For a second Fumiko’s expression remained puzzled.
“Along with the land here in Oiwake, he gave you the entire Karuizawa property.”
Fumiko said nothing. Her eyes all but bored holes in Fuyue’s face.
“The lawyer said there’s no reason to think you didn’t know about it all along. Then Harue and Natsue started saying that after all, you are not exactly what you make yourself out to be, which would explain it.”
Fumiko remained speechless. Finally she murmured, “I never had any idea.”
She sat down heavily, setting the tray on the table, and stared into space for a few moments before slowly burying her face in her hands. Her elbows were on the table and she was taking shallow breaths, her shoulders faintly rising and falling. Yusuke thought she might start crying, but she just went on breathing quickly.
For a while Fuyue studied her, off to one side. Her eyes revealed nothing. After a minute or so, still with her face in her hands, Fumiko said again, brokenly, “I never … had … any idea.”
“I couldn’t imagine you not saying a word to us about it if you did know. But I couldn’t very well ask you over the phone, which is why I had to come over to make sure.”
“I never dreamed of such a thing.” The words were for herself rather than Fuyue.
Fuyue went on watching the rise and fall of her shoulders before saying gently, “Taro has taken care of everything. The apartment in Tokyo is in your name, and he’s provided you with enough cash to pay the gift tax too. It’s none of our affair, so the lawyer hasn’t told us this in so many words, but apparently that’s how it is.”
Fumiko was making a valiant effort not to break down and cry. Looking at her, Fuyue opened her mouth to say something but seemed to think better of it. The three of them were plunged into silence. In the lamplight, only Fumiko’s shoulders seemed to be moving.
Fuyue glanced at Yusuke. Apparently she had not forgotten he was there after all. “Mr. Kato, how did you get here?” she asked. “Car? Taxi?”
“Bicycle.”
“Then I’ll give you a ride home. It’s raining so hard, you should leave your bicycle here and come and get it tomorrow.”
Her tone of voice, though not as commanding as that of the eldest sister, left no room for argument. She promptly stood up, purse in hand, and headed for her raincoat hanging on the wall.
“What about your tea?” Fumiko removed her hands from her face, letting them flop onto the tabletop, and looked at Fuyue. Her face was deathly pale.
“No, thank you. My sisters are waiting for me to get back, so I’d better be going.”
“I see.”
“Will you be all right by yourself?” Fuyue asked, buttoning her raincoat.
“I’ll be fine.”
The lawyer would be in touch in the morning, Fuyue told her, then added in a different tone of voice, “Anyway, congratulations. Harue and Natsue are still in shock, but in time they’ll see what a good thing it is that the land is in your hands. So much better than having it go to complete strangers.”
Still in a daze, Fumiko was gazing ahead at nothing. Yusuke wasn’t sure if he should leave her like that or not. At Fuyue’s urging, he half rose, then turned toward Fumiko and asked in a lowered voice, “Would you like me to stay?”
Her eyes finally found their focus. “It’s all right,” she said, looking at him. “Since you have a ride, you should go on home.” She gave him the barest trace of a smile before adding, as if wrapping something up in her own mind, “Thank you for everything.” Her gaze was fixed on his young face.
“No, thank you. Can’t I at least clear the table before I go?”
His glass noodle dish now held only water from melted ice, but in the one on Fumiko’s side, some noodles lay uneaten on the bottom.
“It’s all right. I’ll take my time cleaning up.” Using the table as support, she pushed herself to her feet.
Fuyue slipped on her shoes, opened the door, and stuck her head outside. “It’s letting up,” she murmured, and stepped out onto the porch. She turned to look at Fumiko and said from under her open umbrella, “I’ll call you tomorrow,” then went down the steps and was gone.
Yusuke wasn’t sure what to say. Since he was leaving someone else’s bicycle there—“a piece of junk,” admittedly, but it still didn’t belong to him—he would have to come back before returning to Tokyo. But knowing that Fumiko had opened up to him precisely because she expected never to see him again made it difficult for him to say, like Fuyue, that he would call her tomorrow. He took the shoehorn she handed him and squeezed his feet into his wet sneakers. “I’ll be going, then,” he said, purposefully vague. After a polite nod of his head, he plunged out into the rain. Fumiko’s face as she stood in the open doorway and saw him off remained unreadable. After descending the steps and going a few more paces, he turned to look back at the figure standing there, so thin and alone. He had a feeling this was going to be their farewell.
When the car drove off he turned around again. The little cottage was not only screened from view by the rain, but hidden as well by the trees and bushes, so that only a glimmer of yellow light showed. The next time he looked back, even that was gone.
For a time Fuyue said nothing. Probably she was focused on her driving. In the dark and the rain she had to navigate a narrow, twisting road that was unlit and unpaved, with only her headlights to rely on. After they came out on the main road, she broke the silence.
“You must have heard quite an earful,” she said abruptly.
“Yes, I did, actually.”
“Stories about the past.”
“That’s right.”
“And about Yoko.”
“Yes.”
Looking straight ahead, Fuyue gave a slight nod. With a glance at the clock on the dashboard, she tilted her head in Yusuke’s direction. “Do you have a little time this evening?”
“Uh … Well, yes.” Then, in case this sounded impolite, he added quickly, “Yes, I do.”
“Would you mind joining me in a nightcap?”
Unsure how to interpret this, he again murmured a yes. She might be planning to drag him back to the Karuizawa villa to make him listen while she and her sisters poured out their woes, but in that case the wording of her invitation was strange. He couldn’t make out what she had in mind.
She added, “I’d feel more comfortable going somewhere I’m familiar with, so would it be all right if we went to the Mampei? I’ll see that you get home safely afterward.”
“Oh, yes, fine.”
Yusuke felt himself growing tense. Apparently he and this woman—“old lady” seemed unkind, but she was well past middle age—were to go out drinking together. He remembered the night he’d stumbled into the Oiwake cottage and first heard her voice on the telephone, an affected voice of indeterminate age inquiring, “Is that Taro?” He never imagined at that time that things would develop to the point where he would be sharing a late-night drink with the owner of that voice. It seemed the bizarre sequence of summer nights that had started then was to go on, whether he wanted it or not.
Fuyue said nothing more as she drove, facing straight ahead. After a little while she reduced the speed of the windshield wipers and commented, “It’s not stormy anymore.”
The bar in the Mampei Hotel was off the lobby to the left, and around a corner to the right. It was marked with a hanging sign that read simply BAR in English. On entering, they saw a wooden counter lined with bottles of wines and spirits, and standing behind it a bartender dressed in black. The room was small and dimly lit. It was also rather old-fashioned. Against one wall was an upright piano, apparently well used. The place was surprisingly empty for a holiday weekend. Fuyue’s eyes picked out some seats at the back of the room, and she murmured a suggestion that they take those. Holding herself erect and walking with a spring in her step, she signaled her wishes to the bartender with eyes and chin.
At the back was a little recessed space, apparently a remodeled terrace
or sunroom, with a low, slanting ceiling. Perhaps to appeal to foreign guests, the bar’s decor had a flavor of traditional Japan, with wooden wainscoting and, instead of wallpaper, a sort of wickerwork similar to that found in tea ceremony rooms. The window blinds too were suggestive of sudare reed screens, but the floor had a tacky crimson carpet, and hanging from the ceiling was a crystal chandelier. Unless you knew this was the bar of a famous old hotel, it might have seemed a forgotten place at the edge of town. Yusuke looked around curiously, wondering whether it had existed back when Fumiko’s uncle had first worked there as a busboy and what sort of clientele patronized the place back then.
Fuyue briskly seated herself in a black armchair. “You sit there, facing the door, will you? I’m more comfortable with my back to it.”
Yusuke sat on the sofa she indicated, inquiring as he did so whether she came there often.
“I did until twenty years or so ago. These days, hardly ever.”
A young waiter with an oval face came over and handed Fuyue a heavy leather-bound menu, which she passed on to Yusuke without a glance. “Whiskey for me,” she told the waiter. “Straight. Make it a double.”
“What label would you prefer, madam?”
“Ballantine’s.”
“We have everything from seven-year-old to thirty-year-old.”
“Right. Well, I’ll be extravagant and have the seventeen-year-old. There is such a thing as Ballantine’s seventeen-year-old, isn’t there?”
“Yes, madam.”
Very well, she would have that, she said, and looked at Yusuke. “Have whatever you like. Wine, cognac, a cocktail.”
She flung her head back and leaned back in the armchair. Maintaining this reckless-looking pose, she fixed her gaze on Yusuke. Flustered, he turned the pages of the heavy menu, finally ordering the hotel’s own original cocktail, named after what Westerners once called the surrounding area, Happy Valley. The words printed on the beige paper in bold type were “Happy Vally,” which Yusuke, dredging up his high school English, decided must be a misspelling. He closed the menu, wondering if there were so few foreign customers nowadays that such errors went unremarked.
“How old are you, dear?” asked Fuyue, still with her head against the back of the armchair, after the waiter left.
“Twenty-six.”
She gave a small laugh—a laugh so coquettish that Yusuke was startled.
“A fine, full-grown young man.” The eyes behind her glasses were teasing.
“I don’t know about fine, but I am full-grown, yes.” Yusuke himself was surprised by his own words. They seemed to catch Fuyue off guard too; he saw a trace of surprise in her eyes. She leaned forward, close to the table, and took her glasses off with her long fingers.
“You probably haven’t heard that Taro and Fumiko had a … sexual relationship. It happened a long time ago, before he left for America.”
She folded her glasses in a leisurely way and laid them on the table as she spoke, all without raising her eyes; she seemed purposely to be avoiding the look of astonishment on his face. Only after playfully lining up the shiny silver-framed glasses alongside the ashtray did she look up at him. She let out a quick burst of laughter.
“Imagine telling a perfect stranger a thing like this—you really must forgive me.” She laughed again.
But the next moment, just as she opened her mouth to go on with the story, she gave a little cry as she seemed to remember something. Reverting instantly to her usual brisk self, she reached for the glasses beside the ashtray and put them back on, then laid a hand on her purse and stood up.
“I forgot all about my sisters. I need to go and call them. I’ll be right back.”
As he watched her impressively erect figure pass through the room, Yusuke let out a long breath. What she said had taken him by surprise, but having once heard it, he had no doubt it was true. What an idiot he was for never having suspected that they had once been, if not lovers, physically intimate. Was he too naive a listener or was Fumiko too discreet a narrator? He couldn’t be sure.
Through the window blind he could see into the adjacent room, a lively dining room where white-jacketed waiters glided to and fro, candles flickered on tabletops, and couples and families, their faces lit up with an air of mild intoxication, chatted with apparent pleasure.
Yusuke recalled Fumiko’s matter-of-fact way of telling her story. She had even gone to the trouble of including words that seemed to cancel out the possibility of such a relationship. But as he thought further about it, he found her intention shifting. He began to suspect that at heart she hadn’t been so discreet after all; that rather, while misdirecting him on the surface, she might secretly have been hoping he would figure it out. With hindsight, he began to catch hints in what she’d said that pointed at the true nature of her and Taro’s relationship. He let out another long breath.
A dark figure materialized at the side of the table and laid a surprisingly stylish cocktail in front of him. The stem was green and the liquid in the transparent, conical glass was reddish violet, so that the drink looked like an exotic flower resting on a green stalk. On the table across from him, a tumbler, clear above, cut glass below, was set briskly down. It was faintly embarrassing to realize that of the two of them he, not she, had chosen the more feminine drink.
Some five minutes later Fuyue was back with apologies. “I didn’t wait,” said Yusuke, holding up his flowerlike cocktail. “No, no, of course not!” she said, sitting down. She took off her glasses again and laid them on the table. “My sisters just wouldn’t let me hang up …” She raised the tumbler to her lips and drained half its amber contents. She had evidently stopped off at the ladies’ room, for her lipstick shone more brightly against her freshly powdered skin. Beyond that, it seemed as if being away from her sisters had almost changed her physically. Altogether her appearance had an unexpected charm, something Yusuke found vaguely unsettling. This was a different Fuyue from the one who, as the youngest of the trio, was always at the others’ command. Maybe her rather mannish look in their company was a form of resistance, he thought, or a means of self-protection, to ward off their constant bossing.
Without looking him in the eye, Fuyue let her long fingers play with the glass on the table in front of her as she asked, “Were you already aware of what I told you just now?”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“I didn’t think she would tell you that part.” She looked up. “Actually, she doesn’t know that I know.” Her eyes were now on the tumbler. “Thank goodness.” She murmured this last almost to herself. “My sisters don’t know that I know either. But they grew suspicious long ago, and today, after the lawyer left, they brought it up again, saying there must have been something like that going on after all. I didn’t tell them anything, because I thought it wouldn’t be right, for Fumiko’s sake.” She raised her eyes again.
“But when I went to Oiwake and saw your face through the glass door—remember?—I felt immediately I could talk about it with you, that no harm could come of it. To go my whole life and never mention it to anyone would just be too hard.”
She downed the remainder of the amber fluid, turned toward the counter and held up her empty glass for the bartender to see, then turned around again. “A subject as improper … or as adult as this, I should say … is nothing to talk about sober.”
Fuyue had learned about their relationship more than twenty-five years earlier, she said, when, after the “elopement,” Yoko was released from the hospital and taken home to Sapporo by her mother. Though no longer in the Utagawas’ service, Fumiko had involved her own family in the search for Yoko and generally been such an enormous help that Fuyue had wanted to show her appreciation. That was how it started.
An ordinary thank-you gift of cash had seemed a bit too impersonal, and so one Sunday when she was out shopping at Mitsukoshi department store in the Ginza, she’d splurged on a black pearl brooch as a present for her. Wanting to see the look on Fumiko’s face when she opened the box
, and curious besides to see where she lived alone in the city, Fuyue had gone straight from the Ginza to Sangenjaya to deliver the gift, stopping to ask directions to Evergreen Apartments No. 2 at a police box by the station. This was a time when some apartment buildings still didn’t have even a telephone in the hall, and if Fumiko was not at home she was prepared to mail the package later. After finally tracking down the address, she was surprised to find a squalid-looking building—somewhere she would never have connected with anyone as well turned out as Fumiko. Still, it can’t have been easy for a single woman to support herself as an office worker in Tokyo, she’d thought, half persuaded and half hesitating as she made her way up a steep, narrow staircase where the smell of urine hung in the air. She located the room number and knocked softly on a door marked TSUCHIYA. No answer. She knocked a little louder. Again, no answer. She knocked still louder and called out Fumiko’s name, to no avail.
Just then the neighboring door opened, and an anemic-looking woman of around thirty stuck her head out. Her hair was in curlers and she had a pink nylon scarf wound around her head like a turban. “Looking for Miss Tsuchiya?” she asked. Fuyue said yes.
“She’s not here. She went out shopping for supper with her kid brother a while ago.”
“Her kid brother?” Fuyue repeated, puzzled.
The woman, with her head sticking out at an angle through the half-open door, let out a dirty laugh. The indecency of the sound was startling. She opened the door wider, and Fuyue saw that she was wearing tight mambo pants, her bare feet stuck in high-heeled plastic sandals.
“Some kid brother!” the woman sniggered. She sized up Fuyue, who was dressed in a summery linen suit and carrying a shopping bag from an exclusive department store. “She acts all la-di-da, then brings home that sexy piece of work. Dark and kind of different, but a real hunk, all right.”
Fuyue was speechless.
“I live right next door here, you see,” the woman said, leering.
There was no escape.
“Every night they do it. Two months, and they’re still doin’ it every night! Hot and heavy, night after night, hours at a time. Today too. Like all Sunday mornings, they’re at it first thing. Her voice carries right through the walls, know what I mean?”
A True Novel Page 64