The cicadas kept up a loud droning all day long, and just as they fell silent, white mist rose from the valley, marking the onset of evening. I joined the rest of the family around the oval dining table for dinner, and afterward did the dishes. Even when Yoko was alone with me in the kitchen, the name “Taro” never crossed her lips. The evening wore on, and still she didn’t mention him. As I bustled around the house, going upstairs, downstairs, and back again, her silence began to weigh on my mind. I realized for the first time that one of my main reasons for coming to Karuizawa had been my concern for those two. After the tongue-lashing her parents had given her a couple of years ago, perhaps she was trying to give him up, or may even have done so already—I remembered Taro’s strained face at our last meeting. Thoughts like these flitted through my mind.
That night, just after I had crawled under the quilts in the attic room and settled down to read, I heard a soft knock on the door. At this, I felt a wave of relief. For Taro’s sake, I inwardly said a prayer of thanks.
“Fumiko?” Yoko had come tiptoeing down the corridor from the bedroom at the other end. She had on a pair of woolen socks and was wearing a cardigan over her pajamas. As soon as she came in she plopped down on the tatami by my pillow, looking despondent.
“Fumiko …,” she said again, and pulled an envelope folded in two from the breast pocket of her pajamas. “Here.”
“Another letter?”
I sat up on the futon. I didn’t let my relief show in my face. At some point I had decided, without even consciously realizing it, to do what I could to help the two of them, even though I had scruples about conspiring against my former employers, who had been so good to me.
“Yes, another letter,” she said awkwardly, and turned it over. “This is the address of the post office in the town next to Miyanomori. I thought I could write to Taro by general delivery.” She looked at me pleadingly. “We’re not going to do anything naughty.”
She’d wanted to write to me sooner to ask for my help, she said, but was afraid that after what had happened last time I might refuse to act as a go-between. If she could stay in regular contact with Taro, she would feel a lot easier, and she wouldn’t try to see him without her parents’ knowing. She just wanted me to give him this address.
When I didn’t reach out for the letter, she sagged, and seemed on the verge of tears. After a few moments she began to speak again in a muffled voice.
“You know where he’s living, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said, “I do. Yoko, dear, you’ll catch cold. Sit on a cushion.” I drew a cardigan around my own shoulders. “I do know where he lives, but even if I deliver your letter, there’s no telling whether it will reach him. Your father left strict orders with Mr. Azuma to keep an eye on Taro, you know.”
“An eye on him, ha!” Yoko straightened her back. “That nasty old hag of a stepmother and her sons will just gang up on him, that’s all!” Sitting on a cushion, she tossed her frizzy mop and rocked her small, thin body in agitation. Then she slumped back and spoke in a pleading tone of voice.
“I know it won’t do any good to send it through the mail. That’s why I want you to find a way to hand it to him in person. Have him come to you, or you go to him.”
Without really knowing why, I sighed.
“I promise I won’t cause you any more trouble, ever again.” Her face was full of entreaty. Not knowing about her grandmother’s dying request to me, she seemed to have only modest expectations of help.
I took the envelope, promising only that I would do what I could to get it into his hands. I warned her, though, that when I sent him my new address after becoming single again, there had been no response, and I couldn’t be certain that he was still living in the same place.
Yoko nodded, then launched into a long lament. Ever since the incident two summers ago, her mother had cracked down on her, keeping a sharp eye on her every move and opening all her letters. Her private life was an open book. She wanted to go to college in Tokyo, but that was no longer an option. Instead she would have to attend Fuji Women’s University, which she could get into straight from her school without even taking an entrance exam. And so on.
“Anyway, trust me, it’s not fun having a mother with time on her hands. After letting me do as I pleased for so long, now all of a sudden she starts interfering.”
The sarcastic tone had an adult ring to it, but the sallow face in front of me remained that of a child, with lingering traces of her features as a baby. No doubt Taro was to be pitied, but this childish girl who had a future far brighter than mine yet was haunted already by a ghost from the past, aroused my pity in her own way, and this replaced the feeling I’d had a moment ago when I heard her soft rap on the door.
“Are you unhappy in Sapporo?”
“I wouldn’t say that …” Her eyes were on her lap.
“Have you made any friends?”
“Yes, some.”
I was silent. She looked up and began ticking off the pleasures in her life.
“The new house is nice, and I like singing in the church choir, and I love Hokkaido crab.” She looked down again. “But the thought of how unhappy Taro must be in Tokyo makes me feel such pain, all the time; I can’t bear it.”
She was quiet for a moment, still looking down, then raised her head and looked into my eyes. “Fumiko, did you know our old house in Chitose Funabashi is gone?”
“Gone?”
“Whoever bought the property decided to tear it down and rebuild.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes. Not even the gate is there anymore.”
“Oh dear.”
“The whole neighborhood’s changed. Including the vacant lot where the air-raid shelter used to be. It’s gone too.”
“That’s awful.”
“I know.”
The skin around her eyes slowly reddened, but perhaps because she had matured a little, she did not cry.
WHEN I RETURNED to Tokyo I sent Taro a postcard inviting him to drop by for a visit sometime, but by the time the cold winds of autumn set in he still had yet to come. My brother’s wife had a baby, and in return for the present I sent, they mailed me some soba. I wrote to Taro again: “Soba noodles from home—come and have some with me.” He never showed up, but neither were my postcards returned in the mail. One day I made up my mind to go and see him. After work I took the train to Kamata and asked the way at the police box by the station. The place turned out to be one of a number of little factories all jumbled together.
In the center of the room, on a floor of packed dirt covered with iron filings, the first thing that met my eyes was a huge lathe. Mr. Azuma was busy turning something on it. When I told him that I happened to be in the neighborhood and thought I should stop by, he paused in his work, but only to say with more than his usual gruffness that Taro wasn’t back from school. He avoided my eyes and seemed so anxious to get back to work that I told him I would come back another time, and started to leave. Then O-Tsune came in from a room at the rear with a fussy baby on her back that she was trying to soothe. She barely nodded at me in greeting. There was a look of obvious annoyance in her eyes. I was shocked to think that she’d had another baby at her age, until she explained it was the eldest boy’s child. Later I heard from Taro that his brother had managed to get a seventeen-year-old girl pregnant, a live-in waitress at the corner eatery, and after considerable wrangling had been forced to marry her.
It was already pitch dark outside. On my way back to the station, the whine of motors and the heavy thud of punch presses echoed in my ears, while sparks from welding torches briefly dazzled me. Men with deep creases in their dark-brown faces, and bodies showing the accumulated weariness of years, were at work loading and unloading trucks. It occurred to me later that there in the noise and commotion was the very sound of Japan’s new economic growth, the “economic miracle” of the late 1960s.
IT WAS JUST before New Year’s when Taro finally came to see me.
&nbs
p; The company where I worked had closed for the holidays. I spent the day doing a major cleaning before packing without enthusiasm to go back to my parents the following day; and I had just made myself a pot of tea, settled down at the kotatsu heater, and was looking at a picture postcard from Fuyue. On it was a brightly colored photo of a gigantic Christmas tree. She had gone to New York with her parents, Grampy and Grammy Saegusa. It was cold, she wrote, but they’d wanted to see Christmas in New York, so they were taking advantage of the music school’s winter vacation and were going to an opera or a concert every night. Calculated in yen, even the cheapest seats were so expensive that they had almost bankrupted themselves. The lines were dashed off in an energetic hand. An enviable way to go broke, I was thinking, sipping hot bancha tea, when someone knocked at my flimsy door. I turned, and the door swung open without a sound. I’d been going in and out for some time, carrying out the trash and whatnot, and left it unlocked. I watched as a young man in a beige jacket and black trousers came in, ducking to keep from bumping his head on the lintel. It took a few seconds for me to realize it was Taro.
It was two years since I had seen him. Back then he’d still made a boyish impression, but now he was definitely a young man. He hadn’t merely grown up; something about him was different. It wasn’t only the unfamiliar work clothes he was wearing. Whether just his face looked different or his entire body, I couldn’t tell, but it seemed as if somewhere on the inside he had been reshaped, and that the inner change had seeped out, making him look like someone I hardly knew. I felt a surge of disappointment—or perhaps fear: fear of what the future might hold for him. His youth was no longer fresh and vigorous, but had settled like a thick sediment, with a stale smell to it. He had become like those young men you see lounging on street corners, men with no pleasure in life aside from throwing their wages away on pachinko pinball; young men who have run out of hope.
He stood there white-faced and silent. I remained where I was, unwilling to get up from the floor cushion by the kotatsu heater, the quilt cover pulled up to my chest. I told him to come in and shut the door, that it was cold outside, and that as long as he was up, he should fetch a cup from the counter by the sink. He removed his shoes and meekly got a teacup, brought it over, and sat down across from me to get warm. He may have felt that nothing had changed between us, but for my part I found his sudden presence so disturbing that instinctively I leaned back slightly. Without so much as looking around the room he stared down at the kotatsu tabletop.
“Do you want a cushion?” I asked, pouring him a cup of tea, but he shook his head, giving me only a quick glance. “What took you so long?”
Without answering my question, he finally spoke. His voice was husky. “How’s Yoko?”
“Alive and well.”
“You saw her in Karuizawa?”
“I did. She was worried about you.”
Hearing this brought a spark to his eyes for the first time. I pulled myself away from the warmth of the kotatsu long enough to take out the letter I’d kept in the bottom dresser drawer, hold it out so he could see her handwriting, and put it in front of him. He stared at the general delivery address, written in her clumsy handwriting. Then he said in an abrupt, offhand way, “I dropped out of school.”
“You did? Why?”
“Had to.”
“Did you do something wrong?”
“You know I wouldn’t. No, it’s just that now, with the Utagawas out of their life, they’ve no reason to keep their promise.”
He kept his feelings in check, but his shoulders were shaking with repressed anger. Of course, I thought, remembering how Mr. Azuma and O-Tsune had behaved when I saw them. Now that I heard what had happened, it seemed as if it had been inevitable all along, that no other outcome was ever possible.
From years back, the Azumas had wanted to go into business for themselves. Even with three breadwinners in the family, they had continued to scrimp and save to build up the necessary capital. Being evicted from the Utagawas’ rental house was the perfect chance for them to turn their hopes into reality. They set up a sub-subcontracting plant in Kamata manufacturing household appliance parts, in the process using up the money from the Utagawas and leaving Taro with no choice but to quit school after a single year. Since the family—O-Tsune and the boys in particular—had never taken kindly to the idea that Taro alone should be able to continue his education, when their ties with the Utagawas were severed, it was obvious that they would feel free to ignore their promise.
Still, Mr. Azuma apparently wanted to avoid giving the impression that his treatment of Taro was unfair. On the condition that Taro work at the plant in the daytime and attend a night school afterward, he went on paying his tuition and train fare. But the situation at home was difficult. When Taro opened a book, one or the other of his brothers would interfere, and if it came to a fight, they ganged up on him. The baby howled morning and night, and the lights went off early. He could get no studying done at home. And although Mr. Azuma allowed him to leave for school as soon as he got a fixed amount of work done, O-Tsune and the boys kept a spiteful eye on how much he did, increasing his quota little by little on the grounds that he was finishing too soon. Mr. Azuma stayed out of it, finding it too much trouble to interfere as often as was required, which was constantly.
Before long, Taro was coming to class late on a regular basis, and then he was increasingly absent. He barely managed to chalk up the minimum number of days required during his sophomore year, and this year he didn’t know if he would have enough. A night school diploma involved at least four years of study, instead of three, but at this rate he might not be able to last that long. Even if he did, how on earth was he supposed to attain the academic level he needed to apply to the faculty of medicine at the University of Tokyo? It was an open question. For the time being, he not only had to work the lathe but do the accounts, as well as drive around to make deliveries and collect payments. Also, since the plant was a household industry, his salary existed only on paper; in fact he received nothing in the way of spare cash. At most he was given an occasional handout with which to get some trousers to replace those he’d outgrown.
And yet the Azumas’ business was by no means limping along. Orders increased steadily, month by month. Mr. Azuma built a small warehouse out back and bought a pickup truck, and the moment Taro turned eighteen he gave him the money to attend a driving school, which wasn’t cheap. Success, though, only made them eager for more business. Even the eldest son, who at one time had shown signs of delinquency, settled down after marrying and applied himself to the family business. Now all of them, his bride included, were working like mules.
Taro wanted to get away from them as soon as he could and live alone, work somewhere in the daytime and, to save precious time, drop the drawn-out night-school classes to study on his own for a certifying exam that would qualify him to apply to a university. Lately this was all he could think of, waking and sleeping. But at his age, and without a high school diploma, he couldn’t hope to earn enough to be on his own. Even if he did run away from the Azumas, he would still need to find a live-in position somewhere, which meant being a soba delivery boy or a grocer’s order boy, or else working again at some household industry or other. Under these conditions, there wasn’t much chance of getting enough time and space to study. Sleeping arrangements were bound to be crowded—three to a three-mat room, six to a six-mat room—and, while winter might be bearable, in summer there would be all the insects to put up with. Whichever way he looked at it, he kept coming back to the conclusion that he had no choice but to stick it out where he was. In the meantime, life went pointlessly on while he wore out his nerves and his body, and his mind grew emptier by the day. Living, he said, was simply torture.
Moving only his shoulders, he spoke at first in a strangely impassive way, but as he went on his thoughts seemed to grow darker, until before long his face was flushed with desperation.
I listened quietly, shaken by it all. It wasn’t
only the wretchedness of what he said. I was appalled by him himself, sitting there in front of me. What had happened to the little boy who was so sparkling, as if he wore a bright star on his forehead?
There was a short silence. Then perhaps I sighed too loudly, for he raised his head and looked at me.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“What for?”
“I used up my savings after the divorce, so I can’t help you. All I can offer you is a little spending money.”
“I didn’t come here looking for a handout.” He looked away and drew a deep breath. “Sometimes I think I’ll help myself to some of their money and run for it.”
“No, don’t.”
A True Novel Page 45