And yet I thought the place where the man and woman had enjoyed their romance in my memory must have been very similar. The hills, the vast lake, and the brilliant sunlight were all the same.
But that lake I held in my memory was someplace I had drawn for myself, just as I pleased, over many years. I couldn’t really have remembered the shore and the reeds and silver grass that grew there, even the contours of the hills, with such perfect clarity—not at that age. If I recalled anything, it was most likely the strength of the sunlight beating down onto the lake.
It didn’t matter, though. The lake I had seen in my childhood must have been a lot like this. I had seen many lakes in my life, but never before had I stood on a shore this bright.
“It’s dazzling,” I said, repeating myself.
“You get that up in these northern provinces, I’d say,” the driver said. “There’s a special brightness to everything in spring up here, not just the lakes.”
It occurred to me that maybe the lake I recalled had been in the northern provinces somewhere—it wasn’t just the driver’s words that made me think so. And now that I’d had the thought, I began to feel I was probably right about that, even if I couldn’t identify which lake it had been.
And I had a reason for feeling this way, too. My father, who had graduated from Kanazawa Medical College before enrolling in the Army Medical School as a commissioned officer, lived in Kanazawa briefly, immediately after he graduated from Army School—maybe he was there doing research at his alma mater, I’m not sure—and so I, too, had spent part of my childhood there.
Two years or so passed after that drive along the shore of Lake Kitakata before I asked my mother if a maid or someone else might have taken me to a lake during our time in Kanazawa when I was little. She answered that she and my father were so young in those days they certainly weren’t in any position to employ a maid. If someone had taken me to a place like that, she went on, it was probably a young woman named Mitsu, a distant relation who had left home for a time to escape some kind of trouble and came to stay with my mother.
I had always called this young woman “Aunt Omitsu,” but she had died around the time I started elementary school, or maybe even earlier; she was only twenty or so. As a result, while speaking of the deceased as “Aunt Omitsu” felt perfectly natural when she came up in conversation, I had no memory of the woman herself.
About a year before she died, Aunt Omitsu had married a young official in the Forestry Bureau, which had a branch office in her village, and she left a child behind; somehow it was never entirely certain what the cause of death had been. It was an illness, of course, but after her death all kinds of rumors circulated—that she had poisoned herself, or accidentally overdosed on medicine.
“Made no end of trouble while she was alive, that girl, and stirred up more when she died.”
Several times, I had heard my mother comment on her unfortunate relative in this way. And she wasn’t the only one. To some extent, most of those who had known Mitsu had similar things to say when the conversation turned in her direction.
As a child, influenced by the thinking of the people around me, I had acquired a vague sense that the woman I knew as Aunt Omitsu was a bad person. The name made me think of a garishly colored moth, strewing white powder everywhere as it flew.
Two incidents explained Mitsu’s bad reputation among my relatives: she had withdrawn from the girls’ school she attended after some conflict about whether or not she had sent a love letter to a male student; and then, after she quit, when she was supposed to be staying at home on her best behavior, she had gotten romantically involved with Miwa, the young official in the Forestry Bureau, become pregnant with his child, and married him only after she learned that she was expecting.
Neither of these incidents was remarkable in the least—such things happen all the time—but out in the countryside people appear to have regarded her as an extremely lewd woman.
During my student days, however, I came to see Mitsu in a slightly different light. This change in perspective was brought about because I had a few occasions, talking with people when I went back to visit my hometown on the Izu peninsula, to hear stories about her.
By then, almost two decades had passed since she died, and naturally my relatives’ attitudes toward her had shifted. They started making excuses for her, commenting that she had been too beautiful for her own good, or that in the end she had just been too much of a child.
As I recall, I made the first adjustment to my childhood image of Aunt Omitsu in my first year at college, when I returned home for the Festival of the Dead. I stayed at my uncle’s house on that trip, and while I was there I heard talk about a man named Ryōhei who had left the village and now ran a successful business selling Western goods in Yokohama.
“I hear Ryōhei’s in town,” my uncle said. “How many years has it been, I wonder? Used to come down every year to say a prayer for Omitsu at her grave. Guess his passions have cooled.”
When I asked why he visited Aunt Omitsu’s grave, my aunt jumped in.
“There’s a riddle,” she said, laughing. “Must have liked her, don’t you think?”
“Not a riddle Ryōhei will ever solve, though, now she’s dead,” my uncle said.
The next day, I saw the middle-aged man they had been talking about, Ryōhei, walk past the house in a suit. He was thin with an honest air and a receding hairline; he had the composed manner, as he greeted people in the street, of a moderately successful man.
When he and Mitsu were young, there had been some discussion of their marrying—that was the extent of their relationship. There don’t seem to have been any amorous goings-on between them; it was an ordinary match, arranged by a third party. In the end, for whatever reason, the discussions fell apart, and the possibility of a match between them faded.
The rumor that Ryōhei had been in love with Mitsu made its way around the village only after she got married, gave birth to her child, and left the world behind shortly after.
Ryōhei had already moved to Yokohama by then, but each July he would go home for the Festival of the Dead and pay his respects at Mitsu’s grave. He never visited any of his relatives’ graves, aside from his own immediate family’s plot, but he made sure to go to Mitsu’s before he left. This gave rise to the rumor that he had been seriously in love with her, which gradually spread.
Year after year, Ryōhei kept coming to pray at Mitsu’s grave, as if he were making the trip down expressly to lend credence to those village rumors. Each time the Festival of the Dead rolled around, without fail, the villagers would start talking about him again. Evidently this continued for years.
I heard about one more incident back then, when I was in school. It seems a cousin of Mitsu’s, a man by the name of Togashi Kiyoji who worked in lumber, had declared in his youth that he wanted to marry Mitsu; he ran into stiff resistance from the whole family on account of the fact that he and she were cousins, and in the end he had gone after Mitsu’s older brother, who was the most vehemently opposed, chasing after him with a carving knife.
Togashi Kiyoji was a good friend of mine. Whenever I went back to my hometown, we would go out and cast nets into the river together.
Until I heard that story, I would never have believed Togashi could have such an incident in his past. He was a good man, carefree, happy-go-lucky. I couldn’t imagine him ever being seized by such violent passion, even temporarily.
And then there was one more story—this one from a slightly later time, after I graduated college and joined society—about the eldest son of the owner of a very large jewelry store in Tokyo, who had made Mitsu a formal offer of marriage, relying on the services of a go-between.
On this occasion, Mitsu’s father had refused, saying the families were separated by too wide a gap, and that he would be incapable of preparing adequately for the wedding.
The jeweler’s son, who was enrolled at a private university in Tokyo, came down shortly after to meet with Mits
u himself, but she happened to be visiting a town several kilometers off when he arrived, so he stayed at the village inn that night and went back to the city without seeing her. Two years later, he killed himself in Tokyo. The newspapers said he’d been studying too hard for the upper civil service exam, that he suffered a nervous breakdown and poisoned himself, but it had happened almost immediately after Mitsu passed away, and people in the village assumed his death was related to hers.
Somewhere along the way, as I learned of these incidents involving Mitsu, I began little by little to amend my childhood image of Aunt Omitsu.
For someone who lived only twenty years, Mitsu certainly managed to make a lot of waves in the lives around her. And while those involved might have disagreed, from a more neutral perspective there was something gorgeous and colorful about all those waves—something that not only failed to strike me, young man that I was then, as legitimate material to use in criticizing her, but actually gave me the impression that she was a very special woman, lovely and intriguing. She had stirred up all kinds of trouble, and then, just like that, she died. In a sense, it was almost awe-inspiring.
When my mother suggested that it might have been Mitsu who took me to the lake, the woman I had known as “Aunt Omitsu” appeared before me for the first time as a figure connected to my own life.
“Now that you mention it, she did seem quite fond of you,” my mother said. “Very fair skin she had. The sort of face men fall for, I guess you could say, not really a great beauty—but things were never quiet around her, that was for sure. Must have been her personality they liked, I suppose… She seemed fond of you, though, it’s true.”
Knowing my mother, I suspect that—young as she was at the time—she must have been among Mitsu’s strictest guardians; and yet, listening to her talk, I sensed only the faint nostalgia one feels for those who died long ago.
“When she stayed with us in Kanazawa that time—we didn’t know it, but she was carrying a child in her belly then. That was Kōnosuke.”
Kōnosuke was the boy she had left behind when she died—a small, fair-skinned electrician whom I had met two or three times at family gatherings. I was slightly shocked, somehow, when my mother told me that. Because I found myself recalling the couple making love in my little snippet of memory, and it occurred to me that maybe it had some connection to Kōnosuke’s birth.
But when I asked my mother whether Kōnosuke’s father, Miwa, had ever come to Kanazawa, she immediately knocked that idea down.
“No, he was a mild, timid sort of man, Miwa was, and when Mitsu started getting a reputation in the village, he turned into a big coward—he wasn’t in any shape to be visiting Kanazawa,” she said. “Besides, Mitsu seemed to have got sick of him finally, him being the sort of man he was, and she wasn’t eager to marry him. But then in the end she was pregnant, after all. She gave birth right after she left us, and went back.”
“Didn’t you notice she was getting big?”
“It’s hard to believe we were so oblivious, but no, we didn’t. I was young, of course, but I have the feeling she must have been unusually small, too.” My mother chuckled, then added that maybe the baby in Mitsu’s belly hadn’t grown very big because his mother didn’t care much for his father.
In short, Mitsu’s pregnancy led her into a marriage she didn’t really desire. Of course, people were pressuring them to marry, too, whether or not they wanted to.
I got the sense that the special circumstances of their marriage had something to do with Mitsu’s staying with us in Kanazawa during her pregnancy, and then after her death with the spread of those nasty rumors.
Naturally, I’ll never know the true location of that picture in my memory—of that shore, glowing the way it only ever could in spring—or be certain who that couple was. All I have is this single card, and I don’t know who else might have another to lay down beside it, or whether such a card can even be found in this world, or if it has long since vanished without a trace. Either way, this picture alone stands out among my few fragmentary childhood memories for the clarity with which it is drawn.
Now, whenever I recall that scene, I think of it, for no good reason, as having taken place on that little lake near the Sea of Japan, Lake Kitakata, and tell myself that the people who appear in it are Aunt Omitsu and her lover, a man no one alive knows anything about. And it seems that as time goes by, this supposition is slowly being transformed in my heart into a matter of unquestionable fact.
Was her lover, the man who lifted me in his arms and strode with me into the waters of the lake, someone she had met for the first time only after she came to Kanazawa?
Of course, it doesn’t matter. However I imagine it, I am still only imagining.
I know the indescribable brilliance of the spring sunlight that streamed down onto the face of the lake that day. That’s all. The woman in that scene may have carried a tiny life inside her; that has no bearing on the picture’s meaning, none at all. It does not make her lewd, or self-indulgent.
Sometimes, the twenty brief years of Mitsu’s life appear to me to have possessed an extraordinary breadth. It happens when I think of her bare, fair-skinned arms reaching out in my direction, and the water sparkling behind them. But I don’t know what makes me feel that way.
MR. GOODALL’S GLOVES
THIS AUTUMN, in the course of a trip down to Kyūshū to take care of some business, I set foot for the first time in Nagasaki, a city I had never before had the good fortune to visit, and in the course of my stay I happened upon certain objects that reminded me of two figures who lived in the Meiji period, both of whom have some connection to my own life.
The first was a sample of Matsumoto Jun’s calligraphy. The evening I arrived in Nagasaki, a friend invited me to K., an expensive restaurant notable as one of the venues where “men of high purpose” gathered and made merry during the Restoration. Worn out from traveling, I would have preferred to take it easy at the inn where I was staying, but it seemed heartless to reject the hospitality of a friend I had not seen in years; and so, in the end, I did go to the restaurant, which was tucked away in a corner of an entertainment district called Maruyama that has been built on the mountainside, on a rather steep slope, and is evidently classified as one of Nagasaki’s historic sites.
Hearing that the place had been favored by Restoration-era patriots called up images of the rowdy tumultuousness that took hold of similarly luxurious establishments across the country during the war, as commissioned officers in the army and navy claimed them for their own private use, behaving as they pleased, with no regard for anyone else, and these memories made me somewhat hesitant to visit such a place. Once I stepped through the old-style entryway, though, with its two hanging lanterns outside, each so big I could barely have put my arms around it, and the great buckets of water lined up along the wall in case of fire, I felt a kind of nostalgia for the dreams of old warriors whose traces lingered here, and since the architecture was in the style of an earlier era of which few examples remain in Japan in this day and age, I decided that it was, after all, worth having a look.
Partway down a long, winding hall my friend and I were offered straw sandals to wear and taken out to see the spacious garden; after that, we were shown to the large room on the second floor where the patriots had had their gatherings.
According to the explanation we were given by a middle-aged woman who could have been either the proprietress or the head serving woman, Takasugi Shinsaku, Sakamoto Ryōma and various others had come here to enjoy themselves, to plot against the shogunate, and to plan their “Naval Auxiliary Force.” Gesturing at a spot on the pillar in the alcove, she informed us that we could see gashes there that Sakamoto Ryōma had left during a sword dance. It was true: the old pillar, made from mulberry or some similar wood, bore two scars that looked to have been made by a sword.
A scroll by Rai San’yō hung in the alcove. And just to the side of the alcove, leaning outward from the transom, was a horizontal frame hold
ing a work of calligraphy large enough to suit the spacious room. I gazed up at the piece, assuming it must have been done by another of the patriots, only to find that the four thick characters, which read “Compose on the flowers, sing of the moon,” had been signed “Ranchū,” and that in the square stamp under the signature I could clearly make out the name Matsumoto Jun.
That a sample of calligraphy by Ranchū, aka Matsumoto Jun, should be hanging in such a place was entirely unexpected, and it evoked a certain nostalgia in me, as though I had bumped into an old friend I had not seen in ages in some spot where I would never have thought to run into him.
Matsumoto Jun was a doctor who was active from the final decade of shogunal rule into the Meiji era, and while he was not as widely known as the old patriots, as they are called, one could not possibly tell the history of medicine in Japan without referencing his name. As it happens, my great-grandfather was one of his pupils, and the relationship between them went deeper than that of mere master and disciple; as a result, I was used to hearing his name from the time I was small.
I asked the woman who was taking us around about Matsumoto Jun, but she knew nothing at all about him. She went down to the reception area to ask how his calligraphy had come to be hanging in the room, but in the end all she could tell us was that the owners said it had been there for as long as they knew, and they had left it up because there was no particular reason to take it down; beyond that, the most they could offer was that the calligrapher had been a doctor.
Though at first the writing had felt out of place, upon reflection I realized it wasn’t really all that surprising that Matsumoto Jun should have come here to enjoy himself.
Looking him up in a biographical dictionary, this is what one finds:
Matsumoto Jun; childhood name Ryōjun; pen name Ranchū. Second son of Sakura domain physician Satō Taizen. Born on the 16th of the 6th month of Tenpō 3. In Kaei 3, having been adopted as successor by shogunal physician Matsumoto Ryōsuke, he was dispatched by the shogunate to study in Nagasaki; upon returning to Edo he opened his own school and took pupils. In Meiji 1, during the Boshin War, he was imprisoned after establishing a hospital in Aizu to tend to the Northeast Army troops; subsequently pardoned, he went on to found a hospital in Waseda, then through Lord Yamagata obtained a post in the Ministry of War, where he worked tirelessly to set up the Army Medical Division and the Army Hospital in Hanzōmon. During the Saga Rebellion, the Conquest of Taiwan, the Seinan War, and other conflicts, he presided over medical affairs from Tokyo, serving as the country’s first surgeon general. The convention by which families of fallen soldiers make pledgets with their own hands to send to the front is said to originate in a proposal he made to the government. In Meiji 23, Matsumoto joined the House of Peers; in Meiji 28, he became a baron. He died on March 23, Meiji 40, at the age of 76.
Life of a Counterfeiter Page 7
