She thought for a moment, then looked away. Eyes on the ceiling, she gave a little nod. Her throat was even thinner than it had been when she was in the hospital after their “elopement.”
“It would be all right then.”
“It would?”
“Yes.”
For the first time, he seemed almost happy as he took another deep breath.
“But …” She looked at him firmly. “You mustn’t die in a strange way. I would be too miserable.” She frowned, as if she were seeing things that frightened her. “Die in a way that would make me think you had a good life.” A few tears rolled down her cheeks.
Taro groaned. “You call this a good life?”
“I do.” She rocked his hand back and forth on the sheets as if to soothe him. That was all the strength she could summon. With the ghost of a smile on her dry lips, she told him, “It’s been perfect. Couldn’t have been better.”
Taro jerked his hand away. “Couldn’t have been better?” he protested, shoulders heaving. “The hell you say!” He fell silent. Then in a low, mournful voice he said abruptly, “You wouldn’t marry me. You didn’t want me. You said if you were with me, you’d be so ashamed you’d die.”
After a brief pause, she said without a flicker of expression, “You still can’t forgive me, can you?” She seemed to be looking somewhere far beyond the ceiling.
He too was expressionless. “No, I can’t.” He picked up her hand again. “I never could. You don’t know how deeply someone like me can hold a grudge. You just don’t know.”
He wrapped his man’s hand protectively around her small one.
“I don’t care. I don’t want to know.”
“I wanted to kill you, the whole time.”
She showed no surprise. Her hand still tucked in his, she continued to stare into space. “Starting when?” she asked. “After I said those terrible things?”
“No.”
“Before that?”
“Long before.”
She turned her head toward him. “You mean from when we were kids?”
“Yes.” After a moment’s hesitation, he went on, “From the very first time I saw you in the yard of the Chitose Funabashi house.”
“Okay.”
Still no surprise. She looked back up at the ceiling, out of breath, and that was all. When she regained her breath, she spoke, less in answer to Taro than to release her own emotions.
“I was always afraid. From the time I was a little girl, I always felt afraid … When I was with you, it was like the rest of the world was rushing away from us … as if we were getting farther and farther away from it … and it scared me.”
Taro just went on with increasing vehemence. “I always wanted to kill you.”
“I felt so lonely I was scared.”
“I should have done it.”
They each seemed lost in their thoughts. The silence grew, and then Yoko cried softly, “But we were happy, so happy.” Clutching his arm, she raised herself slightly and looked up into his face. “Don’t ever stop wanting to kill me—even if I die.”
“I never will—even if I die.” And he laid himself over her, as he’d done before.
“It’s crazy how happy I am,” I heard her say, then she whispered, “Take care of Masayuki …”
For a moment there was silence. She had slumped back on the bed. Then she gave a low, soulful cry: “But oh … I don’t want to die yet … and let it all go to waste.”
Clutching his arm again, she tried to lift herself a little, but she no longer had the strength. All this talking seemed to have exhausted her.
While I don’t believe that without the disturbance she could have survived, I do think it shortened the little time she had left. As Taro and Masayuki switched places, her breathing became more labored and she drifted in and out of consciousness. It was nearly ten at night when the three Saegusa sisters and Miki arrived from Tokyo, driven by Nimbo, and by then she was in a coma. She stayed that way for an entire day. In the middle of the night she had greater trouble breathing, and her legs turned purplish from lack of circulation. Her dry lips became white.
Her poor daughter was stunned by the suddenness of it all. Harue looked angry and for once was close-lipped. Deep down, I think she too was stunned. Natsue shed tears continually from those large, round eyes of hers, but the sight of her daughter lying so near death seemed to make her queasy, and instead of moistening Yoko’s lips herself, she asked me to do it. Fuyue alone looked calm; she behaved with even greater self-possession than she usually did.
Taro waited in his car in the hospital parking lot, out in the freezing cold. When everyone arrived from Tokyo he’d left the waiting room, not wishing to be seen as they came and went. He asked me to let him know if she regained consciousness, but she never did, so I had no occasion to go out to him. I only looked down at the parking lot from the window at the end of the hospital corridor. It seemed to me that Masayuki did the same every time he passed that window. Taro didn’t leave even to eat. On the evening of his second day there, the car still hadn’t moved.
She died just after two in the morning.
When the doctor pronounced her dead, his words were mingled with Natsue’s sobs. I slipped out of the room by myself, pushed the elevator button, and went downstairs. I headed for the emergency exit, the only one usable at night. I felt no emotion. I was numb. I propelled myself forward mechanically, thinking only one thing: Taro would never forgive me. He would never forget how I failed to look in the attic room that day. And I had spent decades—no—virtually all my life thinking only about how I could make him happy. Now at the end of it all he would resent me, hate me. The thought went around and around in my head. I did not feel in the least remorseful; only stunned by life’s cruelty, when all along I had been doing my best. I felt almost more like laughing wildly than crying as misery and derision roamed the emptiness inside me. If only Mount Asama would erupt now in bright red bursts and bury us all in ashes, the living and the dead.
I went out by the emergency exit. I saw the wintry sky filled with stars, and from among them fell shards of moonlight, glittering on the asphalt parking lot. That’s when it sank in. Yoko was dead. The sheer, harsh fact of it struck me with full force. The ground rocked, and the firmament with its countless stars started to revolve around the moon, and I had to cover my face with my hands and crouch on the ground from vertigo.
I heard the sound of a car door opening and closing, and footsteps coming toward me over the asphalt, but I didn’t have the courage to raise my head and look.
10
Drinks at the Mampei Hotel
FUMIKO STOPPED TALKING.
It had started to rain a little while before. What began as light drizzle turned within minutes into a torrential downpour. In the sudden absence of any talk, the noise made by the rain was even louder. Yusuke, seated directly across from the now silent Fumiko, listened absently to the sound of millions of raindrops landing on the roof. He remembered that half an hour earlier there had been a distant chime followed by the voice of a woman speaking over a loudspeaker, warning that a storm was on its way. When he’d asked about it, Fumiko had explained that someone from the town hall drove around making these announcements for the sake of local farmers working in the fields.
The hands of the pendulum clock on the wall pointed to six-thirty.
Pale yellow light shone through the milky glass shade above them, showing a fairly bare tabletop. Today he hadn’t been sitting there listening to her talk from morning till late in the evening as he had the other day, and yet he felt that a vast amount of time had elapsed, as though there had been no interlude.
She was looking down at the table, still silent. She seemed so withdrawn that he wondered if she even registered the sound of the rain on the roof. It might have been the light, but her cheeks now looked hollow.
He let his eyes wander over the low wooden shelves on his right, behind her. On the top shelf, amid the jumble of cotton work gl
oves, a trowel, candles, coils of mosquito repellent, a disposable lighter, and other things, he noticed two bundles with rabbit-ear knots, the ones he’d seen the other day in Karuizawa, containing the urns. While he’d sat listening to Fumiko during the past few hours with his back to the porch, more than once those two small bundles had caught his attention. Now that she was silent, their presence asserted itself more insistently.
She picked up her story again after serving a fresh pot of tea.
AFTER JANUARY 1993 Taro stopped coming back to Japan, even when he had business in some other Asian country.
With Yoko gone, making money no longer meant what it had, and with the economy in the doldrums, there was no point in coming here in search of investors. I stayed in touch with him and his lawyers, and took care of unfinished business, but once I’d canceled the rental contract on his luxury apartment in Yoyogi Uehara, there was little or no work for me to do anymore. Yoko’s teasing me about being a real career woman seemed a thing of the distant past. About a year after she died, I floated the idea to Taro of my packing up and leaving Tokyo to go home to Miyota. He answered that he still had some ongoing projects involving Japanese investors and would like me to remain in the city if there was no particular reason why I had to leave. Of course there wasn’t, so I took advantage of his generosity and stayed on. This was partly because after Yoko died I was at loose ends, and partly for a more practical reason: I had taken my granddaughter Ami under my wing in Tokyo.
From the time she was in middle school, Ami had wanted to attend college in Tokyo someday. But in the fall of 1992, about three months before Yoko disappeared, just as Ami was preparing for the spring entrance examination, her parents told her to apply to a local prefectural university, for financial reasons. The sudden decline in the economy had taken quite a bite out of my son’s salary at the local bank, and with two boys to educate besides her, the plan made sense. But when I heard about it, I felt I couldn’t just sit back and do nothing. I offered to take her in for as long as my work as Taro’s assistant continued—they may even have been quietly hoping I would do exactly that. Since I was quite willing to help the family, and Ami and I had always been close, it only seemed natural. Then that January Yoko died. I told Ami’s parents that the situation had changed; that if Taro’s interest in Japanese investors dried up, my work might end at any time. But they had their hearts set on sending her to live with me in Tokyo. I said to myself, if I lose my job, I’ll worry about it when the time comes. So after Ami, a bright student, was admitted to Waseda, she started living with me when classes were in session. She was usually out of the house, either at school or at a part-time job, and when she was home she generally stayed in her room, the only tatami room in the apartment. As a little girl, she had been like a daughter to me, but now it felt more like having a lodger I could be comfortable around, which was fine. Knowing how I regretted, and would go on regretting to my dying day, not getting the education I wanted, I just hoped that I would continue to be subsidized by Taro so that she could go on living in the Gotokuji apartment and keep up her studies.
TARO STAYED ABROAD, and during the next six months, then a year, then two years that I lived in Tokyo, one by one the elder generation began to slip away.
In late 1993, Harue’s husband died of diabetes. After rising to an executive position in the Mitsubishi Corporation, he had become president of a subsidiary, resigning that position a few years before the end. Fortunately, his eyesight didn’t fail him, and with insulin injections, he went on playing golf to the last.
My mother died in the spring of 1994. She always blamed her poor health on the strain of the war period, but whatever the reason, she became prone to illness around the time I left for Tokyo. In middle age her heart weakened and she often had to take to her futon. She finally began to open up to me after my stepfather died some years before this, though no doubt she’d have said it was I who finally opened up to her. Her failing heart kept her from getting around, but even other people in the country no longer walked anywhere much, every family now owning two or three cars; so at New Year’s, though my aunt O-Hatsu lived only a stone’s throw away, we drove over to pay our respects. The talk turned to the past. In my mind’s eye I saw my mother the way she was on those winter nights long ago when she sat by the hearth and pulled a cloth from her waistband, then covered her face and sobbed out her troubles. And again I saw the blank look on her face after she was told that my father had taken his own life.
As usual, O-Hatsu, now living in a house with an up-to-date kitchen, bustled around making green tea that she served with pickles—though, unlike in the old days, the pickles came factory-sealed in a plastic bag. My mother was a good fifteen years younger than her, but she seemed so frail I was afraid she might not last much longer. Sure enough, she died last spring after two heart attacks. Having rushed home after the first one, I was able to be at her side from then until the second one came and carried her off. Providing this final care helped remove a weight that I’d long felt pressing on my chest.
I should perhaps mention in passing that the husky-voiced woman who was my uncle Genji’s companion for so long had the good fortune to be targeted by a land shark during the “bubble” era, which resulted in her selling the small property in Soto Kanda for enough money to let her live out her old age in comfort after the bubble burst. At the time of my mother’s funeral she sent a telegram and a generous sum of condolence money, and when I went to call on her to thank her after I got back to Tokyo, I found her living in a cozy, brand-new apartment on the Marunouchi Line. She had given up her little restaurant, now pinned her hair up at the nape without any hairpiece, and was dressed in Western-style clothes, though she had the round shoulders you often see in women who are accustomed to wearing a kimono. She seemed glad to see me. They had never had any children and she lived alone, but she was continuing her lessons in Japanese dance, a hobby she’d taken up again back when she was living in Soto Kanda. This provided her with friends from that circle, and she wasn’t lonely at all. In a sunny tatami room was a little Buddhist altar decorated with a picture of my uncle, one he’d chosen himself to be shown at his funeral, taken when he was “the Valentino of the Orient.” She kept flowers and incense in front of it, along with offerings of water and white rice. I couldn’t help feeling happy for him when I saw what care she took for the repose of his soul, with the old-time conscientiousness that’s so typical of people in the entertainment trade.
It was around then that I learned of the death of Taro’s guardian, Mr. Azuma. Taro had sometimes talked about sending the Azumas a substantial amount of money, mumbling about it in such a way that I was never sure if he was talking to himself or consulting me. I’m sure it wasn’t gratitude that motivated him, but rather the desire to pay off a debt. Still, there’s no denying that amid all the hardships of leaving Manchuria, they did share their meager food supply with him and bring him up. I suspect that the older Taro became, the more that weighed on him. But because of O-Tsune, he was hesitant about doing anything that would mean reviving his connection with her. Then, about a year after Yoko’s death, he called me from New York and asked me to track them down. I took it as a sign that he was preparing to cut his ties with Japan, so I felt uneasy—even alarmed—but all I said was “I’ll get right on it,” and hung up.
They might still have been living in Kamata, so I checked the telephone book, but there was no listing for either Mr. Azuma or his eldest son. Just to be sure, I took the train out there, curious to have a look around and see for myself how much the area had changed in all the years since I’d seen it. The street I once walked along trying to escape the din of machinery and the sparks from acetylene torches had been completely revamped. The old backstreet factories were no doubt still there if you sought them out, but the main street was lined with the sort of low buildings you found anywhere in Tokyo. The wooden house where the Azuma family had lived was gone, as was the coffee shop where Yoko and Taro sat and glared at each other.
I’d never heard of any relatives on the Azuma side, and I had no idea where old Roku might be buried. In the end I called Taro back and got the old address he had for O-Tsune’s family down south. That’s how I was able to track them down at their current location, which was surprisingly close to Kamata. It turned out that twenty years earlier, their eldest boy was in a car accident and changed his name on the advice of a fortune-teller. That explained why I couldn’t find him in the telephone book. His father had been dead for three years, I was told.
My staying out of it would mean fewer complications down the road. All the arrangements were done in the name of Nakada Associates, and one of the firm’s lawyers met directly with O-Tsune and her son. After Taro took off, the Azumas, I learned, were eventually able to hire another two or three workers and then move to Shimomaruko, where they had their own factory instead of a rented one, with a little more space. They survived the steep rise in the yen exchange rate, and for a while were doing quite well. However, to remain competitive, they’d bought a large and very expensive computer-controlled milling machine, only to have the economy collapse and business dry up, leaving them drowning in debt. The little boy O-Tsune was holding in her arms that time I visited them left the family business and became a truck driver; fortunately he was earning enough for them to live on, but with no hope of paying back their debts, they were on the point of selling their costly machine for next to nothing. Coming at such a time, Taro’s gift of cash—which I suspect was in the tens of millions of yen—was more than welcome. The lawyer apparently explained to them in words of one syllable that Taro’s assets were all overseas; that he had specified this was a one-time gift to his family; and that, on his death, none of the rest of his estate would go to them. I think he succeeded in getting the point across that the Azumas should not look for any future windfalls.
The lawyer told me O-Tsune was a “timid-looking, tiny old woman.” The “tiny” part I could understand, since she had always been short and had probably shrunk further in old age, but hearing her described as “timid-looking” was rather a surprise. Her eldest boy was apparently dressed in a dark blue suit, without a trace of his old wildness, and looked as if he had gone through some pretty hard times. The subject of the second son never came up, so what became of him I don’t know.
A True Novel Page 62