A True Novel

by Minae Mizumura

  O-Tsune kept a low profile in the house out back, ingratiating as could be, since the rent never rose and Mrs. Utagawa supplied her with a steady stream of handouts. Taro’s brothers had moved on to adult life, the younger of the two also finding a job straight out of middle school, which was probably why they lost interest in tormenting Taro. Mr. Azuma worked till late at night, so we hardly ever saw him.

  Every summer Taro routinely accompanied Mrs. Utagawa to Oiwake, where there were always chores for him to do: going down to the main road to shop, doing the washing and hanging it up to dry, burning paper trash, burying kitchen garbage in a hole in the ground, raking leaves. Besides all that, he willingly sought other ways of making himself useful, and as the years went by, the old lady grew increasingly dependent on him. Yoko would spend the first two-thirds of her vacation in Karuizawa and the last in Oiwake: after losing her to Karuizawa for that period, Taro was always keen to have her all to himself in Oiwake. I was usually off in Karuizawa, so I don’t really know how the two of them passed the time, but apparently they went walking quite a bit. North of the main road was a trail marked as the Writers’ Path, and in front of Mount Asama was a smaller mountain, Mount Sekison, with a cemetery at its base. Here and there among the personal graves were stones in memory of meshimori onna, “food-serving women”—women who had ministered to travelers in the old post town inns. South of the main road was virgin forest stretching from beyond the irrigation canal all the way to the Miyota rice paddies, with groves to explore on foot. The remains of sparklers were always scattered in the garden, so they probably enjoyed watching them blossom like small chrysanthemums in the night air. Small birdhouses hung from branches too.

  It became routine for Taro to be summoned to Karuizawa to do the work of a handyman. In no time he was spending the night two or three times a summer, sleeping on a futon spread on the Saegusa kitchen floor. The grounds were spacious and the house old, in need of all sorts of attention beyond the responsibility of a gardener, electrician, or plumber. Taro was well aware that if he made a bad impression on any one of the three Saegusa sisters, his access to the Utagawa home in Chitose Funabashi could be affected, and so he always swallowed his feelings and got the job done. The money they paid him no doubt helped him to bear it. He must have found it reassuring too that spending time in Karuizawa let him learn more about this other world of Yoko’s from which normally he was excluded. And although the Saegusa sisters were taskmasters, as they grew used to seeing him summer after summer they became fond of him in their way. If they baked a nice meat pie, someone would say, “Oh, that boy Taro is coming tomorrow, we must give him some!” Old fountain pens or men’s wristwatches that had been replaced by new ones were set aside for him—“That boy Taro could use this, don’t you think?” To make it easier for him to come to Karuizawa, they even bought him a bicycle.

  CANAL IN OIWAKE

  I don’t know how aware Natsue may have been that Taro was in and out of the Chitose Funabashi house on a daily basis, but she made the exaggerated claim that “his family has been in the Utagawas’ service for generations.” It pleased her that the family she had married into was able to provide her own family with someone so useful to them.

  In the Shigemitsu household, Yayoi seemed to feel it wasn’t right to use a boy the same age as Masayuki as a handyman, and so, although the Demon made occasional demands of him, she herself never did. Ever since the sweater incident she kept her distance, as though she had done something wrong, and if she happened to pass him she would greet him with the sudden shyness of a girl. Taro in turn would respond with a bashfulness that is not unusual in adolescent boys but that was rare with him.

  Time’s pace was so slow and ambling that it scarcely seemed to move, but one thing did change quickly, and that was Taro’s physique. He was rather late in developing, but from around his second year in middle school he shot up, and his voice deepened. Yoko entered puberty around the same time, but girls’ physical changes are not as dramatic as boys’ to begin with, and although her asthma had retreated, she was still delicate in health and childish in appearance. Taro, by contrast, though he had once been as sweet-looking as a girl, became decidedly masculine. Sometimes I would sit and marvel at his cheekbones and jaw. When he worked up a sweat, his armpits gave off a strong sweet-sour smell like that of some animal at night. I think he knew that once he became a full-grown man he could not go on being with Yoko the way he had all these years, so he did what he could to minimize this transformation, talking to her in a high voice and acting childish around her. Mrs. Utagawa had grown so used to seeing him every day, and he was so much like a grandson to her, that she may not have noticed the changes particularly. But others did.

  Harue teased him outright. “Well, look at you! You’ve turned into quite a charmer, haven’t you!”

  She was right too. As he matured, the appeal of his rather unconventional looks gradually attracted attention. Now that I think of it, Yoko might have been the one most immune to his charms. Taro hung so eagerly on all she did, from morning to night, and Yoko took their rather peculiar relationship so much for granted, that she never seemed to realize how others might see him.

  Harue even made the same uncalled-for comment to her sister Natsue: “You know something? That boy Taro is turning into a real charmer.”

  “Is he?”

  “Yes, indeed. If he gets any more grown-up, you’d better not let him hang around Yoko too much.”

  That conversation took place in Karuizawa, and it must have stuck in Natsue’s mind. Some six months later, one balmy Sunday morning, she and I were in the kitchen of the Chitose Funabashi house, making breakfast with the windows open, in an atmosphere fragrant with the smell of coffee. From out back we could plainly hear O-Tsune yelling angrily: “The way you pigs stuff yourselves, you eat up every yen we earn!”

  Natsue and I exchanged wide-eyed looks. Then, as if remembering what Harue had said that time, she turned with a frown to Yoko, who was setting the table with her sister, and asked, “Does Taro still come over every day?”

  “Not every day,” Yoko lied, her face bent toward the table as she laid out the knives and forks.

  “It’s one thing to help him with his schoolwork, but you mustn’t spend all your time with a boy like that.”

  Yoko was silent. By then she couldn’t possibly have helped Taro with his schoolwork, but there was no point in her saying so.

  “He will only have a bad influence on you.”

  When Yoko didn’t answer this but just kept on with her work, head down, Natsue raised her eyebrows. Takero, who had been drinking his morning coffee and reading the paper, spoke up. “Look, there’s no need to worry about Taro. He may have grown up with those people back there, but he’s no lout. I’ve seen him at Oiwake. The boy knows how to behave.”

  “You may think so, but Yoko will be starting high school next year, and I don’t think it’s right for her to be spending so much time with him.”

  “Maybe so, but once she’s in high school, things will change anyway.”

  Yoko had just turned fourteen, but she was so small and childish for her age that she looked barely twelve, standing there beside her more mature sister. Looking at her, her mother evidently thought pressing the matter any further would be pointless and let it drop. Probably she ought to have had the girl spend her afternoons at the Saegusas’ after school, but because of old Mrs. Utagawa, she wanted to avoid that.

  A FEW MONTHS after that exchange, in the summer of 1963, after a long lull, time was jolted forward. It started in Oiwake when Taro noticed that the whites of old Mrs. Utagawa’s eyes had turned yellow. When she went to Karuizawa Hospital to be examined, the diagnosis was senile jaundice, a sign that she didn’t have long to live. Frail though she seemed, the old lady had a strong constitution, and had never been infected by her husband’s syphilis. I always assumed she would live on for years, and the news left me dazed. It was decided that she should stay in Oiwake, since she would only suff
er in the heat if she returned to Tokyo. Yoko came over from Karuizawa, and she and Taro looked after her together. Yoko’s father spent more time there than usual that summer, and her mother came visiting several times, driven by Fuyue, who had just passed her driving test.

  I too went over as often as I could to check on her condition.

  AGED TREE

  Taro and Yoko gave up trekking around the countryside so that she wouldn’t be alone. But even though they learned how to cope, and could cook things she enjoyed, not having any adults in charge must have been tough for them on their own. When she saw me arrive, Yoko would jump up and down, clapping the tips of her fingers, and Taro looked relieved too. With the four of us together again, much the way it had been from the time Taro first began having after-school snacks with us, we felt like a family.

  One day when I was staying there in Oiwake, I sat at the small dining table mending Mrs. Utagawa’s night yukata while Yoko used some garden shears to snip green soybean pods off the stem before they were steamed. Mrs. Utagawa was in the tatami room next to us, dozing, and Taro was out on the porch with his schoolbooks spread on the folding table. Earlier when he tried to help Yoko, she had chased him away, insisting that he study. Some time ago Mrs. Utagawa had offered to pay his school fees and train fare, and he planned to take the exam for Shinjuku Municipal High School, his school of choice. Watching him write intently with his left hand, his face twisted in a scowl, I asked Yoko, “After Shinjuku High School, what will he do?”

  “Go to the University of Tokyo.”

  “And then?”

  “Be a doctor like Papa.”

  In her innocence, she seemed to think that everyone should end up like her father.

  “When he’s a doctor, what then?”

  She paused in her snipping and cocked her head, considering.

  “Spend all day every day in his lab, is that it?” I asked, teasing.

  This seemed to catch her off guard, her round, childish face showing that a life like her father’s wouldn’t be much fun for those left at home. For a while she was stumped—but then her eyes lit up.

  “He’ll be somebody like Dr. Schweitzer, and work for the good of mankind.”

  Somehow she made it sound as if her father wasn’t lifting a finger for “mankind.” “Oh, really,” I said, wanting to laugh. “Dr. Albert Azuma, is it?”

  “That’s right,” she said, and slowly intoned in English: “Doctor … Taro … Azuma.” She clicked her shears triumphantly in the air.

  “What about you?”

  “Me?” The question seemed to surprise her. “I guess I’ll work for the good of mankind too.” Spoken with considerably less confidence.

  While we carried on like this, Taro alternately looked up moodily at the sky or sighed and laid his cheek on his book. A swirl of unsettling thoughts—his guardian might soon die, he might never come to Oiwake again, might not go on being a frequent visitor in the Utagawa house or even be able to attend high school at all—must have fed a deepening anxiety that made studying impossible.

  Nothing will ever be the same again: that thought surely preyed on him, and caused his usual caution and restraint to break down. Soon after this a scene took place that set Harue firmly against him. It was a little thing, but I doubt whether she ever forgave him for it.

  IT HAPPENED TOWARD the end of summer, when I was in Karuizawa. The curtains in the dining room and parlor had been sent to the cleaner’s for the first time in years, and when they came back the Saegusa sisters decided to have Taro rehang them. I phoned Oiwake, and the next afternoon he came over on his bicycle. The day was sweltering in a way that was unusual for Karuizawa, the atmosphere heavy with an oppressive languor. Taro had pedaled all the way under a burning sky, and his tanned arms and neck glistened in a most discomfiting way.

  He had left Mrs. Utagawa asleep in the Oiwake house, and with Yoko there too he went straight to work, clearly eager to finish up and get back as soon as possible. The three sisters, on the other hand, were in a lazy, self-indulgent mood brought on by the heat and humidity. They sat sprawled on the chaise longue and armchairs in the parlor, fanning themselves and sipping glass after glass of iced tea while they chatted idly about nothing at all, watching without really seeing as Taro went back and forth between the dining room and the parlor, dripping with sweat. A crack of thunder and a rainstorm would have cleared the air, but as evening drew nearer the heat continued to simmer. In that setting, the presence of a new maid called Mie proved especially provocative.

  That Mie was a problem. She was the third maid to enter the Saegusa household after Chizu: fresh out of middle school, a precocious little thing with a high bosom and rounded hips, the sort of girl whose whole body shouts her need to fall in love. I heard that back at the Seijo house, when she carried a tray in Masayuki’s presence, her hands shook so much that everyone noticed and smiled. She fell hard for Taro the first time he came over in early summer to weed the garden, and ever since then had made herself the target of the sisters’ teasing by dropping things, getting her orders mixed up, and giving little shrieks whenever he was around. Hearing the story of his origins one day put a damper on her ardor, but even so, once he was in front of her she seemed to lose control. That day too, she let out a series of funny little squeaks that might have been laughter or excitement, and for no good reason went in and out of rooms where he was. When he was hanging the curtains in the dining room, she went into the dining room, and when he was hanging them in the parlor, she went into the parlor.

  He had finished putting up the lace curtains in both rooms and the heavy brocade drapes in the dining room. All that remained were the parlor drapes. Just then Mari, Eri, and Yuko came trooping in from a game of tennis, declaring it was just too hot out there, sheer torture! They tossed their rackets down carelessly, toweled themselves dry, and dabbed some ointment on their mosquito bites before taking the iced drinks I’d prepared. Then, each with a glass in hand, they sank wearily into chairs, just like their mothers.

  At that point Taro reentered the parlor with the stepladder. When Harue caught sight of him, she looked around at everyone and whispered, “Watch now. Mie will come wandering in.”

  Sure enough, not long after he had set up the stepladder by the windows and started to hang the drapes, the door opened cautiously and Mie peered furtively in. She took one step inside the room before realizing that everyone’s eyes were on her and fleeing in consternation.

  “Now that is what’s called a sex bomb,” said Harue in a low voice as soon as the door was shut, eliciting a chorus of shrill protests from Mari, Eri, and Yuko. “I can’t help it, there it is.”

  “A pity she’s so short,” said Natsue.

  “No, shorter is better!” This from Fuyue. “A pocket pinup, they call it. Made in Japan to suit Japanese taste.”

  “The common man’s taste,” supplemented Harue.

  After a languid silence, fanning the neck of her cotton dress with an ivory-handled fan, Harue turned and looked up at Taro, who was perched on top of the stepladder. “Taro,” she said, “Mie’s been popping in and out for no reason—had you noticed?” Her tone was teasing. She was addressing him directly by name nowadays. Instead of a reply, he only showed a trace of a wry smile and went on working in silence.

  “Seems to me she has a bit of a crush on you.”

  Taro’s smile disappeared as he stood facing the window, showing only a boyishly slender, stiff neck.

  “Something wrong?” His failure to respond to her baiting made her perverse. She fluttered her fan as she continued to address the back of his neck. “Not your type?”

  Still with his back to her, Taro said nothing. He kept working steadily, hands on the curtain rod.

  “Girls like her are called pocket pinups, did you know that?” Still no response. Harue exchanged looks of roguish humor with her sisters and the three girls sitting in front of her before turning back to Taro and increasing the pressure. “Well? What do you say?”

&n
bsp; He kept his back to her.

  Harue drew up her shoulders and, with a certain hauteur, turned to face the front again. Then, in a deliberately flippant tone, she said, “Well, who could blame you? You’ve been spoiled, after all.”

  She looked around the room with satisfaction. Two sets of beautiful women from two generations were draped in various careless, almost seductive poses—the Saegusa sisters and three of their daughters, all but Yoko. The elder women were still lovely to look at, but Mari, Eri, and Yuko were like flower buds on the point of opening, mirror images of the beauty of their mothers in their youth.

  From the top of the stepladder, Taro turned and looked down at the room. He was holding the brocade drapes in his arms, puzzled. Harue’s remark made no sense to him. But then, seeing her satisfied gaze sweep the room, he understood, and a smile came to his lips—the sort of smile people wear when confronted by human folly—a detached, dismissive smile. Not boyish in the least, either, but completely mature.

  As Harue turned to look back at him again, she unfortunately caught sight of that smile. Worse yet, when they saw her frown the others followed her line of sight, and so everyone in the room saw it.

  That was all there ever was to it, but I do believe that that single incident turned Harue permanently against him. Afterward Yoko’s sister Yuko came into the kitchen and murmured in my ear, “Doesn’t Aunt Harue know he’s in love with Yoko?”

  Afraid that if I said something amiss it would get back to Natsue, I gave Yuko a noncommittal look. Her face was very like her mother’s, but its expression could not have been more different. When had she become so grown-up, I wondered.