LESS THAN A week after Natsue’s call, the phone rang at about ten-thirty in the morning in my house in Miyota. My daughter-in-law handed me the receiver with a puzzled look, and a voice in my ear said, “It’s me, Taro.”
“Taro …?” I said, half in doubt.
“Yeah, it’s me.”
I hadn’t heard that voice in fifteen years, but it had the same diffident tone to it as when he was a child.
“Where are you?”
“Karuizawa.”
Shocked that he was so close by, I felt the blood drain from my head. The hand holding the receiver started to tremble, but with my daughter-in-law watching I controlled myself, though hardly knowing what I was doing.
He was staying at the Prince Hotel, he said.
Afraid of my voice sounding too shaken, I said nothing. He asked if I could join him there for lunch, or if I wasn’t free then perhaps dinner that evening or lunch the next day. At any rate he hoped I would come out to see him at least once. His Japanese sounded a little awkward.
“I’ll come now,” I managed to reply.
“Is noon all right? Or shall we make it a little later, around one?”
“One o’clock would be fine.”
I hung up and turned to stare hollow-eyed at my daughter-in-law, standing there with her head cocked innocently to one side. I told her I was going to the Prince Hotel to meet an old friend, someone from the family I’d served during my Tokyo days. I kept my voice as expressionless as possible. Since the birth of her second child, she’d become a full-time mother, thus freeing me from the responsibility of babysitting and letting me go out whenever I pleased. I felt wobbly. My knees were weak, my head muddled. I couldn’t think straight. I forced my uncooperative body into gear and got ready to leave, but putting on makeup, doing my hair, and choosing what to wear took twice as long as usual. I’d lived so long in the country, with so few opportunities to go anywhere, that my sense of fashion was not what it used to be. Harue’s words rang in my ears as I dithered: “Common people hardly ever dress up, so when they do, they go overboard and end up looking like bar girls, all dolled up with ringlets and a ton of accessories.” The last time I’d seen Taro, I’d been thirty; I was now forty-five. Go for a quiet, understated look, I told myself, surprised by my own intensity as I peered into old Mrs. Utagawa’s full-length mirror for a final inspection. Memories of the nonstop quarreling Taro and I used to do came back to me as if it had been yesterday or a phantom scene from another life. Such an urge to see him filled every corner of me that I could hardly believe I had sworn never to set eyes on him again.
It was just one o’clock when I drove up to the hotel. A man in a smart dark suit—Taro—was seated on a sofa in the lobby. He seemed to recognize me instantly too, getting swiftly to his feet. It wasn’t only female vanity that made me pray that he wouldn’t be disappointed or feel awkward around me, that I wouldn’t look painfully old. As to what feelings he may have had on his return to Japan, I had no idea, but I did not want to ruin whatever memories connected him to his past. He’d made a reservation, he said. When we entered the hotel restaurant he held the door for me, ushering me through in a manner I’d never seen anywhere but in foreign movies. Although I seemed to make him a bit nervous, he was completely at ease with the headwaiter, who bowed politely and led us to a corner table marked “Reserved.” His way of walking across the plush carpet, sitting in the chair, and taking the menu was flowing and natural. That alone showed how far he had come in the world.
When he sat down across from me, I had my first good look at him. He gave an impression of intense vitality. It seemed incredible that he had once been a boy whose snotty nose I used to wipe. Never in all my life had I imagined dining in such a place, face-to-face with a man who looked like this.
“Is this your first trip back?” I said, to start the conversation.
“Second.” As if embarrassed, he opened the menu and studied it.
“When was the first?”
“I came in November.”
“Last year?”
“Mm-hm.”
“On business?”
“No.”
He looked up. Then for the first time he in turn looked me full in the face, his eyes roaming from my hairline to my throat as if to assess how much I had aged. I didn’t know whether to be relieved that I was wearing a gray suit that was on the sedate side or to wish I’d chosen something a bit more daring.
“I went to Mrs. Utagawa’s grave first thing,” he told me. “Maybe the one person who’d have been pleased to see me back.”
He said this with a wry smile, and I couldn’t help joining in. It was true: the old lady was the one person he might have counted on to welcome him wholeheartedly after an absence of fifteen years.
“I thought her grave at least would be the same, but it was all different …”
“Her son died.” When Takero died, the ancestral graves and that of old Mrs. Utagawa had finally been combined into one family grave.
“I know,” he said, glancing at me.
“You knew that?”
Yes, he said: he’d read his obituary in a Japanese newspaper.
The waiter came to ask if we’d like something to drink before lunch, and Taro waved his left hand at me, urging me to order. Since it wouldn’t really do for a wife to go home with the smell of alcohol on her breath, I asked for water, and so did he.
“Aren’t you going to have a drink?” I asked, memories of the days when he used to drain bottles of shochu vivid in my mind.
Again he looked down at the menu before saying, “I’m on the wagon.”
“Since when?”
“Since sailing across the Pacific.”
“Fifteen years ago?”
“Yes, ma’ am.”
“You haven’t had a drink in all that time?”
He shook his head, eyes still on the menu.
“Really?”
“Not a drop.”
“Well, you certainly drank enough for a lifetime in those six months.”
For a while we were silent. When I spoke again, my tone was surprisingly caustic.
“So you reformed.”
Taro said nothing, his eyes still cast down.
“Good for you.”
If he’d done it out of shame over those months of hard drinking in my apartment, then was that whole period something he wanted to forget completely, to pretend never happened? As if my cynical tone had made him stiffen, he turned a page of the menu and answered in a cheerless voice, “When I find out there’s no point in life, that’s when I’ll start up again.”
“Oh, I see.” Impulsively, I added, “Life has no point to it anyway, and you know it.”
He looked up in mild surprise and studied me with an expression that was hard to read. Here I’d rushed over after hearing he was back, intending to give him a warm welcome … Under his scrutiny, I felt ashamed of failing to be pleasant.
There was a long pause during which the waiter came to take our orders. After he left, it was Taro’s turn to ask a question.
“How’s marriage?”
“Mine, you mean?”
He looked ruffled for a moment, then nodded.
“Fine, thank you.”
“A good husband this time?”
“Yes, a good husband.”
I looked away. Not because I was lying but because his probing eyes made me uncomfortable.
“I got rich,” he said after a pause.
“I know.” I laughed. “You’re a big name now.”
“Hardly.” The old, gloomy look I’d seen so many times before came faintly back into his eyes. “I was such a money-grubber, I’m still an uneducated boor.” Another searching look. “Fumiko, is there anything you want?” He said this with his eyes slightly upturned. “Anything money can buy, I mean.”
“No …”
Most of the time I lived from day to day thinking, “If only we had a bit more cash …,” but that feeling had vanished. When he p
ut the question to me like that, I knew at once that the only things people ever really want are the things money can’t buy.
“Nothing?”
“Not a thing,” I said, then added: “The moon. That’s what I want. The moon.” I spoke the cliché for the fun of it, but even to my ears it didn’t sound funny.
Taro looked straight at me before looking down at the tabletop. Then he said, “I’m the one who bought the Oiwake place.”
How can I describe my reaction? I thought I knew how dogged he was, how annoyingly obstinate, but perhaps in the fifteen years since I’d seen him last, my knowledge of him had dimmed. I felt my face turn pale.
“That was you, Taro?”
“Yeah, it was me.”
He answered with a casualness that was perhaps deliberate, then looked up and added an explanation. “I used a Japanese company as a broker so Natsue wouldn’t know. It would’ve attracted too much attention if a foreign company had gone after a place like that.”
On reading in a Japanese paper that Takero Utagawa was dead, he’d had a sudden impulse to buy the Oiwake cottage, he said. The purpose of his trip to Japan the previous November had been to look up the real estate agency and have them contact my family in Saku. That’s how he found out I was married and living in Miyota.
“Did Natsue say anything?” He asked this nonchalantly, as if to cool off my reaction.
“About what?”
“About the cottage.”
“She did call last week, as a matter of fact.”
As I gave him the gist of the phone call, a faint smile came to his face. The reason he’d tried to push through the sale so the transfer would take place in midwinter was that he figured that Natsue, always the laziest of the three sisters, would be unlikely to come to freezing Nagano at that time of year and would instead contact me with instructions over what still remained inside the house. He’d worked it all out ahead of time. His ability to see several moves ahead was now combined with an adult’s ability to take action. There was something unnerving about it.
“Actually, I have a favor to ask of you, Fumiko,” he said rather formally. I felt my face stiffen.
“I want you to leave the place just the way it is.”
I looked at him, deflated. His strong, masculine face was completely serious.
“Don’t throw anything away, just leave everything the way it used to be for when I take over.”
His determination to keep everything the same had also led him to negotiate the purchase of the lots behind, on either side, in front, and diagonally across from the cottage. It seemed crazy to me.
“What are you going to do with it?”
“Thought I’d come back for a couple of weeks in the summertime and use it.”
“Every year?”
“Maybe.”
“Use it for what?” I asked, knowing there was no point in asking.
“I’ve never had a real vacation …”
“Yes, but that place is in no condition to use. I air it out once in a while, but the futons and the quilts were too much bother, so I never touched them once in fifteen years. I never swept the floors, either.” Other emotions swelled in me, but these details were all that came out. “It’s just not usable,” I said firmly, though I knew it was a waste of breath.
“It’ll be fine. I’ll fix it up as I go along.”
He stared into space. A vision rose in my mind of this man, who handled more money daily than I would see in my lifetime, hanging out damp, moldy bedding to air and sweeping frayed tatami mats in the little highland cottage. He was always good at working with his hands; he probably would look after the place himself well enough, however ridiculous the whole undertaking was.
After a moment I said, “When will you be back this summer?”
“Don’t know yet.”
“I’ll fix it up so you can use it by summertime.”
His eyes widened. “That’s not why I got in touch, Fumiko. I just wanted you to leave it as it is.”
“It’s all right. I’ll clean it up for you.”
After a short pause he said uncertainly, “You will?…”
“I’ll do my best to see everything is just the way it used to be.”
Even as a child he had never been able to say thank you at the right moment, nor did he now. He merely said in a slightly more relaxed voice, “When I came back to Japan before, I went to Chitose Funabashi.”
I said nothing.
“Now there are three little houses crowded together on the old plot, and close by is a big highway, Ring Road 8 I think it’s called. It’s all changed. I tell you, Japan is one scary place, the way things change.”
Noticing my distracted expression, he fell silent. He might be feeling relieved, thinking we were reconciled, but I was filled with conflicting emotions. I already regretted having offered to do his cleaning, as if he and I were accomplices—though in what crime, I couldn’t have said.
The meal had ended and coffee was served when Taro reached inside the breast pocket of his suit jacket and produced a bulky envelope. It was a horizontal, Western-style envelope; he mustn’t have had any Japanese-style ones on hand.
“Here.”
He held it out, looking almost angry. Thinking it was a letter to Yoko, I hesitated, and he thrust it at me again till it almost touched my chest. Though I had known it would come to this in the end, now that it had happened I felt too weary to react.
“Here,” he repeated, still thrusting the envelope at me.
I waited a full beat before taking it with an audible sigh. It was strangely hefty, almost as if he had handed me a bar of lead. I turned it over, immediately seeing through the unsealed flap that it contained a wad of crisp new ten-thousand-yen bills.
“What’s this?”
“Well, you know …”
“What is this for?”
“Look, I don’t know what I’m supposed to say, all right?” He slowly reddened.
“How can you be so rude!”
I might have turned red too. I felt a rush of anger. After all I had done for him out of pity, my heart going out to him, now that he was rich he wanted to repay my sympathy with money? I thought of the time I’d scrubbed his grimy little body in the Utagawa bathroom; the time he’d shown up on the doorstep of my apartment looking desperate, in work clothes; the time I’d sat and bowed my head down to the tatami before a grudging Uncle Genji, begging him to help Taro go abroad. Scene after scene from the past flickered through my mind. The next thing I knew, I had flung the envelope back at him. For once I’d given vent physically to my anger—not only anger at Taro, but also an unfocused resentment that I had kept pent up inside me all those years.
“What am I supposed to do?”
He sounded pained. The envelope had landed on the table, upsetting a small espresso cup that fortunately was empty.
There was a brief silence. Then he said in a low, choked voice, staring distractedly at the overturned cup, “How can I thank you in a way that wouldn’t be rude?”
“You can’t!” I retorted. “You can’t ever thank me in a way that wouldn’t be rude. Not ever in your whole life. That’s your comeuppance.”
He stared at me, his shoulders heaving slightly. Under the surface of the sterling young man he’d become I saw the face of a much younger Taro, eyes tightened as if he might start crying. After fifteen years of hard work crowned with brilliant success, he had returned to Japan without a tickertape parade in his hometown or a family to rejoice with him. Once he had visited old Mrs. Utagawa’s grave, the best he could hope for was to come and see me. And here I didn’t even treat him properly, but just heaped sarcasm on him.
I reached out, picked up the envelope, and removed two bills from the wad bound in white tape.
“My housecleaning fee.”
“Thank you.”
He took the envelope I handed him and pulled out another bill, then another and another and another until he’d counted out eight in all and was holding them
out to me. “Please take this,” he said with a look of such entreaty that I gave in. He thanked me again; and that’s how Taro and I entered into our strange and ambiguous employer—employee relationship.
That day of our reunion, we went the whole time without once mentioning Yoko’s name.
FUMIKO’S EYES WANDERED several times to the old-fashioned wall clock before she announced, “Time’s up.” She bent her head back slightly as if easing something off. “I’m almost done, but the rest will have to wait for another time.”
In less than an hour she was supposed to pick up Taro Azuma at Middle Karuizawa Station, where he was arriving on the last train from Ueno.
She bent her head back again, then straightened up and let out a long sigh as she looked at the dinner table.
Lit by a dim yellow bulb, the tabletop looked suddenly messy to Yusuke too, crowded with the remains of their makeshift meal: coffee cups, teacups, and small plates; serving dishes that held corncobs and empty steamed soybean pods; plates with bits of smoked salmon, cheese, and pickles scattered on them; slices of lemon and crusts of bread. While it was still light outside they’d sat out on the porch where the insistent sound of the cicadas echoed in his ears as he listened to her talk. When daylight faded and the cicadas quieted down, the mosquitoes then became unbearable and so they had moved indoors, where he kept on listening. The two of them had eaten and drunk whatever she found in the refrigerator, making do.
They quickly cleared the table and went outside to another bright moonlit night.
When Yusuke brought his bicycle around to the gate with its two wooden posts driven into the ground, Fumiko came out that far to see him off. Her purse was in her left hand and car keys dangled from the other.
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