What had she expected to happen when she took Taro with her? Perhaps she thought that if he was going to come to Oiwake every year, he would have to visit Karuizawa sooner or later anyway, so he might as well get it over with right at the start. That reasoning probably led her to take him with her.
As I went around the house closing the rain shutters for the night, I looked in on the shed, where the lights were off. I knew that didn’t mean Taro was asleep. I could see him in my mind’s eye, a scowl on his face as he stared up into the darkness. The next day, I went back to Karuizawa by myself only to find Yoko running around playing with the others, the events of the previous day apparently forgotten.
MRS. UTAGAWA’S NEXT visit to Karuizawa was for Sunday lunch in the week of the Bon festival. She didn’t bring Taro: although Takero was in Oiwake by then, he had some sort of pressing deadline for a manuscript, so he stayed at the cottage too. She arrived alone.
As soon as Harue caught sight of her, she asked, “Where is the rickshaw-puller’s boy? Has he gone back to Tokyo already?”
“No, he’s still here.”
“Oh, good. Make sure you bring him with you next time, will you?”
Natsue chimed in. “Yes, do! Remember how high he climbed, without getting scared? We’ve been saying we’d like him to come back and wash all the windows.”
Mrs. Utagawa tightened her lips. Evidently she had left him behind on purpose, and he had not objected. That afternoon Yoko was scheduled to come back to Oiwake with her grandmother and stay ten days; knowing this must have made a difference.
It was decided in advance that I too was to go to Oiwake with Yoko that day. I would spend the night there, and after making sure that everything was all right, go back to Saku for a three-day visit to my family. Plans then escalated. As long as the three of us were being driven over, why not take two cars, with the Shigemitsus in one and the Saegusas in the other, so all the children could see the Oiwake cottage too? The decision was made on the spur of the moment and led to some arguing among the adults about who should go and who should stay. We were supposed to get an early start and arrive in Oiwake around four-thirty, but by the time we piled in and set off, it was already later than that.
I rode in the Shigemitsu car, with Masao driving. We arrived first and parked on the side of the road. Masayuki jumped out and ran down to the gate. Taro, who had been counting the minutes until Yoko’s arrival, had never imagined that any other child would jump out of the car—much less the very one who had been so much on his mind. In a flash, he moved in front of the gate and stood with his arms spread wide, barring the way.
Dumbfounded, Masayuki blurted out, “Hey! This isn’t your house!”
He said this in an authoritative, grown-up way, being now in his first year of middle school. He could not have had any idea what profound significance his words would later take on. It was probably the first time he had ever spoken to Taro, but he’d seen him in Karuizawa and knew from the Saegusa sisters’ conversation what sort of child he was. In his surprise, the words must have popped out of his mouth.
Taro was livid. If Masayuki had tried to push his way in, I could see from Taro’s eyes that he would have a go at him.
I caught up with them then and gave Taro such a fierce look that the minute he saw it he turned on his heels and ran off to the shed. Masayuki was still recovering. But then the other car arrived and soon everyone trooped in, inspecting the house inside and out. Unlike the girls, Masayuki spent most of his time exploring the outdoors, but he seemed leery of Taro and went nowhere near the shed.
“Masayuki!” Yoko called in a flirty sort of voice.
I was outside chatting with Fuyue, and turned toward the sound to see Yoko standing on the porch in a crisp new yukata with a design of scattered crimson koi, her face flushed. The other girls were clustered around her. Mrs. Utagawa had finished sewing the yukata in time for her to wear it for the Bon festival dancing that night. Yoko had been so eager to show it off that she must have begged to put it on as soon as she arrived. Neither her sister Yuko nor her cousins Mari and Eri had ever worn one, so they stood there fingering the long sleeves and the dangling ends of the sash with mixed curiosity and envy. When Masayuki came out where he could see her, he said “Wow!” and headed straight for the porch, all thought of Taro clearly gone. “You look terrific, Yoko.” She flushed even more and, catching hold of her long sleeves in both hands, swung them back and forth, trying her best to look fetching, like a little dancer.
Taro was hypersensitive to Yoko’s voice. When she called out “Masayuki!” in that coquettish way, the shed door opened and he came out. He went and balefully watched the children on the porch, his face still pale.
Shortly afterward, when the two cars had gone, Yoko finally began to explore the summer house properly. Although Mrs. Utagawa promised to help her put the yukata on again when it was time for the Bon dancing, she wouldn’t take it off, happily waving her sleeves as she wandered through the rooms and outside and even into the shed, flitting about where Taro would be sure to see her. Taro, meanwhile, was out in the yard, pointlessly picking up twigs and ignoring her. Without him there to explain things, it was no fun for her to look around. Above all, she was disappointed that he’d made no comment about her new outfit.
“Taro!”
She called his name several times and even went up to him, but he wouldn’t respond.
The two children had an early supper of a local specialty, steamed buns with vegetables inside, eating by themselves at a small Formica table in the kitchen. While Takero was here in Oiwake, Mrs. Utagawa had ensured that Taro kept a low profile by feeding him there first alone, and, with Yoko staying, she apparently planned to go on that way, feeding the children together ahead of the adults. Taro sat diagonally across the table from Yoko and reached silently for a bun, looking sullen. Yoko picked up her red plastic bowlful of miso soup with both hands. She had no idea why Taro was so angry with her, but she was cross with him for being angry, and sulked. Mrs. Utagawa seemed to think this was a holdover from the recent trouble in Karuizawa, so she kept quiet.
After the dishes were done, Taro went back to the shed. Since he hadn’t asked her along, Yoko stayed in the main house with nothing to do. She stood in front of the glass doors with a round festival fan in her hand, admiring her reflection from various angles, but soon got bored and settled in a rattan chair with an illustrated book. I kept an eye on her while I prepared supper for the adults and set the table. Off in the distance came the sound of singing and the beating of a drum.
Yoko perked up her ears like a small animal and started up, then sank back into her chair, waiting for Taro to summon her to go. But Taro did not appear.
Too impatient to wait, she flew outside. Soon I could hear her calling his name over and over by the shed. “Taro! Taro! Taro!” The cries grew more insistent: “Taro-Taro-Taro! T-A-A-R-O-O!” The last was a screech.
The shed was close to her father’s study, so I grew concerned. Mrs. Utagawa poked her head out of the kitchen and looked at me as if to say, “What’s all the noise about?” I was forced to step outside into the dark and do something about it. The door to the shed was open, but the lights were out, the interior pitch dark. Just inside the doorway stood Yoko. I went closer and saw that she was clutching her fan in her tiny fist, her frizzy hair flaring out as she glared furiously at Taro, who lay on the upper bunk staring at the ceiling.
Pale moonlight filtered in at a low angle behind her.
“All right, never mind, I’ll go by myself! Don’t blame me if I get lost.” With that she turned, whirling her long sleeves, and went outside. To think that the worst threat she could come up with was that she might get lost made me smile in spite of myself.
Taro sat up and stared morosely through the open door for a second, then bounded down, grabbed a flashlight hanging from a peg, and went off in pursuit.
I noticed then that there was a full moon that night.
I stopped to close the
shed door, so by the time I reached the gate Taro had just caught up with Yoko some way up the slope. I watched them with a wary eye, wondering what would happen next. Yoko kept right on walking, paying him no attention. He must have grabbed her by the arm, for I heard her cry out with exaggerated pain, “Ow, that hurts!” Immediately afterward, I saw her start sobbing like a little child again, and then, between convulsive sobs I caught the faint sound of her shrill command: “Say you’re sorry! Say you’re sorry!” As she saw it, she had sacrificed the pleasure of spending time with the others in Karuizawa in order to be with Taro in Oiwake, and it made no sense that he should be so grumpy. Anyway, in the end, as he alone knew—and knew only too well—she held absolute sway over him.
“You apologize!” The demand rang out more insistently.
In the white light of the full moon I saw Taro drop down on his knees and, supporting himself with both hands, lay his forehead flat on the ground in an attitude of abject apology. The flashlight he’d laid down shone on the pebbles. I gasped as Yoko slipped off one wooden clog and put her bare foot on his head to press it down farther. There was no need for me to intrude, however. As soon as her toes touched his head, she lost her balance and toppled over, landing on the ground beside him. Now she began bawling even harder, fists in her eyes, elbows sticking out in the air. Taro jumped up, grabbed her by the hands, and pulled her up off the ground. Then he was on his knees again. He took her bare foot in his hands and slipped the wooden clog back on, then brushed the dirt off the hem of her yukata. His slim figure was radiant in the light of the moon.
I watched in bemusement as the two children disappeared hand in hand up the dark mountain path to the strains of the “Tokyo Ballad.”
Yoko stayed for ten days in Oiwake, as planned. As for myself, I went the next morning to stay with my family in Saku for a two-night visit and then directly back to Karuizawa. How the children spent the rest of their time in Oiwake, I don’t know. But over and over again I saw in my mind’s eye those two small figures climbing the mountain path, like a vision from another world.
THAT SUMMER, TARO showed up in Karuizawa again. First he came with Mrs. Utagawa, bringing Yoko back from Oiwake. One look at his face told me he was braced for whatever might come. I suspect that Mrs. Utagawa had hesitated to bring him after what had happened the time before, but he must have insisted on coming.
Since it wasn’t Sunday, instead of a full meal at the Shigemitsu villa we had a simple lunch at the Saegusas’, where there was no separate servants’ hall but a spacious kitchen with plenty of room for the help to eat. Taro ate alongside Chizu and me without batting an eye. After the meal, Harue came in and said to Taro, “Thanks so much for coming! You are such a help.” Then she handed him a pile of wet old newspapers—“This is how they clean windows in England”—and set him to washing all the windows in the house, from the attic to the first floor. He took this in his stride. He seemed to have told Yoko in advance what things would be like for him in Karuizawa, because when she came darting up to him while he was straddling a windowsill and polishing a pane, he couldn’t conceal his pleasure, but only spoke to her for a few minutes before sending her back to the other children. Since they were playing doubles on the tennis court, she would plainly rather have watched or even helped him work for as long as the tennis game lasted. She left dragging her feet.
The window-washing wasn’t even half done when night began to fall and it was time for him to leave, so the next day he got up early and took the bus to Karuizawa by himself. It took him all day to finish. As usual, Yoko scampered back and forth, but with Mrs. Utagawa absent, there was no one to be concerned about her comings and goings, and I doubt if anyone noticed but me.
There in the highlands, by the end of August, autumn winds begin to blow, and from that year on, that became our cue to close up the summer houses in both Karuizawa and Oiwake. Once we were back in Tokyo, the daily routines of life got under way again.
6
A Stolen Day
WIND AND FOG, pine and birch, horned beetles and stag beetles, slowly rotting windowsills and dirty stucco walls, stairs that creaked with every step, the smell of wood burning in the fireplace, the clink of delicate china teacups on saucers, the laughter of a bevy of lovely women—to Yoko, Karuizawa was a place where these were familiar, established things. But for Taro, Karuizawa could only symbolize a closed world into which she might one day disappear, removed from him before he knew it; a world that he would never belong to or make his own. For as long as he could remember he had lived in darkness, and then Yoko had suddenly come and lit up his life, like a fairy. The fear that she might as suddenly vanish must always have been there. But from the time he set foot in Karuizawa that summer, what had been a vague dread turned to clear alarm.
When summer ended and he went back to the city, Taro naturally began to look on Seijo as Tokyo’s version of Karuizawa. Just as in Karuizawa, there was in Seijo a pair of neighboring houses inhabited in the same way by the same people, among them the boy Masayuki. And so naturally enough, on Saturdays when Yoko went there for her piano lesson he could no longer see her off with an easy mind. One time he came up with the idea of using the money he’d earned in Karuizawa to board the train and see her all the way to Seijo, but Yoko had a fit. “No, don’t! I don’t want you to!” He sneaked on board a different car anyway, which was fine, except that when he stepped off the train at Seijo station, she caught sight of him and was so mad that she took the next train back.
What kept him from feeling too wretched was that Yoko was less drawn to that other world than he feared; she seemed surprisingly content with her life in Chitose Funabashi.
Proof of this was not long in coming. A Keio University student who lived nearby began coming over to tutor Yoko, and in due course she was safely accepted into Seijo Academy’s middle school and began commuting there by train—but only for the first few days did she take the trouble to stop by the Saegusas on her way back, out of sheer novelty. After that she generally came straight home to Chitose Funabashi after school, and so life went on largely as before. She must have come back in part to keep her grandmother from feeling lonely. As for Taro, who can say whether she acted out of consideration for his feelings or because rather than be ignored in Seijo she preferred to come home and be pampered by him? Ever since that summer in Karuizawa, she seemed to understand in her own fashion that the time she spent with Taro was somehow unallowable, and yet she seemed happy to let it continue. “Today Grammy’s baking a cake,” she might say when she set out, to explain that she’d be dropping by the Saegusas later on, or she would telephone—by then there was finally a telephone line in Chitose Funabashi—to say she was there and would be staying till nighttime. “Sorry. I’ll come back with Mama and Yuko.” About Masayuki, whom she saw now and then, she talked in the same awed tone as ever. Yet she never seemed to feel any more at home in Seijo than before. Taro was a determined boy, and so I’m sure he thought a good deal about all of this at the time, but he found no cause for further distress or jealousy.
In any case, considering what happened later, it seems a miracle that those peaceful, humdrum days lasted right up to the day that Mrs. Utagawa died. As the two children grew up, they stopped romping around the house. Even in fine weather they would sit on the sofa and talk—though Yoko did most of the talking. At other times, they would sit reading something from the Girls’ Library of World Literature or the World Literature Series, or play records from her father’s collection. Any vocal music, whether in Italian, German, or French, Yoko followed by reading the lyrics included inside the cardboard sleeve, singing along heartily as Taro listened in some embarrassment. The Utagawas had resolutely resisted television, but after they went and bought a set once Yoko was in middle school, she and Taro would sometimes watch a show as well. A television set was one thing the Azumas had bought early on, so for Taro it was nothing special. He couldn’t wait to turn it off, in fact, but during the first couple of months, Yoko would sit mesm
erized, mouth open and eyes glued to the screen. She used to mimic the hit song “Tokyo Dodonpa Girl,” flouncing around the room; every time the line “Dodonpa!” came up, she would take a big step forward, then one to the right, then one to the left, just like the singer onscreen, with Taro rolling about on the floor laughing. Now and again one of the young Primavera staff taught her some proper dance steps too, and she would try to teach Taro what she had learned. It used to drive her to weepy hysterics when he just stood there like a sack of potatoes. Also, at some point, the two of them took over the responsibility of looking after the garden from the aging Mrs. Utagawa. When they went outdoors together, they tried to avoid any local middle school boys who were sure to tease them—one more reason why they continued to visit the vacant lot across the street, with the abandoned house and air-raid shelter surrounded by clumps of pampas grass. Sites like this were fast disappearing from the neighborhood, so it was a special place.
Things continued, therefore, much as usual. Takero went on staying late at the university and Natsue went on spending most of her time in Seijo. As for Yuko, the older girl, she took after her father as she matured, becoming increasingly serious. Even after she came home from Seijo she would practice the piano until as late as she could without disturbing the neighbors. When Eri and Mari went on to Seijo Academy’s high school, Yuko auditioned for the high school attached to the prestigious Toho School of Music, met their demanding standards for technique and ability, and was accepted. That, however, did not change her routine. After class she took the bus to Seijo and stayed at the Saegusa house as she used to do, coming home with her mother in the evening. The Saegusas had another grand piano besides the one Fuyue used for teaching, and practicing on that was supposedly Yuko’s reason for visiting there every day. But Yuko knew that if she ever did come home early, she would feel out of place, and that it was more natural, all things considered, for her to spend time with her cousins. She and her sister, Yoko, lived in different worlds; while they never quarreled, neither did they ever seem to have very much to talk about.
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