“I don’t know, I think it’s the times.” I never thought about such things; the words just popped out of my mouth.
“If that’s true, it’s sad …” Yoko paused in her folding, looking gloomy.
The Saegusa family that I first encountered with Uncle Genji was on the way out. Harue’s daughters ended up becoming several times more ordinary than she was; as for her granddaughters, as Harue herself declared, they were indeed “no different” from the mobs of girls you see on the streets of Tokyo. When Miki was little, I thought she would probably outshine her mother, but as she entered adolescence, though she was still the most energetic of them, there was little to choose between her and Mari’s and Eri’s daughters. I think my granddaughter Ami showed more promise, perhaps because she was never spoiled. Harue’s grandsons were pleasant enough, in the way of privileged young men brought up to be “cool” and carefree, but since many young men are brought up nowadays to be “cool” and carefree, it could hardly make them stand out.
The only person outspokenly critical of the third generation was Fuyue, who never married and had no children or grandchildren of her own.
“I don’t know,” she told me, “they just seem to get smaller and smaller. Only their bodies are big.”
“How true.” It was only around Fuyue that I could be so unguarded.
“They’re Nietzsche’s ‘small people.’ ”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“It’s from Thus Spake Zarathustra, which I read when I was studying Wagnerian opera. ‘Small people’ are small to begin with and become even smaller and lazier, less capable of understanding greatness. People doomed to extinction.” She went on with apparent enjoyment, “They’re her grandchildren, so in the end Harue doesn’t want to write them off. She’ll stand up for them, say how decent and sweet they are, when they haven’t got either brains or backbone. But nowadays even children with brains have no backbone anyway, so it’s all the same in the end …”
Was she right? Are young people today of a lesser breed than before, or do they just seem that way to people like us, without children of our own? I suppose I’ll never know the answer.
“Anyway, they’re all shallow.”
She said this with an odd kind of satisfaction.
CONSTRUCTION WORK ON the Long Island house ended in the autumn of that year. Yoko went to see the finished product in December. She stayed for around ten days and came back to Tokyo in the middle of the month—when the sound of “Jingle Bells” on every corner is at its most insistent—along with Taro, who had business in the city. Too excited to take a rest, she came rushing over to my apartment. Windrush was just wonderful, she said, beyond her wildest dreams. When you came through the front door, there was a high-ceilinged entrance hall, open all the way to the third floor. On the first floor, besides a drawing room, large dining room, small dining room, and so on, there was also a morning room where the eastern sun flooded in, a billiards room, and a library with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves covering the walls. A grand staircase led to the upper floors, with countless bedrooms. If you stepped outside and walked away from the sea, there in the middle of a Japanese garden was a teahouse, and going in the other direction, you came to the little chalkstone building that Masayuki had designed. That was the best thing of all, she said. It had a wide balcony with round white pillars from which you could look far out across the winter sea. Just to set eyes on that stretch of water, with its leaden shine, made her heart take wing, she said. And from there you could go down the steps and walk along the shore where the waves roll in and recede. She was ecstatic, her words tumbling out, quite unlike the Yoko I had last seen in Karuizawa.
“Masayuki’s design is terrific. The garden and everything.” Then she added, looking straight at me, “We absolutely want you to come over to see it in the spring, Fumiko. That’s what we said.”
Though the age of foreign travel had arrived long ago, I had never once set foot outside Japan. I didn’t have the courage to go by myself, and the idea of going with strangers on a group tour was unappealing. Yet, hearing her account, I felt a sudden urge to travel, to get out of Japan for once. It was ironic that soon afterward the whole thing came to an abrupt end.
YOKO’S DISAPPEARANCE CAME to light the day after Christmas, when Masayuki called me. He started to talk, then stopped, before mumbling, “It’s about the time he’d be landing, isn’t it?” He apparently had trouble saying the name “Taro” aloud. Taro had left for America the day before, Christmas Day.
“Yes, that sounds about right.” I looked at my watch. It was nine in the morning on December 26, which meant that in New York it was seven at night on the previous day, his scheduled arrival time.
“I’m very sorry to bother you, but do you think you could telephone him for me?”
The voice didn’t sound like the Masayuki I knew. Actually I had hardly ever spoken to him on the phone before, which may have added to the strange sense of disconnection I felt.
It seemed that he and Yoko had had some kind of row Christmas Eve. When he came home from the university the next day, she was gone. She had told the office people something about a sudden business trip, but Masayuki was convinced she had gone to New York, still angry with him. He wanted me to find out from Taro if he had heard from Yoko the day before, if she had said she was going to New York or had perhaps actually flown there with him.
His voice was tightly controlled.
An image came into my mind of two figures standing on a balcony with white pillars, staring out at a lead-gray sea in a strong north wind. For a moment the image took on a firm reality. Yes. That’s it. Yoko has finally left us and gone to New York. To be with Taro for good … I felt the air surrounding me become still. After hanging up, I called New York, only to find that Taro came on the line sounding like his usual self. He had just arrived. I sketched in the situation. He said he hadn’t heard from her. Then he asked, “Do you think she would ever do that—leave home, and come here to New York?” I could picture him standing stock-still while he waited for my answer.
“Yes, of course.”
He waited a moment longer before saying in a strangely distant tone, “I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
He was silent.
I remembered Yoko’s ecstatic face as she said, “The sea glowing dimly, seagulls flying, the gray sky hanging low. It was all incredibly lonely and sad but at the same time perfectly wonderful.”
Without answering my question, Taro asked, “Did something happen between her and Masayuki?”
“Some kind of quarrel, I think.”
He was silent again. I waited for a response, but as he said nothing I decided to hang up so I could report back to Masayuki. “Anyway, if she gets there … if you hear from her at all, please phone here right away.”
“What about Oiwake?” Taro asked suddenly, his voice rising. Before I could say anything, he groaned. “It’s not spring now, Fumiko, it’s winter—damn it. She could be snowbound.”
I knew from the way he said this that he was remembering the “elopement,” the time she caught pneumonia. That had been in early April. Annoyed by the degree of concern in his voice, I told him it wasn’t snowing in the first place, and anyway Masayuki would surely have phoned Oiwake already. “The minute I find out something I’ll call you, so you do the same, all right?”
He seemed to be thinking. There was no response so I hung up, putting the receiver down more roughly than necessary.
I called Masayuki back. When I reported that there had been no word from her yet in New York either, he said he was immediately setting off for Oiwake. He had been phoning the cottage steadily since the night before but thought she might be deliberately ignoring the telephone, and he had already decided to go there in case she hadn’t been heard from. The scandals of the past—her “misconduct” and “elopement”—apparently made Oiwake spring to his mind too. Not knowing where the key to the cottage was, he asked if he could come to my place
to pick one up. By then I had made up my mind to go with him. When I heard Taro’s despairing groan, I had balked at his suggestion, but now that Masayuki was pinning his hopes on Oiwake, the idea that she might be there seemed not so unlikely.
“I’ll go with you, if I may.”
Masayuki sounded surprised. “Oh, no, no need for that.”
He thought of me as being on Taro’s side, so it never occurred to him to rely on me in a crisis. I insisted. She might not just be ignoring the telephone, I pointed out. You never knew, she might be ill, in which case my nursing experience would be useful, and if more help were needed I could call on my son and his wife. My words evidently had an effect, as he changed his mind. “Well, all right,” he said. “Thank you, that would be a great help.” Disturbed as he was, his gratitude was clear.
“THIS IS ALL my fault.”
As soon as I dived into the car waiting in front of Seijo station, that was what he said.
I was less interested in knowing what had happened than I was exasperated with Yoko for being so impulsive and causing such a disturbance, a full quarter century after that last stupid episode, especially considering that she now had a young daughter to look out for. It was all I could do to contain my vexation—not to mention my anxiety over what it would mean if she wasn’t in Oiwake after all. What if she really had gone off to New York? If the situation was only temporary until she calmed down, that was one thing, but what if she had in fact left Masayuki? I naturally felt concern for him and his daughter, but even more, selfish as it may sound, I dreaded to think what I personally was going to do with the rest of my life. My mind was in turmoil, full of uncertainties. Since the bursting of Japan’s economic bubble, Taro’s work in Japan had fallen off, and with Yoko in America, it was all too plain that he would feel no need to return to this country anymore.
Unaware of my selfish train of thought, Masayuki kept repeating as if to himself as he drove, “I should never have said what I did.”
His handsome face, seen in profile, looked rigid.
We took Loop Road No. 8 north and then got on the Kan’etsu Expressway headed for Nagano. As the car sped along, Masayuki tried to explain what had happened. Now that I was involved, he must have felt he owed me an explanation. But this was the explanation of a reticent person holding his emotions painfully in check, and so I still had no idea what had happened, or in what order, until later when I put what he told me together with what I heard from Fuyue. Even then, there were gaps I had to fill in with my imagination.
It all started with an incident that took place the night before Taro left for New York, on Christmas Eve, when he accompanied Yoko as far as Seijo station and they were caught together yet again by the Saegusa sisters. Usually after dark Yoko took a taxi, but that day she needed to be back before six, in order not to be late for a Christmas Eve party at the Saegusa home, so she decided to take the Odakyu Line since it would be faster than traveling by car. Taro always wanted to prolong his time with her till the last possible moment, and since he was leaving the country the next day, I’m sure he was more persistent than usual. According to Fuyue, Yoko sat down on the edge of a bench on the platform. Although she was already wearing a coat of her own, Taro put his overcoat around her shoulders and wound his scarf around her neck till her face was almost hidden, wanting to make sure she didn’t catch cold. That alone was a strange enough sight, but then he crouched down in front of her and became engrossed in conversation, looking intently up at her. People hurried past them, and they were off in a corner, but the sight was so unexpected—a woman buried in a man’s overcoat and scarf and, at her feet, someone like Taro wearing a black suit and gazing upward in an ardent way—once you did notice them, you couldn’t help staring.
Then, who should come along but the three sisters. They had just emerged from the last car of the train on their way back from an expedition to Shinjuku. Their hands were full of packages—ready-made food and presents for the grandchildren—and Harue, with her rheumatism, was walking with a cane, so naturally they couldn’t keep pace with the crowd and fell behind. Soon one of them noticed the little tableau and let out a cry of surprise that attracted the attention of the other two. They walked by without a word, holding their collective breath, but this time Yoko and Taro were too lost in their own world to even notice. Yoko had said she would be out all day and unable to help with the preparations, and she too had the same kind of plastic bags from the food section of a department store on the bench beside her, their very ordinariness serving to make the rest of the scene that much more distracting.
Natsue climbed the station stairs in a state of shock, scarcely believing what she’d set eyes on—even though it was her own daughter. At the top of the stairs she came to her senses. “Honestly, that girl,” she muttered. Harue remained silent as they crossed the overpass and went through the turnstile.
This might be presumptuous of me, I know, but I think that for over fifty long years, ever since Noriyuki Shigemitsu died in the war on the threshold of his life, Harue had lived feeling vaguely aggrieved. Even if Noriyuki had returned safely from the front, whether he would have married her remains an open question, and even if he had, whether that would have made someone like her happy we will also never know. It was only his death that allowed her to go on thinking life had treated her unfairly. She had been born into such fortunate circumstances: she should have been happier. Yet somehow true happiness always slipped through her fingers. She never experienced the state of grace where one rejoices just to be alive. Seeing Noriyuki’s nephew marry not one of her daughters but Yoko, of all people, and seeing that their marriage was clearly a happy one, must have deepened her bitterness. Still, that alone she might have borne. Then Taro reentered the picture, without dimming the couple’s happiness in the least. Instead, the three of them had run off together into never-never land. Harue was a woman of keen perception, and she must have understood all this. And then came that scene on the station platform. The moment she saw it she had vivid proof of the way the two of them were wrapped up in each other, cocooned from the rest of the world—and that proved more than she could bear. I don’t consider her a bad person, but unfortunately for her, she acted on a momentary impulse and lived to regret it.
When the three sisters left the station and came out onto the street, Harue finally spoke: “A good thing it was the three of us who saw that spectacle,” she started off. “What if it had been Miki or her friends, or her friends’ mothers?” She dragged Miki into it in order to find fault with Yoko. Miki probably wouldn’t have appreciated it, but certainly that was where Yoko was most vulnerable, as the mother of an adolescent daughter. Taro and Yoko might have been together that day in the firm belief that Miki would go straight home from school and the Saegusa sisters would have long since returned home from shopping, but that didn’t make Yoko’s behavior any less outrageous. Natsue chimed in, “That’s right, that’s absolutely true.” But Natsue was blind to other people’s happiness, blind even to the fact that happiness like theirs had never come her way. She surely had no idea what lay behind her sister’s outrage. Harue’s mind seemed to be on something else while she went on complaining. Then she stopped and, tapping her cane, made her way home, preoccupied.
Perhaps she had already made up her mind then. Or did it happen later, when she saw Yoko at the party looking so carefree? Fuyue said she never dreamed that Harue would go so far as to haul Masayuki into it. It happened after dinner when the presents had been opened and people were scattered about the dining room and parlor having cake. All at once Fuyue noticed that Harue wasn’t there. Feeling a sudden foreboding, she searched for Masayuki, but he too was missing. Usually she avoided confronting her sister Harue, but that day, she was ready to stop her if she intended to say something to Masayuki. But she was too late. When she opened the door and hurried out into the hallway, Masayuki was just coming back with a look on his face she had never seen before. He walked past her without registering her presence, took his co
at from the closet, and disappeared.
“Harue, you said something completely inappropriate, didn’t you?”
As she came along tapping her cane, Harue answered this accusation excitedly, her face flushed red. “I most certainly did not!”
“Oh, yes, you did. It is none of our business. We have no right to say anything.”
“I have a responsibility to Yoko, as her aunt. She needs to pay attention to what people will think. Her behavior is way out of bounds. Masayuki is a fool to put up with it.” Harue herself ordinarily scoffed at conventional notions of common sense or propriety, but that must have been the tack she took, keeping a close watch on Masayuki’s expression as she described much too vividly the scene she had just witnessed at the station.
“Think of poor Miki,” she added defensively to Fuyue.
“You had absolutely no right. Miki? This isn’t about her.”
What was done was done. There was no point in escalating the confrontation, so Fuyue showed her displeasure but held her tongue.
Sometimes the devil gets into people. That must be what happened to Masayuki then. The poison in what he’d heard must have spread inside him. Ten years had passed since that night he was so terrified that Yoko would leave him, and perhaps his guard was down. Just what he said to her, I don’t know, but whatever words he may have used, when Yoko came back from the Saegusas that night, he confronted her. For all I know he just told her to act a little more like a normal mother for Miki’s sake—the sort of thing that would seem only natural to an outsider.
“I never should have said it.”
His eyes were fixed on the expressway ahead. The car windows showed a dark, wintry sky with not a speck of blue. I glanced at his profile. His eyes were looking far into the distance.
This much was evident: whatever he had said, his comment made it instantly and painfully clear to Yoko that he had stumbled—fatally.
He went on: “ ‘How can you say something like that?’ she said to me in shock. ‘If you say things like that, it’s all over.’ That’s what she said.”
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