“I waited and waited for you.” Slowly she was giving way to tears. “Even afterward. I waited, and waited, and waited …” Her face scrunched up, making her look even more like the little girl she had once been. “For years I waited for you.”
With a wail, she turned and ran barefoot out onto the porch and down the steps. Taro quickly started after her, but the low table was in his way, and by the time he reached the porch she must have already gone out through the gate. I had been standing transfixed, watching the two of them, but after a minute I too slipped on my sandals and went out.
Looking up the road from beside the gate, I saw them together in the moonlight.
Taro had fallen to his knees. I thought perhaps he was going to lay his forehead flat on the ground and apologize, the way he had when they were small, but instead he reached out with both arms, wrapped them around her knees, and abruptly lifted her off the ground and swung her over his shoulder. When he came through the wooden posts I could see her bent double over his shoulder, her arms and head dangling limply down his back. Before, she’d been excited and shrill; now she was like a dead woman.
He bent down and laid her gently in a rattan chair. She slumped back and watched vacantly as he wiped the dirt from the soles of her feet. A trace of resentment flickered in her eyes. After a while she brushed his hand away impatiently. Then she slid off the chair and sat flat on the floor, knees together and legs splayed as she once used to do, her eyes still vacant as she took his hand and began to speak almost in a trance.
“Is it really true that you’re not married?”
She ticked off the fingers of one hand, then the other, as if addressing the question to them. She might have been playing a game of “he loves me, he loves me not,” with fingers instead of petals. Starting with the little finger, she would work her way to the thumb of one hand, then do the same with the other before starting all over again. Repeating this seemed to help her regain possession of herself.
“Don’t work with your hands much anymore, do you?” She sounded a bit shy, her voice now normal. “And you really never had a girlfriend?” She slid her hands up and touched his arm through the sleeve of his shirt, pressing it with all ten fingers as if she could scarcely believe she was doing it.
“No, I never did.”
“Truly?”
“Really and truly.”
She sighed with contentment and then, moving her legs to one side, lay her head in Taro’s lap and quietly began to cry. Taro, sitting cross-legged, looked down at her, not moving a muscle. After a minute he closed his eyes and leaned forward slightly, inhaling deeply—perhaps checking that the smell of her neck was the same as in years past.
The ceiling lamp surrounded the two of them in a circle of light.
I had always known that Yoko still cared for Taro even after she married Masayuki, but until I saw her with him that night, I never realized how much. Or realized, I should say, how her feelings for him had steadily deepened after he left her that time. But until I saw what happened next, I never knew, either, how deeply she had come to love Masayuki as well.
Thinking that my presence couldn’t possibly be wanted anymore, I had just laid a hand on the screen door to leave when I saw headlights approach and stop in front of the cottage. It was Masayuki.
“There’s a car out front,” I said. My voice caught in my throat. I realized that I hadn’t spoken for quite a while.
Yoko quickly raised her head from Taro’s lap and said to herself, “Maybe it’s him.” She scrambled to her feet and came to stand beside me, looking outside. The car was parked in front of the gate with its headlights on. She opened the screen door without hesitation, put on her shoes properly this time, and ran down the steps, disappearing into the darkness. Left behind, with the object of all this happiness suddenly gone, Taro sat alone in the circle of light with a stupid look on his face.
From some distance away came a steady murmur of talking or crying. She did not come back. I sighed and sat down at the table again. Taro uncrossed his legs and stood up, then sat down on the rattan chair, as if he didn’t know what to do with himself. He was silent, and so was I. Finally, knowing that if I stayed out any later my family would worry, I told him I should be on my way, took my car keys out of my purse, and stood up. For the first time he looked me squarely in the face, but still said nothing. Outside, the car’s headlights were now turned off, but the car was visible in the light from the porch and the moon. Two figures were illuminated as well. Masayuki was leaning against the car with his forehead pillowed on both arms, crying. Wisps of his hair, which had never lost its brownish tint, had a bright golden sheen in the moonlight. Yoko had her arms wrapped tightly around him, clinging like a cicada to a tree, and she too was in tears. “I’ll never leave you … That could never happen … You know we’ll be together all our lives …” Through her sobbing came these broken snatches.
WHEN I WENT to Karuizawa the next day, Yoko wasn’t there, having gone out in the morning. Miki was playing with her cousins while Masayuki strolled restlessly around the yard. Yoko came back just before noon. Masayuki went out to meet her, greeting her warmly on the spot, and together they went for a walk, brushing shoulders and murmuring.
That evening, without a word to me, Taro flew back to New York from Tokyo’s Narita Airport.
OVER THE NEXT twelve months Taro visited Oiwake twice more, once in October and again in May. Both times, Yoko left her daughter, Miki, in Masayuki’s care and made the trip up from Tokyo. Whether they slept together, I have no idea. All I could tell was that Taro seemed unwilling to have me see the two of them there. I had no desire to see them together anyway. When I went into the cottage after they left, I found innocent traces of their activities: they must have been to the antique shops in Komoro or somewhere, because the kitchen cupboards were full of bowls and plates that, to my eyes, looked less antique than just plain old; they had amused themselves with sparklers for old times’ sake, littering the ground with black threadlike cinders; and birdhouses hung from the branches again. I aired the rooms and while I was at it swept up the leaves and pulled weeds.
I told Taro to let me know if anything needed attention, but as he made no demands, I went ahead and arranged to make the cottage more habitable, getting the refrigerator fixed, for instance—although it turned out to be too old to salvage, so I bought a smallish new one instead. Toward the end of the year, to my surprise, I received notice that a payment of 600,000 yen had been deposited in my account for a year’s “cottage maintenance”—amounting to 50,000 yen per month. Once the cottage was set up, there had been precious little work for me to do. I considered sending back the money untouched but changed my mind, thinking it would probably only be an annoyance for Taro to have me make a fuss about a sum of money that meant nothing to him. I decided to save it for a rainy day.
THE NEXT SUMMER when I went to work in Karuizawa, I told the three sisters that Taro, the boy who had made a fortune in America, was actually behind the purchase of the Oiwake cottage. When he first returned to Japan, I explained, he had phoned me out of the blue from the Prince Hotel in Karuizawa, and that was the first I knew anything about it. Which wasn’t entirely untrue. But Taro’s call had come eighteen months earlier, and I personally had made the cottage ready for him, so it wasn’t the whole truth, either. I would have preferred to get by without telling the sisters anything, but if they happened to find out later, I did not want to have to pretend to be in the dark, so I’d decided to break the news.
They looked at first as if their hearts had stopped. Natsue’s shock was the most apparent, since she was the one who had been so quick to dispose of the property.
“No!” she shrieked, making a circle of her shapely, lipsticked mouth. “What could he possibly want with that old place!”
“I know what,” said Harue spitefully. “I’ll bet he just wanted to own something of the Utagawas’. Honestly, the thought of that boy’s vindictiveness gives me the chills.”
&nbs
p; “Or he wanted to own something that brought back childhood memories,” said Fuyue thoughtfully. But then she added, “Either way, that property is no great prize, if you ask me,” so you couldn’t tell if she was defending him or running him down. Her sisters chimed in.
“That’s certainly true. It’s in the middle of nowhere even for Oiwake.”
“So even if he did buy it, the price wasn’t all that much.”
“It’s a dinky plot of land.”
I don’t know why I did it—perhaps I was indignant at their stubborn failure to acknowledge just how rich and successful Taro really was—but I said something I probably had no business telling them.
“As a matter of fact,” I said, “he bought up quite a large parcel of land, including all the surrounding property. The lot behind, the ones on either side, and the ones facing it too.”
All three widened their big, round eyes and looked at each other.
“Is he that rich?” This honestly inquiring remark came from Fuyue.
“I don’t exactly know.”
“I said he was vindictive and that proves it,” Harue spat out. “Going to such ridiculous lengths. That just takes the cake.”
Natsue, as Yoko’s mother, seemed to realize that they couldn’t go on cutting up Taro forever. After a little pause, she bit her lip and looked up at me. “What about … does Yoko know?”
I wondered if she had any idea how much she looked like Yoko at such times. It was really quite funny.
“Yes, apparently.”
“She does? What if Masayuki finds out? What’s she going to do then?”
“Actually he seems to be aware of the situation too. I think she probably told him herself.”
“Wha-a-t!” Natsue gave another little shriek. “Heaven help us! This is exactly why I never took to that child. I can never fathom what she’s thinking.”
“But I don’t think her in-laws know,” I said quickly. “I believe Masayuki doesn’t want to cause them any unnecessary concern, so he probably won’t tell them.”
This last was pure conjecture on my part, but I said it to stop the Saegusa sisters from saying anything inappropriate to Yayoi, or at least to delay the blow. I don’t know how much they did tell her in the end. Harue, I suspect, would have dropped hints at every chance, but Yayoi never spoke about it directly to me.
A few days later, the three of them went all the way to Oiwake to have a look for themselves, Fuyue driving. After they came back, Harue said to me with an inquisitive look, “Judging from the outside, he means to use the cottage without rebuilding it, wouldn’t you say? But it does look as if perhaps it has been repaired.” She was flanked by her younger sisters, all three of them wearing the same inquisitive expression. They seemed to suspect me of involvement, but I pretended to know nothing about it. Periodically they would ask me leading questions about Taro, but I never took the bait. Their three faces would look back at me with dissatisfaction, though they refrained from probing further.
FROM THEN ON, Taro came regularly to Oiwake two or three times a year, staying a week or two each time. He avoided the summers, when everyone was in Karuizawa, mostly coming in late spring or in the fall. Yoko would go to meet him on the pretext of buying antiques as an interior designer. Her frequent absences in the past to look after her ailing father in Sapporo meant that fortunately Miki was used to having her mother disappear from time to time. Since the girl was allowed to go to the Shigemitsus in Seijo after school and spend a few nights next door to her cousins, she actually looked forward to those occasions. More often Taro went to Tokyo on business and met up with Yoko there. On rare occasions she took a flight abroad to see him. What was extraordinary was Masayuki’s reaction. Since I myself had played the role of go-between in reuniting Taro and Yoko, for a while I didn’t dare look him in the face. At some point, however, that reservation disappeared. Whether others noticed it or not, to me it was clear that he and Yoko were even more loving than before. It was as if, with Taro’s sudden reappearance, the three of them had taken off hand in hand, out of the fog and into a realm of blinding light.
AS FOR ME, every time Taro came to Oiwake it became customary for him to give me some sort of treat. He seemed to think it would be wrong to spend time only with Yoko, and since he was embarrassed to have me around when the two of them were together, he made a point of taking me out to dinner before she turned up in Oiwake or after she went back to Tokyo. The first place we went to was an Italian restaurant called Scorpione at the foot of Mount Hanare. I passed it on the road between Karuizawa and Miyota, so it was a familiar sight, but the small parking lot was always crammed with foreign cars that even I could tell were expensive makes, and the restaurant gave an impression of being out of the reach of us locals—which was why when Taro asked me if there was somewhere I would like to go, it immediately came to mind. That first night I felt intimidated and parked my minicar with its Nagano license plate on a back street, walking down the dark road to the restaurant. But people change with astonishing speed: after two or three visits, I felt thoroughly at ease there and began to think of branching out. We ate not only at the restaurants in the historic Mampei Hotel and the Kajimanomori Hotel, but also at the Chinese restaurant Eirin near Karuizawa station and the Japanese place, Daimasu, in Middle Karuizawa—in other words, at all the smartest, most desirable spots in town. We even ventured down to Komoro to eat slices of koi washed in cold water, a local delicacy. I tried to eat out with Taro in the daytime for my husband’s sake, but sometimes we went out at night. My husband was generous, though, and understood that I had connections with a world that wasn’t his; and when I put on a little makeup and went out the door dressed up, he saw me off without a word of complaint.
BAMBOO GROVE
With Taro I would talk about my family—my husband, our eldest son and his wife, our granddaughter Ami. He listened, managing to look as if he cared. I talked about the families in Karuizawa too. Yoko must have chattered about them as well, for he surprised me by knowing the names not just of Yuko’s children, Naomi and Ken, but also of Mari and Eri’s five. He told me about America in bits and pieces. At first when he worked as a chauffeur he had been amazed at the size of his employer’s house, but years later he was hobnobbing with investors from all over the country and no longer batted an eye at even the biggest mansions. His work consisted of finding investors in order to set up companies to manufacture new medical instruments, then selling them at a profit. He explained without expecting me to understand, so I only half listened. I was just impressed by the scale of his operations; he mentioned place-names from around the world. If it had been anybody but Taro, I would have dismissed half the talk as hot air.
“It’s a good thing you went to America, isn’t it?” I said to him one day when I was feeling ashamed of my vehement opposition at the time.
“Yes, it is.”
“What was the best part?”
He thought for a moment and then answered with a mean-looking smile. “Losing my hatred of Japan and the Japanese. Now I’m actually grateful.”
Back in the old days he had definitely felt deeply resentful, and even after crossing the Pacific he hadn’t been able to shake off certain grudges for quite a while. But over time he came to feel that, compared with other immigrants who’d arrived in America equally without resources, he was one of the lucky ones. Whatever hardships he might have endured as a child, he had still grown up in postwar Japan, free of famine or war. Not only that, once he was in America, his nationality had allowed him to ride the wave of Japanese economic growth by working for a Japanese company. So, in the end, he’d come to think he ought to feel grateful to the country.
That smile was still on his lips, but he sounded serious enough.
“So you’re glad to be Japanese?”
He didn’t answer the question.
A YEAR PASSED in the blink of an eye, then another and another. Maybe it was the change of life, but the stiffness in my shoulders got worse until finally I gave
up my sewing, which caused no inconvenience to anyone. Untroubled by any financial or emotional strains, my days passed peacefully from one season to the next. The town of Miyota became more and more developed, and the sight of butterflies in spring grew rarer, along with the trilling of insects in the autumn grasses. Only the sight of Mount Asama, peering out from between the surrounding hills, was unchanged. My life flowed on uneventfully, punctuated by Taro’s visits. I would happily have gone on living like this, except his generosity toward me made for unexpected changes.
It began with my husband’s sudden death.
It happened five years after Taro’s return, in January 1986, when we had been married seventeen years. One night he felt unwell on the toilet and called for me. As I was helping him back to the futon he felt faint, and then he was gone. He was only sixty-two. His blood pressure had been high, but after his sixtieth birthday he had stopped helping our daughter-in-law’s family in their pickle business and spent his time in a leisurely way tending a vegetable patch the size of a postage stamp. I never dreamed he would have a stroke.
His death completely changed my status in the family. To put it bluntly, I had no real place in it any longer. Even in retirement, my husband had remained head of the household. When the eldest boy took his place, he and his wife naturally made all the decisions. They both addressed me as “Mother” and treated me with respect, but he was already an adolescent when I married into the family, and I had never been a mother to him in any real way. His wife was able to devote all her time to their three small children, and showed no sign of needing a helping hand. Still, I couldn’t simply lounge around the sitting room all day reading, which I’d been too discreet to do after marrying. A woman’s lot is never easy.
I began to think that, once the forty-ninth-day memorial service was over, I would be more comfortable moving out to a small place close by where I could live on my own. It didn’t take me long to come up with the idea of staying in the Oiwake cottage as a caretaker. I had been involved with that cottage from the start, doing everything from helping with the purchase of the land to going over alone to give it an airing; it was the one place on earth in which I felt I had a small stake. During the cold winter months from December to March, as well as the times when Taro and Yoko came, I could stay in my husband’s house. And thanks to the long years he’d put in at the town hall, I had a small monthly widow’s pension, plus savings that I could use as I pleased. Several years back, after my husband received his retirement bonus, when it came time to rebuild the house our eldest son had applied for a generous loan, so part of that bonus had remained unspent—and with my husband gone, that money now belonged to me. There were also the yearly payments of 600,000 yen for “cottage maintenance” that I had let accumulate. As long as I didn’t have to pay any rent, I could live comfortably on what I had.
A True Novel Page 55