking him around. In short, O-Tsune saw clearly that it was in her own interest to avoid any friction with Mrs. Utagawa.
Soon after that, when Taro got home from school he would call out “I’m back” (not bothering, as was proper, to slip off the rough cotton shoulder bag he wore slung around his neck as he said it) and then make a beeline for the Utagawa house. I’m sure he would rather have dispensed with the greeting altogether, but Mrs. Utagawa insisted that he keep up this custom, so, reluctantly, he did. He stayed with us until suppertime. Sometimes she even gave him supper, first sending me next door to let O-Tsune know.
One Sunday morning about ten days after she’d had words with O-Tsune, Mrs. Utagawa brought her stepson up to date. “The boy will only be bullied if he’s left in that woman’s care. I am having him come over to help out after school. That way, he and Yoko can do their homework together too.”
She said it was “to help out” in case he was thought an unsuitable playmate for Yoko. In those days, there were plenty of household chores children could be expected to do, so this didn’t sound unusual.
“Fine,” said Takero. “Why not? Yoko can help him with his homework.”
“Sure, I will!” said Yoko.
“See that he gets something to eat,” Natsue told me. “That boy is as thin as a rail.”
I assured her that I would. I already was feeding him, of course, but I pretended otherwise. Mrs. Utagawa and I had become accomplices.
“Oh, and have him get rid of that wasps’ nest under the eaves, would you?” Natsue added. “If Roku got well I would ask him, but it looks as if that won’t be happening.”
Ever since Roku was laid up, heavy work that needed doing around the house had been neglected. Firewood for heating the bath needed chopping, and with the cold weather coming on, someone had to clean out the garden shed and make room for a load of coal. Just how useful the boy would make himself, I didn’t know, but I agreed that there was plenty for him to do.
This turn of events must have raised Taro’s spirits no end. But he wasn’t the only one for whom it broke new ground. I’m sure she had never imagined or anticipated this, yet as Taro began to settle in at our house, Mrs. Utagawa found it gave her a pleasure she had never known before: the joy of raising a boy she could spoil and scold to her heart’s content, knowing that she personally was indispensable to his happiness.
In the course of my years with the family, I came to realize that after Mrs. Utagawa married, she had raised the doctor’s son Takero from infancy, not as her own but as someone left in her charge, to be treated with special care. She couldn’t have done otherwise, for he truly was the family’s only, precious hope. Congenital syphilis had carried off two other sons in a row, so everyone feared for this baby’s life, though he eventually survived with nothing worse than a slight disability in one eye and one ear. When, soon after giving birth, his natural mother died of the Spanish flu, he was coddled by wet nurses and maids anxious to ensure that he would live to carry on the Utagawa name. At that juncture Mrs. Utagawa came into the picture, no longer a mistress but a wife. It was her job to raise Takero as the future head of the family. That responsibility would affect her to the end of her days. As far as I knew, she was always extremely respectful toward him, beyond what you’d expect just from not having a blood tie.
Late in life she was given Yoko to raise, but in the end Yoko was still Natsue’s daughter—once again, not Mrs. Utagawa’s own but a child entrusted to her keeping. Taro, who had come to her out of nowhere, was nobody’s child, someone she could do with as she liked. And he was a male child too. Since she belonged to the older generation, you could see in her treatment of him as he grew older that this mattered to her. Added to this, I’d guess that, because he was an outsider not only in the world at large but even in his own family, she could identify with him, she herself being something of an outsider.
The closer she got to him, the more she took on the role of his protector. She was so retiring by nature that, had she known how heavily involved with him she was to become, I doubt whether she would have taken those first steps at all. But after six months, then a year, she had gone too far to turn back. At first she gave Natsue and Takero sketchy reports on the boy, thinking he was scarcely worth bothering them about, but before she knew it things had progressed to the point where she dared not do even that, fearful of revealing what a fixture he had become.
Of course, she would not have grown so involved if Taro had not proven to be such a surprise, demonstrating far greater potential than anyone could have suspected. That he could hardly read before was strange, given that brain of his. Perhaps it had been impossible for him to learn anything with his brothers always filching his pencils and notebooks, and with O-Tsune giving him endless chores to do. It could be that he wasn’t even sent to school before they settled in Tokyo. Or, since he had been an outsider from the beginning, he may simply have thought the letters on the pages had nothing to do with him. Once he started to look at the textbooks with Yoko, he quickly learned to read, and before long he was at the head of the class.
Between school lunches and the snacks we gave him—and, believe me, we saw to it that he ate as much as possible—Taro’s skinny frame soon filled out. He became scrupulously clean too, not wanting to disappoint the girl who on that first day had leaned in close and said, “Mm, you smell nice!” When I offered to run a bath for him, unlike most boys he never objected, but rather nodded, a bit bashfully. In the bathroom, he would fill the wooden basin partly with running cold water, then add hot water from the kettle and work the soap into a good lather before scrubbing himself from head to toe. Yoko used to make him mad by peering in and asking, “Aren’t you done yet?” When his nose ran or he sniffled, she would make a face and point, so he took to using the tissues Mrs. Utagawa gave him. Over time, his way of speaking also became less rough.
The Azuma family let up on their abuse. O-Tsune knew it would do her no good to have old Mrs. Utagawa find Taro being mistreated, so she persuaded his brothers to lay off. “That’s enough, you two,” we would hear her snap, her voice purposely loud enough to carry. The occasional gift of sweets, soft drinks, or used clothing from Mrs. Utagawa also had an effect. Of course, his brothers were unimpressed and went on tormenting him behind their mother’s back—but since O-Tsune was home most of the time and Taro spent long stretches at the Utagawa house, they had less opportunity to bully him, however much they may have wanted to. The usual uproar fell off considerably.
FOR TARO, THE next two years—the years from age ten to around twelve, when he first went off to Oiwake—were surely the happiest of his young life.
When he first started coming over it was autumn by the calendar, but the days were still summery. Mrs. Utagawa would sit near the veranda with her sewing while, close by, Taro and Yoko sat at her low desk with their small heads together, doing their homework. Her room, equipped with the old furniture from the Utagawa Clinic, also had a small family altar, a porcelain hibachi with a kettle on top, and, when it turned cold, a kotatsu heater with a quilt cover. In that one room, it seemed as if time stood still, fixed at a certain year in the Showa period. I would leave the sliding doors open and sit in the adjoining room, folding the laundry or ironing. At three our little quartet—Mrs. Utagawa, Yoko, Taro, and me, not one of us related to the others—would gather in a sunny spot for the customary snack. That was the most peaceful time of the day.
When her homework was done, Yoko used to sit quietly next to her grandmother in her usual splayed-legs position and play with her dolls or gather kimono scraps or color in a coloring book. After Taro came, she was much more active. When the weather was nice, they would go ou
t into the front yard to play. This was hidden from the Azuma house and surrounded by fields and bamboo groves that had somehow remained untouched as new houses went up all over the neighborhood. Since the yard was private, they could play there undisturbed.
There was a swing in one corner, and they took turns on it, each child being allowed a certain number of swings. As I sat in my room reading, in the distance I’d hear Yoko chanting over and over again:
Swing, swing, here comes the train.
When you hear the whistle, then we change again.
Children have such short attention spans, and yet they will cheerfully go on repeating the same thing endlessly, beyond the endurance of any adult. One day that everlasting “Swing, swing” kept up for a good hour, until finally I shut my book and went to have a look. Yoko was standing on the wooden seat while Taro pushed her from behind, her hands clutching the ropes and her feet braced, her whole body quivering with joy as she pumped her little legs for all she was worth and laughter poured out of her. When it was Taro’s turn, sometimes he got so carried away he’d swing right around, full circle.
They also bounced balls while chanting songs to the rhythm:
Tell me where you’re from, sir.
I’m from Higo, sir.
Where in Higo, sir?
Kumamoto, sir.
Where in Kumamoto, sir?
And they tried high-jumping over a long chain of elastic bands attached to trees. It was never higher than Yoko could jump—so actually low-jumping—but Taro didn’t seem to mind. They played jump-rope games too. One time Mrs. Utagawa and I were summoned to join in, everyone dancing in and out and changing places until, before I knew it, Yoko and Mrs. Utagawa were turning the rope and Taro and I were competing to see who could last the longest. I jumped so easily in my wooden clogs for such a long time that finally he said in amazement, “Fumiko, you’re the best. You’re an athlete!”
A True Novel Page 37