I stood silent in the doorway.
“End … of … story.” She spoke the words slowly and deliberately, then shifted her gaze to stare at the wall in front of her. On the wall, white with a grayish tinge, hung a nondescript calendar. A window on the adjacent wall offered a rain-soaked view of a concrete wing of the hospital. For the first time, I spoke up.
“Why tell me this? Shouldn’t you be telling your mother?”
I took off my raincoat carefully to avoid scattering drops of rain and moved farther into the room. Yoko turned her head toward me again.
“They’d never understand. They never can understand Taro. They can’t conceive of there being someone like him.” She answered in the plural, so evidently she was not referring only to her mother.
She looked straight ahead at the wall again, with a faint smile that was perhaps disparaging or embarrassed. “Of course I went to Oiwake with that in mind. I told him we should go ahead and do it and be done with it.” Her mouth tightened. “He said if I wasn’t going to marry him, he wouldn’t.”
She shot me another look.
“How could I marry him, the way he is? So I said again, ‘Look, there’s no way I can ever marry you, but let’s do it anyway.’ ”
A vision came to me of Yoko casting off her clothes and flinging them at the foot of the quilts, exposing a body that was barely starting to show some curves, and shrieking wildly: “Let’s do it! Let’s just do it!”
She looked to the front and, after regaining control of her breathing, plunged on. “He shouted at me. He said, ‘If you don’t want to marry me, then the hell with it.’ He was furious. He made me so mad, I said it again. ‘There is no way I could ever marry you’—and he turned and left me.”
I stood a short distance off with my raincoat over one arm and looked at Yoko with her hair matted on the pillow, staring at the wall. The day we went to Kamata, when she’d looked so pretty and grown-up—I couldn’t help wondering if I had only imagined it. A memory came back to me of the time I first went to the Utagawa house and saw a savage-eyed little girl lying small and flat on her futon.
“He left me.” She repeated the words hollowly, drained and dejected. She stopped looking at the wall and let her eyes wander in empty space. “He left me there at night all alone.” Her flat chest, covered in a thin flannel nightgown, rose and fell. “I waited and waited, but he never came back.” Abruptly she closed her mouth, shut her eyes, and slid down in the bed, pulling the covers up over her head. After a while her face emerged, the cheeks wet with tears. “I waited but he never came back to get me.” She was staring wide-eyed at the ceiling. More tears. “I’ll never forgive him.” She pursed her lips. “No matter how he apologizes, I’ll never forgive him as long as I live.”
Taro never said anything to me. I only formed a hazy idea of what had gone on between them by piecing together the snippets that Yoko let out. She went to Kamata because meeting me had allowed her to get away from the Saegusas, and once she had the chance, she wanted to surprise and please Taro. Kamata wasn’t part of her original plan, but the trip to Oiwake was something she had worked out before leaving for New York, making advance arrangements with Taro by mail. Apparently at that stage she had meant them to spend the night there, have sexual relations, and exchange promises to marry someday. Once they had been intimate, even if they were far apart, they could feel at ease. Not only that, with intimacy an established fact, when they broached the subject of marriage somewhere down the line, her parents would be more inclined to listen. But just before all this was to happen, when she saw him in Kamata, she realized that the image she had built up in her mind during the three-year interval was nothing like the actual, grown-up Taro confronting her. Her disappointment turned to anger, with him and with herself, and she no longer knew what to do. When she tossed her head at him and shrieked, “There’s no way I could ever marry you!” I believe she meant every word of it.
But her refusal was that of somebody who could afford to entertain the idea of going back on her word if things changed. Her despair was not that of someone who’d been absolutely bent on marrying him; it was more that she pictured herself frequently quarreling with him and making up—and if along the way he regained his old spark, why, then yes, she might consider marrying him; but if not, he wasn’t the only man in the world, and surely somewhere out there she could find a husband who would be less of an embarrassment, to her and to others. That, I think, was her frame of mind. Otherwise, how could she have shouted, “There’s no way I can ever marry you!” to his face and still, after he’d turned and fled, expect him to come back—indeed bitterly resent it when he failed to do so? It was impossible for someone in that frame of mind to understand how shattered Taro must have been.
“Where is he now?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Isn’t he at the Azumas?”
“Does he ever come to see you?”
“No.”
“Well if he does, you tell him that I’ll never forgive him, no matter how much he apologizes. Tell him I’ll never forgive him as long as I live.”
I let this slide.
Although the two of them never had any intention of “eloping,” somehow that was the way everyone came to refer to it.
UNTIL HE COULD feel easier about Yoko’s condition, Taro remained almost completely silent. Night and day he holed up in my apartment, a cup full of shochu in one hand, saying nothing. He obviously had no intention of returning to the Azumas. As a courtesy to me he busied himself with household tasks, dipping into the cash in the candy jar under the sink to do some basic shopping and getting simple meals ready when I came home from work. He scarcely touched his own food and just sat drinking—something he must have started doing in broad daylight—with a harrowed look on his face. While I read on my futon before going to sleep, he kept right on gloomily drinking, and when I left in the morning he was still asleep. Or rather, he lay there sodden with drink and, to cover his shame, hid himself under the quilt, head and all. Only when he heard that Yoko had recovered enough to go home did he ease up on the shochu. A bit later, he began working at a neighborhood factory. He still drank steadily from the time he got off work until he went to bed, but that was only for a few hours, and he didn’t get falling-down drunk. He began to talk to me; and sometimes I even thought I caught him smiling.
A month or so after Yoko had gone back to Sapporo, Taro and I began having daily quarrels. It turned out that while he was staring into space with bloodshot eyes, drink in hand, the wheels had been turning. One day he said out of the blue that he wanted to go to America—either there or Brazil, somewhere a Japanese could find work; in any case, he wanted to leave Japan. By spending so much time at the Utagawas, he felt he’d come too much under their influence, and this had led to the ludicrous notion of going to college like a good middle-class boy and studying to be a doctor. But he now realized how silly—and almost impossible—the whole idea had been. In Japan, for someone of his background to lead a respectable life meant making it his goal to become respectable—but a life focused on a goal like that wasn’t what he wanted.
This provoked me. If he went overseas, there was no knowing how things would turn out, whereas if he stayed put, at least things could get no worse. I repeated my earlier proposal. He could stay on in my apartment and quit the factory job, either going back to high school in the normal way or studying for an equivalency test. He could commute to college from my apartment too and decide later what to do next. I tried to get him to listen to reason. I’d been waiting for him to pull himself together and give me just such an opening, so words poured out of me as if a dam had burst. Being male, as long as he finished high school he could certainly look forward to a better life than I’d had. If he graduated from university, he could have what seemed to me a pretty damn good life. I offered to do anything I could to make that happen. But he wouldn’t listen. While I was unburdening myself, he bore it with a frown, but when he talked he simply repeated the same things as befo
re. From the start of the rainy season, around and around we went, arguing in circles.
I realized something then for the first time. It made me feel small, and sad. Like old Mrs. Utagawa, I too had become dependent on Taro. What’s more, I lived alone. If he disappeared from my life, I would have to endure the same old loneliness and dreariness; the thought was dismal, even horrifying. Taro must have guessed how I felt, and only brought up his plan to go abroad quite a while after he’d already made up his mind. Once his decision was out in the open, though, he was adamant. While I argued with increasing vehemence as he sat beside me with his cup of shochu in front of him, he would pull out a textbook for learning English that was among his few belongings and make a show of studying, turning away from me. The blatant rejection in this gesture was absurdly irritating, and in a harsh voice I sometimes said things I should not have. In the end I even wept and pleaded with him. It seems obvious to me now that part of his wanting to leave Japan was to avoid having me around his neck in the future, so the more I begged, the more difficult it must have been for him to endure.
Toward the end of the rainy season, I gave in, and decided to do my best to help him carry out his plan. I got in touch with Uncle Genji, whom I hadn’t seen since my divorce, in the hope that he might have connections that would help Taro get started overseas. Together we went to his house in Soto Kanda. He seemed surprised at the sight of Taro, as if wondering whether this really was the same boy I’d brought to meet him before. He also seemed to get the wrong idea about us and embarrassed me by saying out loud, “Well, Fumiko, I see you’ve gone off the deep end this time.” My uncle frowned at my request, claiming that his experience of foreign countries was a thing of the past. I plowed on, playing up Taro’s merits. This young man, I said, has ten times the ability of any ordinary person, so he would never disgrace you, you can be sure of that; anyone who took him on would be grateful to you; please ask around on his behalf. Recent history forgotten, I pleaded his case as well as I could. Uncle Genji said that he would see what he could do but advised us not to expect much, adding as he looked from one of us to the other that if Taro spoke no English there was little point in even considering the matter.
After that Taro took to opening up his English-language textbook every evening after supper while listening to the Far Eastern Network, the all-English radio station run by the U.S. military. Soon it was summer, time for the Bon festival holidays. I didn’t feel like going home or to Karuizawa, so I begged off with the excuse that things were too busy at work for me to get away that year. We stayed in Tokyo and sweltered. Taro’s preferred destination was the United States, but on looking into it, he realized how hard it would be to obtain a visa that would let him get a job. He had just started talking about Brazil as an alternative when Uncle Genji called me at work. He sounded upbeat. He’d spoken to the cook at the Imperial Hotel, a former associate of his at the base, with the result that an American who came regularly to Japan had offered to take Taro on if he had a mind to work as a private chauffeur.
Since all he wanted was a way to get to America, Taro jumped at the chance, however unexpected the type of work, and by early October he was gone. To save money he took a freighter sailing by way of Panama, but he barely owned even a change of clothes, and getting him fitted out for the coming winter had exhausted my meager savings. By a quirk of fate he was heading for New York, where Harue and the others were.
I told Fuyue by telephone, thinking that everyone should at least be notified that Taro had left the country. As I learned afterward from her, she told Natsue, Natsue told Yoko, and the following morning Yoko stayed in bed for so long that her mother went upstairs to check, only to find her unresponsive and feverish, having spent the night curled on the rug at the foot of her bed. In a few days the fever was gone, but the lethargy remained. At the time, she was taking her first year of college off to recuperate from the pneumonia that had dragged on, and, apart from resuming her voice lessons, she spent her days hanging around the house doing nothing. Her parents were worried enough to take her to a mental health specialist. Privately, I felt that living in that privileged environment, where her emotions ran unchecked, had made her oversensitive and unstable.
At the end of the year a Christmas card, sent airmail—something I had never received before—came from Taro. He had apparently decided that his address, written in small English lettering on the envelope, would be hard for me to make out, so he’d written it out again in big capital letters in the middle of the card. He added that I should let him know if my address changed. That was all. Uncle Genji received a note of thanks from him, but he never wrote me a proper letter. As I studied those large roman letters in Taro’s handwriting underneath the words “Merry Christmas,” which were printed in silver, I felt a wave of emotion. In reply I sent him the customary New Year’s postcard with a message equally short.
The following spring, having heard that the Saegusas were finally back from New York, I used one of my days off to call on them at Seijo. Mari and Eri had grown from pretty little girls into beautiful young women, and their father, Hiroshi, had matched their growth, becoming stouter than ever. Harue, by contrast, gave the impression of having been rejuvenated. I’d heard from Yoko that she was studying painting with a Japanese artist over there, and much later I learned from Fuyue that she’d had an affair with the man, one that lasted for almost the entire duration of their stay. She had been at great pains to keep this secret from the local Japanese community. Since she paid her lover’s expenses out of her own pocket, a source of funding he wasn’t eager to have dry up, he himself had evidently been equally intent on keeping the affair quiet. Somehow this news came as a relief to me. It may sound presumptuous, but I had always thought it a pity that a woman like her should waste her youth and beauty as she’d had to do.
“They say that boy Taro is chauffeur to an American,” Harue said, smiling scornfully. So she knows, I thought in surprise. She had already heard from Fuyue about Taro’s eventual emigration after the “elopement,” and when gossip about someone fitting his description began circulating among Japanese expatriates in New York, she had apparently put two and two together.
As I got up to leave, Harue looked me up and down, rather as if she were looking at some zoo animal, before saying, “Fumi, I must say, your figure has certainly filled out, hasn’t it? You look more like a real woman.” I was past thirty by then, so if it had, that was only natural.
“Yes,” I said, “I suppose so.”
Then she studied my face. “But you seem a bit tired.”
Indeed, I was extremely tired at the time.
Again, I didn’t go to Karuizawa that summer. “Things are too busy at work” was again my excuse for staying away from Karuizawa for the second year in a row. Having put Taro up for six months without the Saegusa sisters’ knowing made me hesitate to go. Also, even though it was already nearly a year since he’d gone, I still felt run-down. Just getting through each day wore me out, and I was hardly in the mood to be around those high-spirited people. In December I received a second Christmas card from Taro, saying that he’d quit being a chauffeur after a year of it and had been working for the New York branch of a Japanese company ever since, as a camera repairman. His new address was again written in oddly distinct lettering in the middle of the card. As before, I sent a blunt New Year’s postcard in reply.
I REMARRIED THE following spring.
As I mentioned at the very beginning, I have an Aunt O-Hatsu, a woman now in her nineties and still going strong. Her husband, my mother’s elder brother, died at the end of the year, and I first met the man who was to become my new husband when I went back with Uncle Genji for the funeral. The man was the third son of a Saku farming family. I was thirty-two and he was forty-five, thirteen years my senior. After finishing his education at around the age of fourteen, he had taken various jobs before starting to work in the town hall. His wife had died years before, and his mother, who lived nearby, had looked after the ch
ildren until her recent death. Of his three boys, the younger two were still in junior high and elementary school, so he was in the market for a wife. He came up and spoke to me several times as I was serving tea at the wake or helping out the day of the funeral. Apparently someone had told him that I’d been married but was now single again. When the mourning period was over, he stopped by my aunt’s house with a proposal of marriage.
“The lady in Western-style clothes …”
Those were evidently the first words out of his mouth. Back then it was customary for women to wear a black kimono at funerals, and my style of dress must have struck him as unusual: a black suit handed down from Natsue and a brooch of black pearls which was a gift from Fuyue.
To ask me to leave Tokyo and marry him when he was not only poor but had three boys who needed looking after was asking a great deal, he’d be the first to admit, but he hoped she would at least convey the offer. He didn’t think he stood a chance, but if by some miracle I accepted, he guaranteed that they would all be good to me. Being unaccustomed to writing, my aunt must have found the prospect of a letter daunting, for she placed a long-distance call to my company instead—which must also have required some resolution—and conveyed the message.
SMALL SHINTO SHRINE
“I know she’s too good for us, but if someone as ladylike as her would say yes, nothing could make me happier.” He had kept saying this, her voice informed me on the phone. I tried to remember him, but all that came to mind was a man unremarkable in height, looks, and way of speaking. When I hung up I was inclined to say no. As a single woman living on my own in Tokyo, I’d had my offers, but none of them interested me, and so I had stayed single. Still, the phrase “too good for us” stuck in my mind, that day and the next. A month later there was another phone call from Aunt O-Hatsu. The man had some business in Tokyo, and if I was willing he would at least like to meet me. I met him and thought he was nice enough, but still couldn’t make up my mind. Then in short order he came back to Tokyo, this time expressly to see me.
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