ONCE AGAIN THE Utagawas’ annual summer pilgrimage to Karuizawa drew near.
One day Takero again aproached Mrs. Utagawa with the idea of building their own summer house. “For my sake, Mother, why not buy a small plot of land in Oiwake and build a cottage there?” he said. “Summer in Tokyo gets hotter by the year. You’d be far better off spending the entire summer in the highlands yourself, you know.”
“I suppose I would.” She said. “But, dear me, what a waste. And without Fumiko around to help out, do you really think I could manage there on my own?”
“I’m sure you could get someone local to drop in regularly.”
“I suppose so …”
“If I had my own place I could go there any time I wanted, not just for the Bon festival.”
“That’s true. Why don’t we think it over this summer?”
“If we’re looking for land to buy, the easiest way to do it is while we’re in Karuizawa anyway.”
“I suppose so … Let’s just think it over for one more year, shall we?”
As the family’s departure drew closer, Taro’s expression grew more despondent, and Yoko, unable to enjoy playing with someone so down in the mouth, grew exasperated and peevish. “Come on,” she’d say, “you know perfectly well we’re coming back soon!” Perhaps one reason children get so depressed is that they have no voice in what happens to them. The day before Yoko left, Taro was utterly miserable. Yoko seemed affected by it and was moody on the train, but once we arrived in Karuizawa and she was let loose in the front garden, she was red-faced with excitement in no time, chasing after the others and playing as usual. It was as if she’d forgotten all about life in Tokyo.
Even with Yoko gone, Mrs. Utagawa had Taro come over every day to do things around the house, to fill in for me. He was a great help to her that summer.
Then, of all things, his right arm got broken. It happened in August, during the ten days Mrs. Utagawa spent in Karuizawa as she always did, around the time of the Bon festival. I didn’t find out about it until the end of summer, back in Tokyo. Taro himself told Mrs. Utagawa that he broke it falling out of a tree he’d been climbing, but she quickly guessed it was those brothers of his who were to blame. O-Tsune did take him to a doctor to have the bone set, and his arm was in a cast, supported by a sling, but Mrs. Utagawa didn’t trust any doctor O-Tsune might choose, so she personally took him to a nearby hospital and had the fracture X-rayed again to make sure that all was well.
When I got back and saw Taro with his arm in a grimy sling, I was obviously surprised, and Yoko’s eyes widened too. She accepted the story that he had broken it climbing a tree and touched the cast in a gingerly way, commenting that it was lucky he was left-handed. But if she looked sad at all, it was less out of sympathy for him than because school was starting the next day.
“I haven’t done my arithmetic yet, have you?” she asked. Every summer in Karuizawa, Yoko would go on playing right up to the last minute and then, fretfully, cram all her summer homework into the final two days. That summer, though, she had apparently decided to cheat, hoping to be able to copy Taro’s answers.
Her face broke into a smile when he nodded. “Goody,” she said, holding out both hands without the least sense of shame. Taro was just as bad. “Be right back,” he said, and dashed off with a look of dumb happiness on his face. That night I saw Yoko copying his answers on the sly so her mother wouldn’t catch her.
One evening a few days later, I went out into the front yard to bring in the laundry. Mrs. Utagawa was watering the flowers, her figure outlined against the red sky. Yoko and Taro were squatting side by side on the concrete patio, he still with his right arm in a sling. Using his left hand, he was making mud pies with her, decorating them with the petals of bellflowers, cockscombs, and marvels-of-Peru from the garden. They produced a row of these colorful pies. Mrs. Utagawa, having emptied her watering can, went over to leave it on the patio. Instead, she held the can over his head and pretended to be watering him.
“Grow, grow, nice and big,” she said playfully. “Oh, if only you were a little tree, Taro, I could water you like this and you’d grow big in no time. Then you could stand up to anybody!”
By then she may have already made up her mind to build a summer cottage in Oiwake and take him along as a houseboy.
I don’t know when she told her stepson of her decision, but by the time the leaves started changing color, they were already deep in discussion about buying land up there. Natsue must have been feeling guilty that she spent over a month in Karuizawa every summer while old Mrs. Utagawa stayed only ten days or so; she had no objection to their building a separate summer house. Oiwake was a fair way from Karuizawa, nearly half an hour by car, but Natsue knew that her husband had always loved it there, and since she intended to continue spending her summers over in Karuizawa, she had no problem with the location, either. For my part, I arranged for my family in Saku to work with a local real estate agent to look for a suitable spot, somewhere close enough to the main road for Mrs. Utagawa to catch the bus to Karuizawa. She was keen on the idea. By the time my family found a likely piece of land, it was so cold that she needed gloves and a heavy shawl in addition to her winter coat, but she went with me willingly to take a look at it.
She was the one who settled on the rough layout of the house too, in consultation with Takero.
One day after the groundwork began, she took out a simple blueprint of the house, spread it out on the tatami floor, and asked Taro what he thought.
“What is it?” he said.
“A house we’re going to build in the mountains. Right near the place where Yoko goes every summer.”
He leaned forward, all ears.
“Here’s the room where we’ll have our meals, and this will be the study for Yoko’s papa. These two adjoining rooms will have tatami. This one will be my sitting room, and when Yuko and Yoko come over to visit, they’ll sleep here with me.”
Taro stared at the layout, looking quite grown-up for his age.
“Tell you what,” she said. “How about if next summer you went there with me as my helper?” Just to do the shopping along the main road would mean a fifteen-minute walk each way through the hills. Taro must have been in the picture from the beginning. “Where would you sleep, do you think?”
He pointed silently to a square behind the main house, off to the northeast.
“What a clever boy you are. Do you know what that is?”
He was quiet, with his head on one side, so she said, “It’s a shed.” Then she told him that she would put in a bed for him there, a straw mattress on top of wooden slats, with a window above so that when he woke up the first thing he’d see in the morning would be a burst of green leaves.
“Everything is green there, everywhere you look. It is very, very pretty.”
His eyes now lit up with childish excitement.
I think she decided to put Taro in the shed in case Takero, when he came to visit, found the boy’s presence a nuisance.
Taro looked serious again as he studied the blueprint and asked, “Where will Fumiko sleep?”
“Well, she won’t be going there very often, so she won’t need a special room of her own.” It wouldn’t be often that everybody was there at once, and since the main room for meals had enough extra space, they could make do when the time came.
“Hm.” He stared at the blueprint awhile longer and then asked, biting his lower lip, “Can I see Yoko there?”
“She’ll be some distance away, but you’ll be able to go and see her now and then, yes. And sometimes she’ll come over and stay with us.”
“Taro!” Yoko came in carrying a light-blue hula hoop in both hands. She’d been waiting for him in the playroom, but had grown impatient and come looking for him. Her grandmother asked her to come nearer, and she plopped down next to Taro. Together they peered at the blueprint. Since Natsue was always saying that the family “didn’t have that kind of money” for various things, Yoko seemed to
find it hard to believe that there was really going to be a new summer house.
“Have we got that kind of money?” she asked.
Mrs. Utagawa gave a vague answer.
“Can Taro come for sure?”
This time the answer was firm. “Yes, for sure.”
Before long Takero too took it for granted that Taro would be going. Having grown up surrounded by nurses, maids, manservants, and live-in students acting as houseboys, he found nothing strange in the arrangement. He also knew what a help the boy had been to his stepmother while I was away in Karuizawa, going to the post office and so on. If Taro himself wanted to go, then there was no reason to object.
That day Taro hung around as long as he could, poring over the blueprint and making suggestions. For one thing, he proposed having people go in and out of the cottage through the porch, without an entrance hall, and using that space as a small maid’s room instead. When Mrs. Utagawa presented this idea to Takero that night he was impressed. “Seems practical, and since there’ll be no guests to speak of anyway, why bother with an entryway?” In fact, I found it very helpful later to have a little room of my own. Taro also said that since summers up there would be cool and moist, maybe my north-facing room should have a wooden floor, with a raised platform for the futon. Putting bunk beds in the shed was his idea too. It might just have been a boyish wish to sleep high up, but the idea ended up increasing storage space, which came in handy.
SUMMER IN OIWAKE
Before midwinter, when the ground froze, the foundation work was done. My stepfather kept tabs on the workers’ progress until the job was finished. Then Mrs. Utagawa began making bedding. She collected some old kimonos that she said had become “too flamboyant” for her—though they seemed plain enough to me—and started to unstitch them, getting Taro to help. When Natsue saw what they were doing, she also brought out some “too flamboyant” ones of her own, although she added generously that I was welcome to them if they looked like something I could wear. Of course, they were far too glamorous for me, and I’m sure I would never have had the courage to put them on, so they became bedding as well. Taro took to studying the layout of the Oiwake cottage almost daily. The seriousness with which he did this made it seem as if it were his own house that was being built.
One Sunday in late December 1958, I took Taro to the top of Tokyo Tower, which had just gone up. He stared out at the city spreading endlessly below under a gray sky and then pointed off into the distance. “Oiwake’s that way,” he said. I remember how stunned I was by the strength of his attachment to, or longing for, a piece of land he had yet to lay eyes on.
BY THE FOLLOWING April, just as the entire country was swept up in the excitement of the crown prince’s wedding, the Oiwake cottage was nearly complete. Taro and Yoko entered the fifth grade. Yoko’s sister and her cousin Mari started at Seijo Academy’s middle school together, and Mari’s sister became a sixth grader at its elementary school. Masayuki Shigemitsu, who was clever, was accepted at a prestigious national middle school attached to the University of Education.
“They say it’s a school for kids who are so smart they’re practically geniuses,” Yoko reported to Taro in the admiring voice she always used when speaking of Masayuki. But Taro had no reason to be glum. “If you took the exam you’d get in too,” she continued, her voice sounding perfectly sincere.
Yoko was convinced that she was Taro’s superior in every respect except for athletic ability and intelligence, two areas where she conceded him the advantage. In fact Taro was regularly at the top of his class, and the bullying had stopped. Even so, his classmates gave him a wide berth, and boys still didn’t invite him to play with them. His own reserve was no doubt partly to blame, along with the aura of poverty he had. But the main reason, it seemed to me, was the old rumor that he wasn’t Japanese. O-Tsune took every opportunity to bring it up, telling anybody who cared to listen, so the rumor never had a chance to die a natural death. Meanwhile, the hard time his brothers gave him had left him with an instinctive dislike of other boys, so he had no interest in joining in their games anyway. He seemed to want nothing other than to be with Yoko.
I do wonder what was going on in Mrs. Utagawa’s mind at the time. I doubt that she had gone so far as to consider the idea of Yoko and Taro marrying one day, but from around the time she set out to build the Oiwake cottage her attachment to Taro seemed to deepen. There is something mysterious about relations between people of the opposite sex. She considered herself his protector, yet somewhere inside she was leaning on him, relying on his ability—almost like a lover. He was still shorter than she was, but she used to say admiringly, as if he was bigger than her, “In times of trouble, a general—that’s you.”
He didn’t know what exactly this meant, but he knew it was praise and so he beamed with pleasure.
TAKERO MADE A couple of trips to Oiwake to sort out various details, and by early summer the cottage was ready. I moved in first, in mid-July. My presence would be needed in Karuizawa once the holidays started, so I had to get the cleaning and unpacking done in Oiwake beforehand. Then, on the very first day of summer vacation, Mrs. Utagawa arrived with Taro in tow. The two of them were not the only ones to show up that day, either. After Taro had looked excitedly around the cottage, inside and out, he took off for the main road, exploring, and while he was gone we had a surprise visit from the three Saegusa sisters. On their way to Karuizawa by a later train with their parents and children, the three had decided to have a look at the new summer house and had traveled on to Oiwake station. From there they took a taxi and dropped in without a word of warning. Natsue had a quick look around the place and said in a loud voice to Mrs. Utagawa, “Mm, it’s certainly well made for a house so small.” To me she added in a hushed aside, “There’s something rather lonely about it, isn’t there?” Harue, the eldest, declared it “just perfect for Takero,” and the youngest, Fuyue, said that it was “nice and rustic, nothing cheap about it.” The taxi was waiting, so they descended on us like a typhoon and then were gone. By the time Taro came back, only a faint trace of perfume lingered in the air. “Gracious! What a whirl they do live in!” said Mrs. Utagawa. I stayed over that night, then took the bus to Karuizawa the next day.
Yoko was eager to visit the new cottage right away, but Natsue suggested she wait a little till everyone was settled in, and so two days went by, then three, until she stopped asking, perhaps because she’d got used again to the pleasures of life in Karuizawa. She may also have realized that sooner or later she would be going to Oiwake by herself for several nights, and decided that in the meantime she should make the most of being with the other children. Her visit kept getting put off for one reason or another, and as it happened, she first saw Taro in Karuizawa instead.
It was the first Sunday lunch in August. As usual, I was working alongside Chizu in the Shigemitsu kitchen, under the Demon’s direction, when Yoko came in and tugged at the sleeve of my smock.
“Grandma’s coming today, isn’t she?”
“Yes, she’ll be here.”
This had been decided quite some time ago.
“If Grandma’s coming, then will Taro come too?” She was whispering, standing on tiptoe to reach my ears.
“I wonder.” I tilted my head doubtfully.
It seemed likely to me that she would bring the boy with her. If it were only a question of his helping her on the way, she would probably leave him at home, but given his longing to see Yoko, I just didn’t think her capable of setting off without him. At the same time, I thought she must be feeling uneasy. I myself felt a vague anxiety—or, rather, a premonition of disaster—about his showing up in Karuizawa and had tried to avoid thinking about it. He wouldn’t be able to play alone with Yoko. Neither could I imagine him playing with the other children. The Shigemitsu and Saegusa families would never approve.
I asked Yoko a question of my own. “If Taro comes, what will you do?”
“There’s so many things to show him! There’s lots
here in Masayuki’s house and over in ours too, and there’s Foggy Pond, and the monster mushrooms that came up after the rain yesterday, and huge golden dragonflies and the mist when it’s getting dark …”
She looked up at me as she eagerly ticked off the attractions on her fingers. I suppose she was getting bored because the older children often left her out of their games.
“They’ve got huge golden dragonflies in Oiwake too, you know.” My tone may have been a bit harsh, for she closed her mouth and looked at me blankly. “Anyway,” I went on, “when Taro comes he probably won’t be eating with you and the others, but here with me in the kitchen.”
“How come?”
“Because he’s not a guest.”
“Oh.”
She seemed to sense something in this vaguely and repeated “Oh,” as if trying to convince herself.
Blessed with good weather that day, we lined up garden tables on the large east-west porch and covered them with white tablecloths. The Saegusa sisters were in high spirits, chattering away as they flitted around. While the elderly members of the two families sat talking in rattan chairs in the garden, Yayoi’s Masao went off alone to read in the shade of a birch tree and Harue’s husband, Hiroshi, also alone, practiced his golf swing as usual.
Mrs. Utagawa and Taro came onto the scene like two clouds over a sunny landscape.
I was on the porch with the Demon, Yayoi Shigemitsu, and the three sisters, and we were so busy that I never even noticed when the taxi pulled up at the back. Suddenly there they were, walking toward us between the two houses. Despite the blazing afternoon sunshine, the atmosphere they brought with them was chilling, almost as if they were shades from the world below. I couldn’t help a slight shudder myself, and I’m sure the others felt the same way. Only Masao kept on reading, oblivious. Hiroshi had raised his arms, on the point of taking a swing, but just let them drop.
A True Novel Page 39