“Money isn’t something you can just ignore.”
“I know, but going on about it the way he does is so petty. So narrow. So … small-minded. He’s become so common inside. It shows in his face.”
That day, the moment I brought Taro into the coffee shop where Yoko was waiting and she at last set eyes on him, her face drained of color. I think probably it was partly a young girl’s shock at suddenly being confronted by her childhood friend’s virility. But she also saw in him the same thing I had seen the other day, and felt a keen disappointment—and consternation. Taro for his part couldn’t take his eyes off this new and prettier version of Yoko. He stared at her, embarrassed but wide-eyed; he looked to me like a hopeless idiot. I occupied myself for a little while in the station bookstore so they could have some time alone together, and then I went back to the coffee shop and took a seat some distance from their table. I pulled a paperback out of my purse and looked up from time to time to watch them. Whatever they’d been talking about, their conversation was now sluggish. They would exchange a few sullen words, eyes fixed on the table in front of them. Taro seemed to be resisting the urge to look at her. After an hour or so I went over and said maybe we’d better be going, as we’d come a long way and Aunt Fuyue would worry. Still looking glum, they stood up without protest. As usual, Taro wanted to go with her to Seijo, hoping to extend their time together as long as possible, and as usual she swung her hair and stamped her foot. “No! Don’t! Not today. I mean it!” By way of a compromise, he got off at Shinagawa. And so they parted.
Since Yoko was going all the way to Shinjuku, I would be getting off before her, at Shibuya. Just before leaving, I said reproachfully, “I can’t help feeling sorry for Taro, the way things ended.”
“It’s all right,” she said. “We’re going to meet again.”
Swept along by the throng of departing passengers, I was ejected onto the platform with her words still ringing in my ears. She was traveling to Sapporo the next day, so they had precious little time. I wondered how they were going to manage it, but even if it was only for a short while, he can’t have felt so downhearted after all, and Yoko herself couldn’t be nearly as fed up with him as she had made me believe. For Taro’s sake, I felt relieved. I saw no reason to warn Fuyue. The possibility that the two of them might go off to Oiwake together simply never occurred to me.
EARLY WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, three days after that, Fuyue rang me at work. “Have your parents gotten a telephone?” She was always the calm one in the family, but that day I heard panic in her voice.
“Yes,” I said, “they put in a line last year.”
“I’ll explain later, but I need you to call home immediately and have someone go to Oiwake to see if Yoko is there. If she is, they need to take her home with them, by force if need be, and if she’s not, then I want them to go look for her in Karuizawa.” She took a breath before going on. “It’s possible that she and Taro may have eloped.”
With my boss’s permission, I called home. My brother happened to be in that day, and just over an hour later he called back.
“She was there all right.”
“With him?”
“Nope, alone.”
“Alone?”
“She’s lying by the heater right now. Got a bad fever. I’m about to take her to the hospital.”
“You are?”
“Yup.”
“It’s that serious?”
“She’ll be okay, I think, but she’s got herself one hell of a fever.”
I left work early, met Fuyue at Ueno station, and together we took the Asama super-express bound for Nagano. On the way she filled me in. On Monday, the day after I saw Yoko, the Saegusa housekeeper had taken her to Ueno station, where she was due to board the afternoon sleeper express to Sapporo. They had arrived in plenty of time, and the housekeeper went on home, assured by Yoko that there was no need for her to hang around. Fuyue had taken it for granted that Yoko boarded the train. Tuesday passed without incident, and then Wednesday noon, that very day, Yoko’s father had phoned from Sapporo to say that she hadn’t arrived on the morning train as expected. Fuyue told him that Yoko had left on Monday, so she should have arrived the previous day. No, she was coming in time for Thursday’s entrance ceremony, Takero asserted, so she’d been scheduled to leave Tuesday and arrive Wednesday. They went back and forth until finally it dawned on them that Yoko had contrived the whole thing. She had told her aunt that she was leaving Monday and her father that it was Tuesday, setting it up so that she would be on her own for an entire day without anybody being the wiser. Quite cunning, if true, but all anyone knew for certain was that here it was Wednesday and there was no sign of her in Sapporo. When Fuyue had urged her to fly home, Yoko claimed she was sick of airplanes and insisted on taking the train. In retrospect it all fitted together. Her father was ready to file a missing persons report with the police when Fuyue, remembering the previous “misconduct,” proposed that she contact my family first and have them look for her in Oiwake or Karuizawa.
“You saw her on Sunday, Fumiko, didn’t you?” Fuyue asked.
“Yes.”
She looked at me. Leaving out the role I’d played in their correspondence, I decided to tell her everything that had happened that day. I finished my account with a humble apology, which she brushed aside. “No need for you to apologize,” she said. “If you hadn’t gone with her to Kamata, she would just have gone by herself. But we had better keep this from Natsue.” How to deal with her sister was uppermost in her mind. “Just the thought of her finding out has me worried sick,” she said. No one had yet sent word to New York.
It was cold in Nagano, with patches of snow on the ground.
We got off the train at Komoro and went by taxi to Saku Hospital. In the hallway outside the sickroom, under a fluorescent light, my sister-in-law was sitting on a vinyl-upholstered bench, wrapped in a padded jacket, waiting.
When my brother found Yoko she was lying curled under a quilt, naked and delirious. On the tatami at the head of the futon were two cups and two small, empty clay pots, a popular packed lunch sold on the Asama super-express. Scattered at the other end were her clothes, lying where she’d thrown them off. From her condition it seemed likely that she had lain shivering on the futon for a day or two. Details came out later, but obviously this outcome was the last thing she had expected. Her plan had been to ride back to Tokyo first thing in the morning and set off innocently for Sapporo on the Tuesday afternoon train. Evidently, she and Taro had quarreled, he stormed out, and she stayed in bed, sulking, and the result was pneumonia. Had she managed to dress herself and make it to the main road before her fever shot up, it wouldn’t have come to this; but no doubt she had stayed there counting the minutes, waiting for Taro to feel remorseful and come back. With no external injuries and so no role for the police, she had been admitted to the hospital without any awkward questions. The following day, Thursday, her father flew down from Sapporo, transferred to a train, and arrived in town. I had taken the day off work and went back to Tokyo as soon as he came.
When I left, Yoko’s fever was still high and she was panting for breath, but according to the doctor the antibiotics were doing their job and she was out of danger.
WORN OUT, I dragged my way home to find the light on in my room at Evergreen Apartments No. 2, with a glimmer showing under the window curtains. For a moment I thought I must be looking at the wrong apartment, but no, that was definitely my room, and those were the curtains I had hung. I soon guessed who was there.
I opened the door and was assailed by a stale, yeasty smell, a mixture of alcohol and sweat. My eyes took in the sight of Taro sitting cross-legged on the floor in his jacket, which he apparently hadn’t taken off since getting back from Oiwake. He stared up at me with bloodshot eyes like a crazed animal. In front of him was a big bottle of cheap shochu and a cup; looking around I saw another big bottle lying on its side, empty.
In a corner was an overnight bag I’d never seen befo
re, which told me that he had left the Azuma house.
“Where’s Yoko?” he asked.
“I’m tired,” was all I said.
I removed my shoes with deliberate slowness before entering the room. When he had arrived I didn’t know, but since I’d been away from the day before, he must have started worrying that something had happened to Yoko and was trying to muffle the anxiety in drink.
“Where is she? Seijo? Sapporo?” He rolled his head toward where I stood and asked again. His reddened eyes were fixed on me, his speech slurred. I wanted to look away.
“She’s in the hospital.”
“Hospital?”
“Yes, Saku Hospital, the biggest one in that area.”
“What’s wrong?”
I didn’t answer immediately, but went to the kitchen sink and washed my hands thoroughly while he looked on in suspense. Then I poured a cupful of water and drank it down.
“She has pneumonia.”
“Pneumonia?…”
“Yes, she stayed under the quilt the way she was and got pneumonia.” Naked, I wanted to say, but I held the word back.
“ ‘The way she was’ …?” He seemed to have difficulty understanding. “Stayed the way she was, under the quilt?” he repeated, the words slurring, then got unsteadily to his feet and staggered toward the wall, laid both hands on it, and began banging his head against it with great force. He seemed in danger of cracking that prize skull of his in two.
To make sure he heard me, I raised my voice. “You’ll smash the wall! If you’ve got to bash your head against something, use the pillar, for heaven’s sake!”
“Is she going to die? Is she?” He stopped and, hands still on the wall, turned beseeching eyes toward me, desperate to know. Even at that awful moment, I couldn’t help noticing how graceful the ten long fingers bearing his weight looked.
“No, she’s going to make it.”
“She is?”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
He breathed raggedly, shaking, then gradually slumped against the wall. He lowered one arm, bent the other one, and rested his forehead on the back of his hand. In a voice so low I could barely hear it he said, “Better she should die.”
Then he was silent. I kept quiet too. After a while he went on in the same barely audible voice, but faster now. “She said she didn’t want to marry me. Said she couldn’t marry anybody so low-class and vulgar. Said marrying me would be so humiliating she’d die. With someone like me, there’d be nothing to expect from life, not in a million years. Not in a million trillion years—that’s what she said.”
“She went all the way to Oiwake just to tell you that?”
Taro lifted his forehead from the back of his hand and looked at me with a chilly smile. “Not only that.”
“I didn’t think so.”
I said this scathingly, and he dropped that disturbingly mature, chilly smile of his to fix me with a probing look. I levelly returned his gaze. Pictures of the scene at the Oiwake cottage as my brother had described it—small, empty clay pots, Yoko’s scattered clothes—passed through my mind like frames on a movie reel. Little Taro, whom I’d always thought of as a boy, seemed to change before my eyes into a man unknown to me, someone I had never seen before. The eerieness of the transformation brought sour bile rising from my stomach.
His face turned sad, with a lingering trace of the old Taro.
“She should’ve died,” he muttered. “I should’ve killed her, then myself. I’d be better off dead.”
He staggered and fell heavily, spread-eagled on the floor. Ever since coming he must have been alternately swilling rotgut shochu and passing out on the floor like this. The thought of this young, active person drinking himself into a stupor overlapped in my mind with memories of my ex-husband and the way he used to work himself into a rage, his hot breath stinking of liquor. Taro must have resorted to this cheap spirit, the commonest and nastiest of all alcoholic drinks, in an attempt not only to drown his sorrows but to deliberately degrade himself. Again the bitter taste of bile rose in my throat.
“You’re right. Dead right. You’d both have been far better off dying than causing so much trouble for all the adults …”
I couldn’t tell if he heard me or not. He just stared blankly up at the ceiling.
“Even Mr. Azuma, whom you sneer at, and your brothers, and O-Tsune, whom you call an old hag—they all work hard at their jobs. What about the two of you? What in heaven’s name are you doing?”
Perhaps ten seconds ticked by. Taro kept on staring hollow-eyed at the ceiling; then all at once he got up and went to get his overnight bag.
“Now what?”
Bag in hand, he moved toward the door. I stood in front of him to bar the way. The reek of liquor, mixed with the sweet-sour smell of his unwashed body, choked my nostrils. As he tried to push his way forward, I resisted with all my strength. We grappled like that for a while before tumbling in a heap on the floor and rolling over. Taro, his forehead pressed into the tatami, started to sob like a small boy.
From that day until he left for New York six months later, he worked the day shift at a factory nearby and stayed with me in my apartment.
7
Nothing But Romantic Memories
THE SIX MONTHS from that day to the day Taro left for America, and the six months following, are a blur: Yoko’s slow recovery, her father’s concern, her mother’s hysteria on returning from New York; above all Taro’s nerve-racking silence as he soaked up shochu, then our endless fighting and finally the dazed numbness when he was gone. After getting so involved in other people’s lives and being harrowed by it, body and soul, I felt drained when I was alone again. I’d never had something worth calling “a life of my own,” but now my life seemed more thoroughly and bitterly empty than ever.
With Yoko in the hospital I couldn’t sit still, partly because my own family had been involved in finding her at the Oiwake cottage. Though my sister-in-law visited her daily, parking the baby with my mother, the Saturday after the “elopement” I left work around noon and headed back to Nagano myself. Fuyue, after coming down to Tokyo to rearrange her schedule at the music school, drove back to Karuizawa, where she slept at the summer house at night and visited the hospital every day. Takero had gone back north to Sapporo, but he came down on weekends by plane and train.
“I did a terrible thing to Papa. I never thought he’d be so worried. I thought he only cared about Yuko.”
After her father left the room, Yoko told me this in a frail, reedy voice, her neck as thin as a child’s. I too hadn’t expected Takero to be so affected. He seemed to have aged twenty years overnight.
Nearly three weeks after the incident, just days before Natsue was due back from New York, Fuyue finally decided to tell her everything. Yoko, who by then had been transferred to a hospital near Seijo, was dreading her mother’s return. Knowing Natsue, Fuyue must have thought that unless Yoko was on the verge of death, having her rush home early would only create more problems. She persuaded Takero to have Yoko transferred to a hospital nearby rather than somewhere in Sapporo, not just because that took less time, I think, but because she felt responsible for what had happened and didn’t want to dump everything in Natsue’s lap. She knew Natsue lacked the inner resources to cope alone up in Sapporo, without her support.
When I saw Natsue at the hospital she gave full vent to her distress, repeating lines that she must have already wailed to Fuyue over and over again. Listening patiently and giving comfort was not easy. She had grown up when the ideal of sexual purity was something shared by Japanese women generally—a direct result of Western moral influence after the Meiji Restoration, I understand. Yoko’s “elopement” occurred during the last period when that ideal held true.
“The child is ruined. She never did know how to behave, and now she’s lost all hope of ever marrying into a good family. How that boy Taro could do this to us I will never know. I just don’t understan
d. After all we did for him … When I told Harue, she even said we should report him to the police.”
It was one thing for her to carry on like this around Fuyue and me, but when she went into her daughter’s sickroom and said the same thing, things grew more complicated.
“Police?”
Yoko had been lying down in bed, but that brought her bolt upright with a look so fierce that her mother, intimidated, fell silent.
“Aunt Harue said that?”
“Yes, she did.”
Looking her mother straight in the eye, Yoko said quietly, “I was the one who said we should do it.”
Natsue gave a little shriek. “Is that how you treat your father and me?”
“I’m just saying it wasn’t Taro’s fault.”
“What if you got pregnant?”
A low, breathy hiss escaped from Yoko before she too raised her voice. “That is totally impossible!” The pair were alike; neither mother nor daughter could keep their emotions in check.
“How can you say that?”
“Because it’s true!”
Again that sharp, breathy sound. Every time the incident with Taro came up in conversation, Yoko made that voiceless hiss and then went into a fit of dry, convulsive hiccuping that made her temperature rise. A fever would do her no good, so I signaled to Natsue, whose face had gone as pouty as a child’s, and together we left the room.
About two weeks later I visited the hospital again, on a Sunday shortly before Yoko was scheduled to go home. Rain had been falling all day. Still wearing a thin raincoat, I stepped into the sickroom and shut the door behind me. Yoko saw at a glance that I was alone.
“Fumiko.” She spoke my name like a command, sitting propped up in bed against a pair of feather pillows they had taken the trouble to bring from Seijo. “There’s something I need to say in Taro’s defense. He didn’t do anything, even though I asked him to.”
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