A True Novel

by Minae Mizumura

  The daughters of the Saegusa sisters all married and had children. Of the four girls—Mari, Eri, Yuko, and Yoko—the first to marry and become a mother was Yuko. When her husband found work with the San Francisco Symphony, they moved to California, and she proceeded to raise a girl and a boy while keeping on with her music, winning international competitions in ensembles with her husband, going on tour in Europe, and making records. She was the most successful of the four, and while her father was of course proud, Natsue was thrilled to death. Harue might have been a bit miffed, but Natsue’s having a daughter with an active life overseas and exotic grandchildren reflected well on all three sisters, so when company came over she would join Natsue in talking proudly about her niece’s accomplishments. Yuko had a strong independent streak, and like her father, wanted to follow her own path in life. As she grew up she would probably have liked to distance herself from her mother; but Natsue, as she got older, relied more and more on her, which may go a long way toward explaining why Yuko chose to marry an American and settle in the United States. But she was a sweet-natured girl at heart, and she came back to Karuizawa for the summer as often as she could, both to keep her mother company and to see that her children learned Japanese.

  NEAR MIYOTA

  Natsue for her part didn’t retire quietly to Sapporo. After moving there she somehow became a Christian, as if to compensate for the absence of her favorite daughter, and was energetically involved in Christmas and Easter services, as well as other church affairs. In Karuizawa she would suddenly let out some phrase like “the kingdom of God,” giving everyone a jolt. But as the price of airline tickets came down, she became less devout and began traveling to San Francisco once a year for a good long stay. While Harue settled permanently in this country after returning from New York—and Hiroshi’s career got on the fast track here—Natsue, by contrast, would travel overseas. Behind her ability to come and go freely, of course, lay her husband’s acquiescence. He had originally intended to return to Tokyo at the earliest opportunity, but in time he came to like it at Hokkaido University and decided to stay on there till retirement. Both before and after her annual San Francisco visit, Natsue spent a good deal of time in the Saegusa house in Seijo, and soon, counting summers in Karuizawa, she was spending easily a third of the year away from Sapporo. They had a housekeeper, but ever since her “elopement” Yoko felt responsible for her father’s well-being and made herself useful taking care of him.

  Between two and three years later, Mari and Eri each married someone they met at work. Fortunately, neither one of them had really shared Harue’s plans for them, so the sight of Masayuki growing fond of Yoko right under their noses caused no great pain. Born after the war, the two girls were not in the same orbit as the preceding generation. The imposing Shigemitsu residence in Seijo, which the three sisters used to admire until their hearts ached, was, to the daughters, nothing more than a house they’d known all their lives, and which in due course was demolished. They had neither listened with rapture to the sound of the clarinet coming over the hedge from the other side, nor turned red with embarrassment when put down by the Demon. They had no reason to idolize Masayuki. Above all, they did not have strong enough characters to be obsessed by anything. I believe that a girl begins life as a doll her mother can dress up as she pleases, a mirror where her mother’s fancies are reflected; but as she grows older, her own nature begins to show. In the same way that over the years Yuko became more and more serious like her father, Mari and Eri became more like Hiroshi, less resourceful than their mother but less poisonous. Harue knew both how high the mind could fly and how low it could sink; her daughters had more equable temperaments, whether for better or for worse.

  Mari married a banker she met fresh out of college through a short-term job at Mitsubishi Bank, while Eri, after serving as an English-speaking guide at the 1970 World Expo in Osaka, brushed aside Harue’s rude objections (“You’ll be an airborne kitchen maid!”) to become an air stewardess, working for a couple of years before marrying a Japan Airlines employee. The educational background of Mari’s husband left much to be desired, in Harue’s eyes, since he’d graduated from “a private university no one’s ever heard of,” but she was pleased that, like the Shigemitsus, his family had once held a baronetcy. Eri’s husband had gone to high school in the United States before attending Keio University and spoke fluent English. For a while the two couples each lived in an apartment along the Odakyu Line, but as a matter of course the Saegusas soon built them a two-family place, divided right and left, on the Seijo property. From then on they were constant visitors in their parents’ house. Their husbands hit it off, and, when they’d had a few beers at a Karuizawa barbecue, happily traded stories about their days as “sympathizers” in the student movement.

  YOKO AND MASAYUKI’S marriage came last of all.

  Masayuki studied abroad at Yale’s School of Architecture on a scholarship, coming back to Japan in the summer and staying in Karuizawa, where he patiently cultivated Yoko’s affections. For an intellectual, he was an ardent lover; for someone so ardent, he was mild-mannered. He and Yoko often went on walks to Foggy Pond or drove to a teahouse on the ridge. I would also see them out in the yard, deep in conversation. Once, at dusk, when they were sitting side by side on a bench, I saw Masayuki gently lay a fingertip on her forehead and knew immediately that he must be touching the scar he’d caused long ago when he made her trip and fall. Yoko sat still with her eyes closed. As wisps of white mist drifted through the yard, it seemed as if the air around them stayed motionless.

  He seldom talked to other people about his experiences studying abroad, but he often did to Yoko. And it seemed she told him things about Taro that she let no one else know. I saw him comforting her as she wept. One summer when her father had a heart attack from overwork and needed bypass surgery, Yoko couldn’t come to Karuizawa. Masayuki went all the way to Sapporo to see her. With the “elopement” a matter of common knowledge, I’m sure his mother couldn’t have been entirely happy, but it wasn’t in her nature to put up any strong opposition. His father, Masao, did oppose the match, and for once this even-tempered man and his son clashed. But since in every other respect Masayuki was a perfect son—someone, I should say, Masao seemed rather in awe of—in the end he had his way. “Fortunately” might be the wrong word, but the senior Shigemitsus had died one after another some time earlier, so their attitude did not come into play. After a three-year stay in the United States, Masayuki got his master’s, came back to Japan, and joined an architectural firm. That same year Yoko graduated from the English department of her university and started work as a private secretary in the faculty of economics at Hokkaido University. That winter, a group of radicals calling themselves the United Red Army staged a shootout at the Asama Mountain Lodge in Karuizawa, and the three Saegusa sisters and indeed all Japan were mesmerized by the events unfolding on television. Another two years passed before Masayuki and Yoko were married.

  One day as I was ironing in the Karuizawa kitchen, Yoko came in and made an announcement. “I’m going to marry Masayuki,” she said.

  “Go right ahead,” I said, not looking up as I sprayed starch on a napkin.

  She walked over to the sink and looked out the window, her back to me. “There’s been no word from Taro.”

  I said nothing.

  “Seven years.” She twisted her head around and looked back at me. “Seven years, and not a word.”

  I wasn’t sure from her expression whether she was angry or weepy.

  “So I’m going to marry Masayuki.”

  “No one’s stopping you.”

  I folded the napkin and ran the iron over its surface one final time, then reached out and picked up another one, spraying and then pressing down with the iron. She watched me for a while before going on in a different tone of voice.

  “Masayuki says that if Taro ever comes back, I can run away with him that same day if I want to. He’s said it more than once.” Her voice was no more
than a murmur. “I never thought there could be anyone who would say something like that. Only he would. No one else in the whole world would think of saying it.”

  I kept on ironing as she talked. Her whispery voice filled the kitchen.

  “I was so miserable back then, I never dreamed I’d ever be this happy.”

  They had a simple ceremony in Karuizawa, since that was where they’d found each other. Her father was there, wary about his heart yet also sincerely happy, as if he’d finally put down a heavy load. Natsue could hardly be disappointed that her daughter was marrying Masayuki, but the whole thing had been such an extraordinary turn of events from the start that even when confronted with the final outcome, she seemed unable to take it in. Harue was resigned, since the ceremony came well after both of her girls were married off. Still, she said some spiteful things behind the scenes.

  “So Masayuki is more eccentric than we thought.”

  At the time I felt this was a mean thing to say, but looking back, the comment does not seem too far off target.

  The young couple avoided Seijo. With help from both sets of parents they made a down payment, took out a loan, and moved into a small condominium in Nogizaka, in the center of Tokyo. Concerned about Yoko’s frail health, Masayuki apparently did not want children, but Yoko felt that she ought to give the family an heir and, although in that sense a boy would have been better, she gave birth to a girl, her only child. The baby was born on a snowy day, so they named her Miyuki, with the characters for “deep snow.” Since she had fair skin like her father the name suited her, even with Yoko for a mother—though everyone ended up calling her Miki, which is what she called herself when she was little. Masayuki began teaching architectural history at his alma mater and eventually opened his own small architectural firm. After she married, Yoko gave up her singing and actually went to a vocational school so that she could help out in her husband’s company as an interior designer. But her mother was away from home so much that Yoko, who was concerned about her father’s heart condition, used to leave Miki with someone—the housekeeper, or a part-time office worker, or even Natsue herself, if she was there in Seijo kicking up her heels—and go back to Sapporo as often as she could.

  Gradually it became apparent that Masayuki and Yoko were an unusually close couple—that he took exceptionally good care of her, not minding how it might look. In Karuizawa, when the fog rolled in, I often saw him running upstairs to fetch her sweater. If she so much as sneezed, he would give her a sharp, worried look, wherever they were. She was still highly excitable and had trouble falling asleep, so he made a habit of sitting at her bedside reading aloud to her until she dozed off, then doing more work before going to bed himself. His mother, Yayoi, learned about this only from living with them in Karuizawa, and, discreet though she usually was, when she found out she was so amazed that she couldn’t help telling the three sisters, and so everyone knew. Even Harue had to join in the laughter.

  AS MORE TIME went by, both the Demon and Grammy Saegusa died, leaving only Grampy (who was in his eighties but looked no older than sixty-five) from that generation. But the sisters’ grandchildren went on increasing in number, so the Saegusa villa was if anything livelier than before. Since the house needed repairs each year and grew more cramped as the number of inhabitants increased, extensions were added at the back and on top, and a separate wing was built in front, slightly off to one side. The two elder sisters were at this point approaching sixty, and their looks inevitably had faded. Their energy was steadily flagging too, and efforts to re-create “the good old days” seemed to be too much for them. Eri and Mari left their husbands in Tokyo during the summer and came to Karuizawa on vacation with their children, but they were less fussy than the Saegusa sisters were. Sunday brunch became still more abbreviated, often consisting merely of ready-to-eat dishes from the Kinokuniya supermarket. Yoko, as the young mistress of the Shigemitsu family, was of course no longer looked on as a cut below the rest. In the daytime she shared her time between the two houses, but slept at night in the Shigemitsu house. She was sensitive in all her dealings with her in-laws. In fact, perhaps from Masayuki’s influence, she was in fact such an exemplary young wife that as time went by it began to seem that all the events at Chitose Funabashi and Oiwake were just figments of my imagination.

  Changes happened in my life as well. As the area prospered, and one by one our boys went out to work, my husband and I weren’t so hard-pressed for money anymore. Ready-made clothes became more popular, so fewer dressmaking orders came in, but we were comfortable enough by that time for me to reduce the amount of work I took in anyway. Instead of riding the train to Karuizawa I began driving there in a minicar. Our eldest boy was a godsend to us. After graduating from Shinshu University, he went to work at the local Ueda Credit Bank, helping out with the family budget as long as his two brothers still needed our support. He married young, bringing into the family circle a sensible, hardworking girl whose people made and sold pickles. Her first child was Ami, who later helped out in Karuizawa. Strictly speaking, Ami was my grandchild, but since I was still in my thirties when she was born, she didn’t feel that way to me. Partly because our daughter-in-law helped out in her parents’ business until her second baby came along, I really was a second mother to Ami when she was small. She was the same age as Yoko’s Miki. I used to take her to Karuizawa with me piggyback, and in no time she fit right in as a playmate for the Saegusa sisters’ grandchildren. My husband had thought I might want a baby of my own, and was relieved to find out I didn’t want one in the least.

  Eventually Uncle Genji died. After his health declined, I went to visit him several times in Tokyo, and toward the end I stayed in his house in Soto Kanda for nearly a month, nursing him while that husky-voiced woman of his added a hairpiece to her thinning hair, pinning it up in back, and went out bravely to attend to her small restaurant. His ashes were interred in a Tokyo cemetery.

  Once Yoko married, no one mentioned Taro’s name in her presence. Even Harue stopped referring to the “rickshaw man’s descendant” in front of her. The Oiwake cottage might never have existed. I stayed away from it for a long time, but the thought of it rotting away gave me pangs, so once I got my little car and could drive over, I started dropping in twice a year to air the place in secret, not telling either Natsue or Yoko. I just opened the windows and closet doors to let in some fresh air. I couldn’t imagine anyone ever living there again and assumed that in the end the building would be torn down and the property sold, yet when I stepped inside, the past seemed to swirl around me along with the dust, making me nostalgic.

  It was all over between Taro and us. And yet we weren’t left completely in the dark about his doings. He did so spectacularly well for himself in New York that whenever Harue’s husband traveled there on business he would hear rumors about him, rumors that passed from Harue to her sisters and so to me. First we heard that after quitting his job as a chauffeur and becoming some kind of a repairman at a Japanese company he had gone right into sales, making such giant strides that he was soon riding around in a Mercedes. Then, although I’m not sure whether it’s true or not, the word was that he’d done something dishonest and left the company. We were shaking our heads over this when we next heard that he’d gone into business with an American. The latest news was that he had become extremely rich.

  In the fall of 1981, Takero died in Sapporo from a second heart attack. He was due to retire that year and had suggested to Natsue that they go back to Tokyo once he gave up his teaching post—only to end up dying on the eve of retirement. I heard the turnout at his funeral was huge.

  Shortly after that, toward the end of the year, my brother, now the head of the family in Saku, was contacted by a local real estate agent whose records showed that some twenty years earlier the Utagawa family had bought a property in Oiwake through the Tsuchiyas. No one seemed to be using the cottage currently, and would somebody please contact the Utagawas and inquire whether they had any interest in selli
ng? My brother passed the message on to me. Apparently some company wanted to build a vacation house for its employees and was negotiating with various local landowners. Whether out of ignorance or sheer determination, they were offering 30 percent more than the going rate. Since Oiwake was full of untouched woods, why anyone should go to so much trouble to buy land where other people’s houses already stood I had no idea, but I didn’t give it much thought. Rather, the knowledge that the Oiwake cottage would soon disappear left me mourning for the past and all the memories of old Mrs. Utagawa the place contained. There was nothing I could do about it, however, but pick up the telephone and call Natsue. Just as I thought she would, she treated the proposal as a godsend. Ever since Takero’s funeral she’d been living with her sisters in Seijo, and as soon as she could sell the house in Sapporo she planned to buy two small condominiums in Seijo near the station, one to live in and one to rent out. Any cash she could come by was very welcome. Of the place where her daughter had caused such a scandal she had nothing but bad memories.

  Yoko heard the news and called me from Nogizaka. “We’re losing the Oiwake cottage …,” she said, her voice trailing off, and then, probably thinking about the house in Chitose Funabashi, she corrected herself. “We’re losing the Oiwake cottage too.” I realized then that she hadn’t spoken the word “Oiwake” in years. She never mentioned Taro.

  Around the end of January I had a phone call from Natsue. The papers had been drawn up and the deal would be concluded by the end of February, when the property would be handed over. The purchaser would probably tear the cottage down eventually, so there was no need to tidy it up inside, but the real estate agent had told her to remove anything she wanted before then. She had no intention of going all the way to Oiwake in the middle of winter. She had already taken out the things she wanted, things of any value, and as she was about to move from a house into an apartment that was significantly smaller, she certainly didn’t want anything else. If the snow wasn’t too deep, would I mind going in for a last look around? I was welcome to keep anything that looked useful. Big pieces of furniture could be left, but any small, personal items—the sort of thing it would be awkward to let strangers see—she would like me to dispose of. She had no idea I had been going there twice a year to give the place an airing.