FROM THE MOMENT Taro asked me to track down the Azumas, I knew he was getting ready to sever his connection with Japan. At the same time, I couldn’t quite bring myself to believe that he would actually do it. But I was forced to do so a month ago, when Masayuki died of liver cancer.
Now that I think of it, his parents weren’t the only members of the Shigemitsu family to succumb to cancer. Yayoi’s mother lived a long life, but she died of cancer too, and it could well be that Masayuki inherited a predisposition to the disease. He also inherited his father’s tendency—call it devotion, or perversity—to relate to the world through a single woman only, so that once that woman died he lost the will to live.
After my work as Taro’s assistant dropped off, I went back to helping out in Karuizawa for a full month during the summers of 1993 and ’94, and Masayuki’s manner was so strangely subdued that I used to check up on him quite often, out of concern. He seemed to feel committed to go on living for his daughter’s sake, and in front of others he behaved normally enough, but when he retreated to the study in his villa, there was such an air of bleak loneliness about him one might have thought his spirit had already left him. I suspect it wasn’t solely Miki’s desire to be with Nimbo that made her go to the Saegusas’, but that she couldn’t bear the sight of her father like that. She was used to spending most of her time over at their house anyway, and soon she was eating her meals there too, going home only to sleep. It would have been peculiar if Masayuki had cooked for himself and eaten alone at home, so, except for breakfast, he started joining the others around the Saegusa table. But not always. As often as not, just before they rang the gong for a meal, he would call to say he was sorry but he was in the middle of something and couldn’t leave and would just eat on his own. Then either Miki or I would carry a tray across to the other house.
Harue never said a word about it, but when Masayuki did not join them for a meal, her relief was obvious. He too, not surprisingly, seemed to find her presence a strain after what had happened. Still, once he was with the others he behaved as naturally as he could, presumably for his daughter’s sake. Even in her seventies, Harue was the head of the Saegusa family, and there was a good chance that Miki would marry her grandson Nimbo one day. I believe Masayuki was determined to endure Harue’s presence with that possibility in mind.
The only time he allowed his discomfort to show openly was when Harue and Natsue went on and on enthusiastically about the Dutchman Peter Jansen, speculating that it was he who had bought the property.
One day when I took Masayuki his lunch tray, he looked up from his desk in the study and turned toward me. “Fumiko …,” he said. His computer screen glowed blue, with a scattering of drawings and papers around it, yet there was no sign that he had been doing any work at all. I knew he’d just been sitting staring out the window.
In full bloom just outside it were some white lilies that Yoko, the little flower thief, had once stolen from the woods.
“I’ve been meaning to say this for some time …” He looked at me, pale. “With Yoko gone, it’s not right for us to go on using the property here like this. So tell him he can sell it anytime, would you, please?”
As usual, he avoided saying Taro’s name.
“Certainly,” I said. Then, to make him feel easier I added, “But land prices are falling, you know. He would only lose money if he sold now, so I doubt if he has any immediate plans to sell.”
“I see. In that case, it’s all right.”
He looked out the window. Something in his eyes was more than I could bear.
“I am so sorry.” Before I knew it, the words had slipped out of my mouth. Words that I could never bring myself to say to Taro.
Masayuki looked at me in surprise, but seemed to realize instantly that I still could not forgive myself. He hesitated, as if unsure how to respond, before telling me quietly that it wasn’t my fault. “It was my fault,” he said.
Soon after that, we learned he had liver cancer. It was as though his loss of the will to live manifested itself in the disease. After the diagnosis he had less than a year to live.
He died entrusting Miki’s future to the three Saegusa sisters and Nimbo, but by then Miki was twenty: he’d managed to hang on until she became legally an adult. Perhaps he knew he wouldn’t live long. As it turned out, he had a substantial insurance plan, and the money from the sale of the Nogizaka condominium (luckily sold just when the economy was at its most inflated) was still sitting safely in the bank, since he and Yoko hadn’t bothered to do anything with it. With inheritance taxes for Seijo less than half what they once were, Miki was well provided for, and in due course she could rent out the house or sell it, so there were no financial problems. Everyone said it was that reassuring knowledge that must have allowed Masayuki to let go of his life in peace.
YOKO’S SUDDEN DEATH had come as a terrible shock to her sister, Yuko, in San Francisco. Since then she’d felt responsible for her niece, Miki, and kept in frequent touch with her. She even invited her to San Francisco for summer vacation, but as Miki didn’t want to go on her own, that never happened. Yuko of course had come back for Masayuki’s funeral a month earlier, and, watching from the sidelines, I could see how swamped she was with not only her niece but her own mother to watch over.
Miki flew off to the beach resort of Phuket in Thailand before her father’s forty-ninth-day service because her cousin Naomi was having a wedding there that had been planned months in advance. It would have been even harder on her if she’d been left behind, so she was allowed to leave with the other young people. Naomi’s fiancé was a fourth-generation Chinese-American she met in medical school. The Saegusa sisters may have wondered why a half-white girl like Naomi would want to marry a “Chinaman,” but times had changed, her life was overseas, and whatever they might have thought in private, they never said a word openly.
Around the time the younger ones went to Phuket, I had a telephone call from Taro saying he was coming to Japan. He was going to dispose of the Karuizawa and Oiwake properties, he said. It seemed mean of him to take the step with Masayuki barely in his grave, but after I hung up, I told myself he wasn’t a coldhearted person; perhaps he had decided that if he let this chance slip, doing it later would only be that much harder. Also, though this could be my own sentimentality, I felt as if he chose this particular week because he wanted to stay in Oiwake for the Bon holiday one more time, the way he used to when he was a boy.
And now he’s back. He was away for two years and seven months.
FUMIKO’S STORY WAS well and truly finished. Something in the way she pursed her lips told Yusuke she was done talking. She was staring down at the table. After a short silence, he asked, “What will you do now, Mrs. Tsuchiya?”
She didn’t answer. She lifted her head to reply, let her eyes stray to the window, and gave a sharp little cry.
“What is it?”
“Your shoes—they must be soaked!”
She jumped up and, going around behind him, opened the sliding doors to the porch, bent down to pick up his muddy sneakers, and put them on a mat inside the house.
“Thanks.” Yusuke, who had turned his head to watch, got up.
“Using the porch to go in and out is handy,” she said, “but when there’s a storm and the rain blows sideways like this, shoes have to be put inside. In the old days there used to be a shoe cupboard outside.” She disappeared into the kitchen and came straight back with a roll of white paper towels in one hand. Seeing Yusuke standing there she told him to sit down, then knelt by the doormat and began tearing off paper towels, crumpling them, and stuffing them into his sneakers. He watched the slight movement of muscles in her back.
“Thank you.” He went on standing, embarrassed. When he saw that it would take some time, he sat down at an angle facing her back. Raindrops pelted the bottom of the glass doors and raced down in straight lines. His bicycle parked under the porch stairs would be getting soaked too, he thought. The rain was still coming down har
d. The cottage, on the edge of collapse anyway, seemed to soak up the moisture, hastening the process.
For a while Yusuke went on watching her from behind. Then he asked again, “Mrs. Tsuchiya, what will you do now?”
“Good question.” Standing up, she murmured, “What to do?” as if it concerned someone else. “I thought I’d put off thinking about the future till Taro came this summer, but now that he’s here, it can’t wait.”
She went back into the kitchen apparently to wash her hands, as he heard her running the tap before she came back. She added fresh tea leaves and refilled the pot with hot water, then poured some green tea into both their cups. Yusuke had already had more than enough and left his untouched.
“Ami graduates from college in another year and a half.” Fumiko didn’t drink her tea right away either. She wrapped her hands around the cup on the table and spoke slowly, as if driving the point home to herself. “So I’m thinking of asking Taro if he’ll let us stay in the apartment until her graduation.”
“And after that?”
“I’ll have no choice but to go and live with my son in Miyota, I suppose.” Before Yusuke could comment, she glanced up at him and went on. “He and his wife are both good people, so I don’t mind. It’s just that I’m sure they’ll feel a bit cramped and constrained, and I feel bad about that.” She laughed forlornly. It was as if what was left of her prime were a burden to her.
“Couldn’t you ask Mr. Azuma to leave this place as it is, so you could use it?”
Her reply came swiftly. “No, I couldn’t.” She let out a long sigh and looked down at her teacup. “Not just when he’s come back to get rid of his properties here, how could I?” She said this as if she had gone over it in her head many times and always reached the same conclusion. She kept staring at the cup as she went on. “I’m all right. I never expected anything, and look at the life I’ve had.”
She sounded as though she was trying to convince herself.
After a pause, he asked another question. “Will Mr. Azuma be going straight back to America?”
She looked at him and smiled wanly. “He might hang around here for a while waiting for Yoko’s ghost … You know he sleeps out in the shed every night.” She tilted her head in amusement: “Why on earth did she come to you, of all people?”
Yusuke laughed and asked, “What if she never comes to him? What will he do?”
“He’s so stubborn, he might not go back to America till she does.”
“What about after he goes back?”
“Mmm.” She sipped her tea before replying. “He’s got such a strong constitution, he’ll have a tough time drinking himself to death, no matter how hard he tries. That might not be much fun.” She smiled sardonically, then turned abruptly serious. “In any case, he won’t be coming back to Japan.”
“He won’t?”
“No, not that I can see.”
A tremor in her voice made him speak without thinking. “Then why don’t you go see him in America from time to time?”
The answer came promptly. “He wouldn’t like it.”
Once again, he imagined she must have gone over this many times in her head.
“I’ve no intention of going where I know I’m not wanted.”
Her expression was so disconsolate it was frightening. Yusuke found himself unable to speak. A chill, gloomy silence hung over them for a while, before she roused herself and said on a different note, “You must be starving!” There was a touch of gaiety in her wide-eyed look, perhaps something that had rubbed off on her from the Saegusa sisters over the years.
“Now that you mention it,” he replied.
“Would you object to a bowl of iced somen noodles on a rainy night?”
“Not at all.”
“It was so hot in the daytime today, I was sure it would be the same tonight, so I’m afraid I’ve prepared the ingredients already.”
“Somen’s good.” Looking into her bright, wide eyes, Yusuke found himself responding with matching enthusiasm.
“All right, then, I’ll boil some water.”
“Can I help?”
“First the water has to boil.”
THE TELEPHONE RANG just after she’d gone back into the kitchen and turned on the tap. He jumped, just as he had the other day, and somehow knew that it was Fuyue again. He got up to call Fumiko, but she had apparently heard it too. The sound of running water in the tin-plated sink stopped, and she came out, wiping her hands on her apron.
The call lasted less than a minute.
“That was Fuyue.” Fumiko frowned as she put the receiver back in its cradle. “Once she heard that Taro’s not here, she said she’d be right over, now, in all this rain.”
The glass doors showed only a reflection of the room’s interior lit by one dim bulb; the rain outside was now invisible. But the sounds—heavy drops pelting the roof, and wind sweeping through the trees and shaking the eaves—were so strong that he felt the presence of nature in a way he never did in Tokyo.
“It’s just not fair,” Fumiko muttered to herself as she turned on the porch light and drew the thin, faded curtains. Then, with a weary shake of her head, she began to clear the table. “Taro taking off to a hotel till tomorrow noon and leaving me here to deal with three hysterical grannies, all by my lonesome.” Her tone was joking, but the underlying dismay was evident in her frown.
She kept up a running commentary while she stacked the dishes. “They should just be grateful they got to use the place for a while longer—that’s how they ought to look at it, but they won’t. Once they realize it’s Taro’s doing, they’re bound to make a fuss.”
Yusuke looked at his watch. “Well, I’d better be going.” He needed to clear out before Fuyue arrived, and since he couldn’t just sit back and wait for the rain to stop, he’d have to ask Fumiko to call a taxi.
“Oh dear.” Her eyes widened in surprise. “Now, don’t say that. Please stay, won’t you? Your presence would be a buffer, so I’d really rather you were here.”
She seemed to mean it. Anyway, she would go and boil the somen, she told him, and disappeared into the kitchen with the stack of dirty dishes. After a moment’s hesitation he followed her to help out.
Later on, while they were having the thin noodles, served with chipped ice in glass dishes, Fumiko tried her best to act as if nothing were wrong, but she seemed unable to contain her apprehension. Yusuke could feel what she was going through and, without any desire to witness the approaching scene, sympathized.
THE SOUND OF rapping on the glass doors came just after Yusuke had laid down his chopsticks. Seated across from each other, he and Fumiko simultaneously held their breath and straightened up in their chairs. The rain had masked the sound of the approaching car. Yusuke, whose back was to the glass doors, got up and pulled the curtain aside, revealing a pale face—a face that stared back at him in astonishment. He slid the glass panel to one side.
“Take your shoes off inside the house,” instructed Fumiko, now standing beside him, “or they’ll get soaked.”
“Yes, okay.” Leaving only her umbrella propped up outside, Fuyue crossed the threshold unhesitatingly, her raincoat dripping. “I ran all the way from the car, and look at me!”
With that preamble, she turned straight to Fumiko and asked bluntly, “Did you know?” The look she gave her was probing.
“You mean about the land in Karuizawa?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, I knew.” She returned her gaze levelly. “At first I didn’t,” she said, and hurried on to keep Fuyue from cutting in. “But Yoko and Masayuki knew about it from the beginning.”
She said this as if their being in on the secret justified her having kept quiet about it. After one more searching look, Fuyue turned her head away, pressing her thin, well-shaped lips together—the shape was the same in all three sisters—and slowly began undoing the buttons on her raincoat. She handed the garment to Fumiko, who hung it on a wall hook by the glass doors before turning back to
face her.
“When I heard it was a Dutch company,” said Fumiko, “the thought did cross my mind that Taro might be involved, since I knew he owned a company in the Netherlands. When he came back to Japan, I asked him, and he said yes, which is how I learned.” She broke off briefly before going on. Her tone was challenging, as if to fend off an attack. “But he told me not to tell any of you.” With that, she urged Fuyue to sit down and then disappeared into the kitchen, giving the other woman no opportunity to respond.
Fuyue sat primly on the edge of her chair. She apparently meant to take her leave quickly. Yusuke had sat down at the same time, but she seemed unaware of his presence. Looking withdrawn, she opened her purse, took out a handkerchief, and absentmindedly began wiping the rain from her hair. She wiped drops off her glasses too. Just as Yusuke was wondering whether he should get up and clear away the noodles, Fumiko came back carrying a cup of tea for her on a small tray. Fuyue slowly looked up into her face.
“That isn’t the whole story,” she said.
Something in her voice made Fumiko frown inquisitively as she set the teacup on the table.
“You really don’t know?” said Fuyue.
“Know what?”
Fuyue only looked at her steadily without answering.
“What are you talking about?” Fumiko asked again.
“What do you think happened to the land?”
“I don’t know.”
“He gave it away.”
“Really? To Miki?”
“No.”
That was enough for Yusuke to guess what was coming, but Fumiko seemed not to understand, a puzzled look on her face.
Fuyue said, “He gave it to you.”
A True Novel Page 63