The next day I was able to leave Karuizawa early and stopped in on my way home, half expecting him to be out, but the car was still parked there and the porch light was switched on. Once again he stepped out to greet me, showing no sign of restlessness. When I sat down at the table with a cup of hot green tea in front of me, he told me matter-of-factly that after years of living overseas, sitting and sleeping on the tatami floor had become a bit much for him and so he’d decided to use Takero’s old study, which had a built-in wooden bed in one corner. He had laid out the futon there the night before, he said. I got up to have a look, curious to see how he had set things up. Sure enough, there on top of the wooden frame was Takero’s striped futon, and on the desk opposite were some papers in English, with shirts from the cleaner’s stacked in their clear plastic wrapping on the bookshelf overhead. For a second I felt as if Yoko’s father was there in the cottage, before realizing afresh that Taro had finally come back.
I was anxious to settle money matters first, so as soon as I was back at the table I showed him a notebook where I’d kept a neat record of how the five million yen from Nakada Associates had been used to open an account in his name, with withdrawals in such-and-such amounts. He gave the figures only a brief glance before talking about something else. On a daytime walk, he said, he had found that within a two-kilometer radius, twenty-one new cottages had been built in fifteen years, which worked out to an average of 1.4 per year; at that rate the area would soon be more crowded than an American suburb, although plenty of the houses were empty. Again, he didn’t once mention Yoko’s name.
When I stopped by the next day, he was out on the porch repainting the rattan furniture white. He seemed so plainly to be killing time that I couldn’t help asking, “What do you do for dinner?”
“Go out to eat.”
Yes, but when was he going to get in touch with Yoko? I was on tenterhooks. As if to put me off, he again brought up an unrelated topic. Lunch he fixed himself, but the compressor in that old refrigerator wasn’t working. Nothing got cold.
Time went by in this fashion until there were only two nights left. Yoko and Masayuki usually went out together, whether for walks or to do the shopping, but there was nothing to stop her from going out alone. If Taro would just get word to her, he could see her in some way. He wanted me to make the initial contact, I supposed, and I was waiting for him to bring the subject up—or rather I was even trying in roundabout ways to draw it out of him, but he said nothing.
That night, knowing he only had two nights left, I took the plunge myself as I toyed with my teacup.
“Taro, you’re leaving the day after tomorrow, aren’t you?” It would be too awful if he went back to America like this. “Just what are you planning to do?” I looked him straight in the eye, trying to pin him down. Even without hearing Yoko’s name, he knew what I meant and looked away.
“Why are you being such a damn coward?”
He still looked away.
“Why?” I said again.
As I watched, his cheeks went rigid. The skin under his eyes twitched. If this were the old Taro, he would soon be in tears, I thought, but in the course of fifteen years—fifteen difficult years—the poor man had probably forgotten how to cry. All he could do was sit tight-lipped under the light.
As the silence dragged on for one minute, then two, then three, I felt something shift inside me, as if he had made some unspoken appeal.
Before I knew what I was doing, I went around to the other side of the table, crouched down beside his chair, and gently laid my left hand on the small of his back. My other hand I put on his knee. Then slowly, soothingly, I began to stroke him. It was like holding a crying child in my arms, yet somehow I was the one crying, unable to keep back the tears. Taro didn’t resist, but held strangely still. For a while I kept on silently stroking him, and as the warmth of my hands conveyed itself to him, little by little he eased up and began to talk in low snatches. I heard for the first time that he had been trying various approaches on his own.
Twice he had telephoned. Both times she had picked up the phone, but when he heard her say, “The Shigemitsu residence,” in a slightly affected voice, he had hung up, unable to speak. Every day he drove quietly around the two villas, hoping she would come outside, but she never did. Time and again he had started to write to her, but it was fifteen years since he had written anything in Japanese, so it wasn’t easy, and anyway, he had no idea what to say. Besides, sending a signed letter might cause her trouble, something he wished to avoid at all costs. The idea of sending an anonymous letter was so pitiful that the urge to write had died away.
For some reason he felt he couldn’t ask me to act as a go-between—that itself weighed heavily on me and made me sadder still. Not that I wanted to do it. There were Yoko’s husband Masayuki and their daughter, Miki, to consider, not to mention what others might think if they ever found out. But just imagining how Taro would feel if he went back to the United States without ever contacting Yoko nearly drove me to distraction. In Karuizawa the next day I did my work mechanically, following Yoko’s movements out of the corner of my eye. Finally, at dusk I made up my mind.
I had seen Yoko in an apron in our house a little while earlier. I asked Natsue, who was curled on the sofa in the parlor reading an old novel, where she was. “She’s in the attic making up the beds for Yuko and her children. Taking her time about it too, I must say.” Yuko would be getting in from San Francisco in a couple of days’ time with her girl and boy, Naomi and Ken, and Yoko was busy getting things ready for them. The Saegusa villa had been enlarged and had wings added on as the family grew, but Yuko and her family came only once every two or three years and stayed for no more than a couple of weeks, so they slept in the attic, in the former maids’ rooms.
I climbed the steep attic stairs and found all three white doors on the corridor standing ajar. One by one I checked the rooms, and in the last one, at the east end, I found Yoko sitting on the bed holding a pillow half stuffed into a pillowcase, looking absently out the window at the sky.
“Oh, hello, Fumiko. Are you going home now?”
By then in her early thirties, she had filled out and was finally losing her girlish looks, becoming more matronly, but perhaps because she was sitting in her old room she looked quite childlike to me and I couldn’t help talking to her as if she were still a little girl.
“What were you doing, sweetie?”
“Remembering when I was small.”
“Any time special?” I asked, wondering if she’d been remembering the days she spent with Taro.
“Back when I was really small. The first time you ever came here. That’s about my first real memory, you know.”
I too had vivid memories of the first summer I had ever spent in this villa. As I kept coming back summer after summer, over the years it grew increasingly difficult to sort out what had happened when. Events overlapped in my mind, memories were tangled. But that first summer was special. I could remember exactly what Yoko had looked like, lying in bed in this room with a white bandage around her head and a sullen look on her face.
She turned back to the window. “The morning sun shines in here through cracks in the blinds, but it’s completely different from the way it came through the rain shutters in the old house in Chitose Funabashi. Whenever I woke up here it always used to amaze me.”
She gave the pillow a smart pat and stood up, then walked over to the southern window and looked down at the garden below with a little smile. I moved next to her, and side by side we watched the three little girls at play.
“I was younger then than Miki is now.”
Her daughter, Miki, was in the second grade. To make up for her being an only child, they had decided to send her to Seijo Academy, where she’d become fast friends with the two little girls who were Harue’s granddaughters and her own second cousins. Harue had five grandchildren in all, Mari’s two boys and a girl and Eri’s boy and girl. Adding Miki to the mix meant there were three girl
s, so the “three sisters” tradition continued in the third generation, at least in some form. In Karuizawa Yoko spent a good deal of time at the Saegusa villa during the daytime, partly because her mother was always asking her help with every little thing, but also because Miki was always playing with her cousins. By coincidence, all three were the same age.
Miki’s laughter sounded especially shrill. Seen from above, the girls were hard to tell apart at first since they were all the same size, but Miki was the most active of the three and soon stood out. Yoko followed her around with her eyes, delight on her face.
That little girl was fortunate in every possible respect. To begin with, she was the Shigemitsu heir, which naturally gave her a certain prestige in everyone’s eyes. Yayoi and Masao of course doted on her as their only grandchild. And Natsue, being Natsue, fussed endlessly over the girl, her one grandchild in Japan. Not only that, Miki luckily took after her father but also for some reason closely resembled her maternal grandmother, Natsue. This meant she had the “Hirano face,” a synonym for beauty, and was the prettiest of the three little girls. Even Harue, with all her prejudices, seemed partial to Miki, favoring her over the offspring of her two sons-in-law, neither of whom she had ever cared for much. With every advantage on her side, it only stood to reason that Miki should be growing up in a manner quite different from what her mother had experienced as a child, always looked down on and left out of things.
“Time for her to put on a sweater,” murmured Yoko.
For once there were boys playing down there too. The three of them were older, so they ignored their little sisters and were yelling themselves hoarse, taking turns as pitcher, batter, and catcher. They had staked out the lion’s share of the area. I was a bit surprised to find myself annoyed that the Karuizawa garden we all cherished was being treated like an ordinary schoolyard.
“Did you want something?” Yoko turned and looked at me standing next to her, as if suddenly remembering I was there.
I shook my head. “Not really. The attic door was open so I just came up for a look around.”
No need for me to go out of my way to bring the two of them together, I thought. She obviously couldn’t have forgotten Taro, but her life without him was peaceful. Why muddy the waters? If Taro intended to invade her life, I decided, he would just have to do it on his own.
THAT RESOLUTION WAS shaken by my visit to Oiwake later that day. Hearing me come in, Taro emerged from the study. One look at his face and I felt myself go pale. My bringing up the subject the night before must have unleashed emotions he had been holding in check. He looked as if he had been through hell.
“Oh, Taro!” I said, in shock.
Overnight his face had become hollower, with dark circles under the eyes. Half in tears, I had to ask: “What are you going to do? Go back to America without seeing her?”
“Yeah, there’s nothing else I can do …”
“What will you do with the cottage?”
“Leave it. I might come back again someday.”
“Someday? What in the world is wrong with you?”
“Yeah, well …”
He looked away, breathing heavily, his chest moving. Even after doing so well in America, he must have wavered for ages before seeing Takero’s obituary and deciding to come back to Japan. That much I had guessed, but never did I imagine that when he had finally made the journey back he would be so scared of meeting Yoko again. His dread that their past together was truly over and done with outweighed his need to see her.
Abruptly I said, “I’ll call her for you.”
He showed a sudden eagerness, but only for a moment. Holding his breath, he stared at me. He kept on staring agog as I walked over to the telephone and punched the number.
“The Shigemitsu residence.”
“Yoko? Is that you? It’s Fumiko.”
“Oh, hello, Fumiko. What is it? Did you forget something?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. Just then my eyes met Taro’s. After holding my gaze a moment he turned and disappeared down the dimly lit corridor. I heard the study door close. I looked back at the porch, training my eyes on the gathering dusk beyond the screen door as I spoke. “I have a surprise for you.”
“A surprise? What is it?” she asked, her voice alert. As I hesitated, she repeated, “What kind of a surprise?”
“Taro is at the Oiwake cottage right now.”
For a moment she was speechless.
“Our Oiwake cottage?” She seemed confused.
“Yes.”
“Alone?”
Strange question. “Yes,” I said, then added, “I’m here with him for the moment.”
Her reply was unexpectedly composed. “I’ll be right there. I’ll leave now. I’ll just tell Masayuki and be right over.”
“What about dinner?”
“He’ll cover for me. Anyway, I’m on my way.”
I knocked on the study door and opened it. The back of Taro’s white shirt floated up in the gloom. He was sitting at the desk, looking outside. The atmosphere in the room was perfectly still.
“Yoko is coming over.”
He didn’t move
“I’m off, then,” I said to his white back.
Just as I turned to leave, the swivel chair spun around and he called out, “Fumiko. Stay here till she comes. Stay … or I can’t cope.” He looked frantic.
As I stood there, he said again, “Please stay …”
His face was ashen, there’s no other word for it. It must have taken nerve for him to get where he was at work, yet here he hadn’t the courage to see Yoko alone. He had never been one to lean on other people for anything, so the request was all the more pathetic. I remained motionless in the doorway, dismayed by the sight of him. Still, whether it was pity or compassion, that all-too-familiar feeling came over me again—the same feeling I’d had when I used to imagine what was going through the mind of the small boy he’d been.
“Has she changed?” he asked in a low voice, still white-faced.
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t think she had changed so much that she no longer cared for him, and yet changed she certainly had. But I did not want to be the one to tell him so.
“Has marriage changed her?” The look in his upturned eyes was insistent.
“Marriage can’t help changing a person.”
“It didn’t change you.”
Unconnected to the present moment, the words echoed loudly inside me. I was silent, lost in my own emotions, and he seemed to misunderstand. With a painful groan he said, “So she has changed.” His face twisted. “Yoko’s not the same.”
“She’ll be here any minute, so judge for yourself,” I said flatly, then went back down the corridor, turned on the porch light, and sat down again at the table. Taro didn’t come out of the study. I couldn’t hear him stir. No doubt he had swiveled back to stare out the window at the gathering darkness.
About half an hour later I saw car lights approaching down the lane. As I got up and went to the screen door, a car door slammed shut. The movement of headlight beams showed what looked like a taxi backing up, turning, and driving off. Yoko came up the steps, kicked off her shoes impatiently, and opened the screen door.
“You came by taxi?” I asked.
“Yes, Masayuki said it wasn’t safe to drive over alone at night when I’m this worked up.” Flushed with agitation, she answered absently, scanning the room. If Taro’s inability to face Yoko alone was absurd, Masayuki’s cautious insistence that his wife take a taxi to see a former lover was no less so. Just then Taro appeared silently from the hallway.
“Taro!” Yoko’s voice rang out sharply. The night air swayed, and her hair, which lately she’d worn nicely smoothed down, seemed to fly out in all directions. “You got married, didn’t you!”
She was glaring at him with the fury of a she-demon. Her breathing was rough and she stood with her hands pressed against her heart, as if she might keel over. Taro looked at her in astonishment. Apparently,
her words made no sense to him.
“You did get married, I know it!”
He came to his senses and answered quietly: “No.”
“You didn’t?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Not ever?”
“Never.”
“Liar!”
“I’m not lying.”
She tilted her head to one side and narrowed her eyes suspiciously before asking in a slightly calmer voice, “But you had a girlfriend?”
“No.”
“You’re telling me you never had a girl?”
“I never did.”
“Not even one?” Her eyes slowly widened.
“Not even one.”
“You liar! I know that’s a lie!” She was shouting again, but Taro seemed in raptures. “You mean it?”
“I mean it.”
He answered her calmly, an unmistakable smile on his lips. His smile seemed not to register on Yoko, who kept staring at him in deadly earnest.
“So you were miserable the whole time?”
“The whole time.”
“Oh, yes? How miserable were you? Enough to die?”
“Yes. I was heartbroken.” He said this glowing with delight.
“Ah, but you didn’t die, did you! You came whimpering back, alive as ever!”
“To see you again …” His face clouded for a moment. “I wanted to see you, Yoko, and find out if there really was nothing worth living for.”
“I see.” Perhaps she was satisfied, for her breathing gradually got quieter. She stared at him. I thought she was calming down at last, when all of a sudden she blazed up again: “Even so, I’ll never forgive you!”
“What for? …”
As she took a step back, he moved forward. She retreated further, stopping when her bare heel came up against the threshold.
“For going off that night and leaving me, and never coming back …”
Fifteen years had gone by, but the pain of that night seemed to revive in her as if it had been only days ago. It was as if she had spent every night of those intervening years reliving it, staring out into the darkness.
A True Novel Page 54