Then he came to the place where the cottage had been.
There was emptiness. The dilapidated house was nowhere to be seen. The two gateposts still stood, just as the surrounding thicket did, but the ground where the cottage had been was now nothing but black, bare earth. Only then—only then did the week come back to him with painful clarity. He stood by the posts for a long time staring at the dark earth. At last, a dusting of fine ash blew up from the ground into the air, where, lit by beams of invisible moonlight, it danced in space.
Yusuke left for the United States three months later.
Epilogue
IN SEPTEMBER 1998, I took the new high-speed train to Nagano that had been built in time for the Winter Olympic Games half a year earlier. As I’d expected, Kinokuniya supermarket was gone, but following Yusuke Kato’s directions, I turned a corner on a street lined with fir trees and there they were, behind an imposing gate, the pair of Western villas. Locating them was easy. The first thing I noticed was the new nameplate on one of the moss-covered gateposts, marked TSUCHIYA. It was a small wooden plate, hanging modestly below a granite nameplate marked SHIGEMITSU that was inlaid in the volcanic rock from Mount Asama. It was probably at Fumiko Tsuchiya’s insistence that the Shigemitsu nameplate was left there. On the other gatepost too, the nameplates SAEGUSA and UTAGAWA still remained. Finding the site of the Oiwake cottage proved to be difficult. I eventually stumbled on a place that I thought must be it—only because there was a pair of wooden posts marking the driveway. There was no other sign. Surrounded at a distance by a number of abandoned cottages, and amid tall pampas grass heavy with silver plumes, only in that one place was the grass lower in height. I saw no trace of the bare black earth that Yusuke had described. Along with vines and weeds left to grow unchecked, the ground was covered with autumn wildflowers. That a mere three years earlier a cottage had stood there seemed like a figment of the imagination. Time had worn it all away.
PAMPAS GRASS
THE FAMILIES
MINAE MIZUMURA is one of the most important novelists writing in Japan today. Born in Tokyo, she moved with her family to Long Island, New York, when she was twelve. She studied French literature at Yale College and Yale Graduate School. Her other novels include Zoku meian (Light and Dark Continued), a sequel to the unfinished classic Light and Dark by Soseki Natsume, and Shishosetsu from left to right (An I-Novel from Left to Right), an autobiographical work. She lives in Tokyo and is currently working on the English translation of her work about the fall of languages in the age of English.
JULIET WINTERS CARPENTER studied Japanese literature at the University of Michigan and the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Tokyo. Carpenter’s translation of Kobo Abe’s novel Secret Rendezvous won the 1980 Japan—United States Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature.
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