Inheritance from Mother

by Minae Mizumura

  And yet one day she realized that she could no longer consider herself happy either. As the years piled on she had come to feel a sense of wrongness about her life, a sense that it wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. Eventually that sense of wrongness had entangled her in heavy, sticky filaments that dulled her skin as well as her heart. Her step lost its bounce, her smiles grew infrequent, the luster faded from her eyes. She found it hard to believe that she had ever been a happy little girl who would burst into song at the drop of a hat and twirl on her toes.

  Just when the change began, she wasn’t sure. It wasn’t the time she first discovered her husband’s infidelity (looking back, she realized there had been ominous signs even midway through their honeymoon). No, she became aware of the sticky meshes of woe only after her father was consigned to a dreary extended-care hospital. Or no, it was still earlier, when That Man first entered her mother’s life and cobwebs began to show on the ceilings of their house in Chitose Funabashi, where her father was left to sit alone, hollow-eyed.

  In these last few years, the heavy, sticky filaments had wrapped around Mitsuki with ever-increasing momentum—especially after she came down with that strange syndrome.

  That night, after sitting directly exposed to air-conditioning for hours, by the time she reached home she’d been ready to drop. After a night of restless sleep, she found that far from having recovered, she shivered with cold at the mere touch of her bedsheets. Her temperature usually registered on the high side, but in the morning it was quite low.

  She went to the hospital, where a young doctor in his thirties unsympathetically informed her, a middle-aged woman struggling to endure the hospital’s air-conditioning, “People don’t die even with a temperature lower than yours.” He didn’t write her a prescription.

  After coming home, she did some checking online and learned that the Western medical establishment dismissed sensitivity to the cold as “poor circulation.” The word and indeed the concept of air-conditioningitis seemed not to exist in the West. Yet on the Japanese Web, any number of women reported suffering from exposure to air-conditioning: their hands, feet, and lower abdomen turned to ice; their shoulders and back stiffened; they felt chronically fatigued. By far the most complaints were from women her age. Whether the syndrome was uniquely prevalent among Asians she didn’t know, but she began to take an herbal remedy prescribed by a woman specialist in traditional Chinese medicine, and she also started acupuncture treatments. She discovered that if she saw a specialist in psychosomatic medicine, she could get prescriptions for anti-anxiety drugs, antidepressants, and sleeping aids.

  As a child, Mitsuki had frequently caught colds and run high fevers, and as an adult she tired easily. Now there was never a day when she felt well. Added to her physical ailments was the ever-increasing burden of her aging mother, whose treatment of her late father she found impossible to forgive. Meanwhile, she went on dealing with her wayward husband as if nothing were wrong, trying not to think of her marriage, even as emptiness spread inside her.

  Her small misfortunes had resonated together like notes in a symphony, quickening and surging in a crescendo that reached a climax late last year. Or, to use the jo-ha-kyu terminology of the Noh master Zeami (she was, after all, Japanese), her troubles had built up to the frenetic kyu pitch.

  From the end of the year until her mother’s death eleven months later, life had been something of a nightmare.

  Wretched: as the nightmare progressed, Mitsuki had begun to think of herself this way. She remembered reading a fairy tale as a child about a princess who never laughed. A semi-invalid middle-aged woman who rarely laughed anymore should be allowed to consider herself wretched.

  It had happened last December 28 at two in the afternoon.

  Both Mitsuki and her husband were on winter vacation. He was supposed to be interviewed for a magazine and have his picture taken, so he set off at ten-thirty wearing a starched shirt with a mandarin collar—a style so popular among cultural commentators on TV that she referred to it privately as the “literati shirt.”

  That day she’d felt fine.

  Normally a short trip to the supermarket wore her out, and she would come home and lie down on the bed afterward, but that day she was energized from doing the New Year’s shopping. She quickly put the various delicacies, auspicious even if ready-made, in the refrigerator, then got on the stepladder and brought down a set of antique ceremonial lacquerware—a sake decanter and cups, a tiered box and plates, and a tray with legs—all packed in old cardboard boxes. She carefully wiped each piece and placed the set on top of the wooden cabinet that housed the TV. Though the lacquer was worn in spots, the utensils were exquisitely decorated with a pine pattern in raised lacquerwork, and the box lid bore a flying crane in mother-of-pearl inlay. The set was a family heirloom, but her mother hadn’t wanted it and her sister had no use for it, having been provided with a new set by her in-laws, so it came to Mitsuki by default.

  Next she got out a tall vase that she and Tetsuo had chosen together in Okinawa and placed in it a ready-made arrangement of green pine, silver branches, and red berries that she’d picked up at a flower shop on the way home—a miniature version of the traditional kadomatsu (gate pine) New Year’s decorations, scaled down to the needs of condominium residents. She placed the arrangement next to the lacquerware set, and the entire room took on a festive air.

  Every year on the last day of December, she and Tetsuo always went to his parents’ house in Toride, Ibaraki Prefecture, one of the most remote suburbs of the sprawling Tokyo metropolis. Mitsuki would stay two nights, New Year’s Eve and January 1, and come back January 2 for a celebration with just her mother and sister. Previously her mother had seemed to care little about “Katsura New Year’s,” but after That Man finally vanished from her life this had become a major event for her as, anxious to maintain ties with her daughters, even Natsuki, she was glad of an excuse for the three of them to get together. They still gathered every year in Mitsuki’s place, where Mitsuki used to bring her father from the hospital for New Year’s to feast on his favorite dishes and listen to his favorite Christmas music, even though he responded less and less as the years went by…

  But today, the twenty-eighth of December, was no time to sit idle, lost in memories. There was far too much work to do.

  She gave the pine branches a final touch and then went to her room. She had a rush translation job to finish, and the year-end housecleaning was waiting, not to mention the laundry. But before anything else, she wanted to see to some correspondence. She had just received two notices from old college friends saying they were in mourning after the loss of a parent and so would be refraining from offering customary New Year’s greetings. Having already sent out her New Year’s cards for delivery the morning of January 1, she needed to quickly get off letters of condolence.

  Was December a month when many old people died?

  Vaguely envious of her friends’ bereavement, she took out several sheets of handmade rice paper saved for just such occasions and wrote a few lines, using a fountain pen to make her writing as presentable as possible. As she took out matching envelopes, she recalled that the only postal stamps left in her drawer were inappropriate, featuring either bright flowers or ukiyo-e paintings. For letters of condolence, neither would do. She went into her husband’s study-cum-bedroom to look for some plain stamps.

  Usually she stayed out of his room. A large computer monitor sat on his desk, surrounded by a slew of books and papers, as befitted a scholar’s study. She knew that if she tidied his desk he wouldn’t be able to find anything, so when she cleaned she did no more than dust lightly and run the vacuum cleaner. She rarely had occasion to open his desk drawers.

  Now when she pulled open the top drawer, something colorful and pretty caught her eye. She picked it up to find it was a pocket tissue case of pink silk, embroidered with tiny flowers of blue, green, and yellow—the sort of thing sold in Asian goods boutiques catering to young people. A tiny f
lower garden. Tetsuo may have had his feminine side, but in the end he was a man. Generally he made do with packets of pocket tissue with advertising inserts that people handed out on the street for free, or with whatever she brought home from the supermarket. This embroidered tissue case had lain hidden in the drawer like a dainty fairy, yet its very daintiness was full of menace.

  He was seeing a young woman. She knew it in her bones.

  Usually if a person needed to borrow tissues, someone would hand him one or two. Could he have taken a whole packet like this, stuck it in his pocket, and brought it home without thinking, case and all? Impossible.

  As she stood there frozen, holding the menacing object in one hand, the telephone rang. She picked it up with her other hand. The caller was a woman whose voice she didn’t recognize.

  “Is this the residence of Ms. Mitsuki Hirayama?”

  The emergency notification card in her mother’s wallet listed Mitsuki’s name as the first contact.

  The woman identified the hospital she was calling from. “Your mother, Noriko Katsura, was brought in by ambulance with multiple fractures.”

  The tissue case in Mitsuki’s hand seemed to glow, as if mocking her.

  She immediately called her sister with the news. Natsuki responded in a fed-up tone, “Whaaat, not again? Well, I can’t always leave everything to you. I’ll go too.”

  Her sister never said, “I’ll go. You stay.” At a time like this it was always “I’ll go too.” Mitsuki checked her watch. Tetsuo would be in the middle of his interview, his cell phone switched off. He was punctilious about such things. She left a voice message for him: My mother fell and broke some bones again. I don’t know what’s going to happen tonight so please get something to eat on the way home, okay? And then rushed off to the hospital.

  While she sat waiting on a bench in front of the emergency treatment room, the pink tissue case rose to mind—only to yield to totally different thoughts that began racing through her brain like fire:

  Mother is dying.

  My mother is dying.

  Finally she’s going to die.

  But no. It couldn’t really be happening.

  The nurse on the telephone had been short on details, but she did explain that Mitsuki’s mother had slipped and fallen in front of a laundry shop near her house, breaking her hip and shoulder. The woman who ran the shop had called the ambulance.

  People didn’t die of broken hips or shoulders.

  “Is she conscious?” Mitsuki had asked.

  Yes, fully alert, the nurse had said.

  If she hadn’t hit her head, then there was even less chance she would die. Even as Mitsuki told herself this, a voice inside said, Still, she’s in her mid-eighties, you never know, she could die from the shock of the fall. Or maybe she did hit her head and there’s bleeding in the brain…Her mind produced one fatal scenario after another.

  In half an hour, the doors swung open and Mitsuki’s name was called. She went in and found spaces marked off by cream-colored curtains to the right and left. She was directed to one of them, and there was her mother lying faceup on the bed, looking quite herself, foundation and lipstick meticulously applied as usual.

  “Mitsuki!” she burst out as soon as she saw her daughter. “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!”

  PORTABLE TOILET

  Mitsuki had constantly begged her mother not to fall, not to cause any more trouble; that must be why she sounded so mortified. From the moment she slipped and fell, during the ambulance ride and all the time she was receiving treatment in the hospital, she must have been waiting apologetically for Mitsuki to appear. Her mother’s contrition would soon fade, Mitsuki knew, but she softened at this heartfelt appeal.

  The X-rays showed fractures to the right shoulder and the femoral neck of the right hip. The shoulder was shattered beyond repair. Both injuries would require surgery, followed by a month in the hospital and another two or three months of rehabilitation.

  “Will she be able to walk?” she asked the doctor.

  “That depends on her. If she makes the effort, then yes, I think she can walk again.”

  Her mother was lying down, her dark eyes wide open, looking from the doctor to Mitsuki and back. She was hard of hearing, so she had difficulty catching other people’s conversations. The doctor gave off an unmistakable air of being terribly busy, and Mitsuki refrained from asking further questions. After he was gone, she knelt at her mother’s bedside and repeated what he had said, then asked, “So how did you fall?”

  “I don’t know, it must’ve been the wind. Before I knew it I was flat on the ground.”

  She’d begun using a cane years ago, after a youth speeding on his bicycle had run into her, knocking her down. In time the cane was no longer enough, and when out on errands by herself she would push a wheeled walker with a basket. That day as she left the laundry shop and was trying to put some freshly starched and ironed sheets into the basket, a sudden gust of wind had knocked her to the ground.

  Natsuki finally showed up, looking as if she’d rushed over. Without so much as a ring on her finger, she somehow projected an aura of wealth.

  “Oh, Natsuki!” Their mother stretched out her left arm—the right arm was immobilized—for her elder daughter to grasp, which Natsuki did, looking faintly flustered. “I broke my bones again.”

  Natsuki seemed moved by this simple declaration. “It’s all right, Mother, you couldn’t help it.” Her tone was uncha­racte­risti­cally gentle.

  Mitsuki took advantage of her sister’s arrival to make a quick telephone call to her mother’s “care manager,” filling her in about the accident and asking her to cancel all visits by home helpers for the time being.

  “Oh, I’m terribly sorry to hear that,” said the care manager. “But I know your mother. She’s got magical strength. She’ll bounce back!”

  The woman’s usual bright tone helped Mitsuki to accept the situation, and it was comforting to know that home helpers would be on hand when her mother returned home.

  She had always been grateful that medical expenses for the elderly were virtually free. The primary burdens of caregiving, however—everything from grocery shopping to changing diapers—tended to fall disproportionately on female family members, so several years ago when the Long-Term Care Insurance system was finally introduced, she’d lost no time in putting in an application. A government-assigned care manager had soon appeared at her mother’s door, and ever since, this bright-voiced woman had seen to it that home helpers came by regularly.

  After the quick telephone call, there was some paperwork to do for admission to the hospital, and then the sisters set off for the family home to pick up various items their mother would need.

  When they returned, they found her in a double room in the bed by the window. Mitsuki, though she hated to deplete their mother’s savings, had requested a double room rather than a ward. Their father had spent seven long years in a ward and never once had a bed by the window; even in such small matters, their mother’s luck held strong.

  Then she spotted a urinary catheter and drainage bag hanging below the bed.

  No sooner did their mother see them than she wailed, “Oh, this is the end of the line for Noriko Katsura!” She had a habit of referring to herself in the third person when using a self-mocking tone. On her wrinkled face, with the makeup starting to come off, self-mockery was writ large.

  Mitsuki too thought this latest mishap would be the end of her mother, and no doubt so did Natsuki. Exactly how it would play out, she wasn’t sure. As their mother aged, and one by one the things she enjoyed fell away, her familiar cry of “I’ve got to have some fun while I still can!” had only intensified. She had continued her frantic search for any sort of gratification, however small. In any case, today marked the beginning of a stage of her life certain to contain far less gratification than ever before.

  Yet there was a long way to go before her life would be truly finished.

  “Come, come!” Mitsuki said
aloud with forced cheerfulness. “You’re not the type to reach the end of the line so easily. If you exert yourself, you’ll be on your feet again in no time.”

  She felt uncomfortable having this exchange in the hearing of the room’s other occupant, a woman separated from them only by a thin curtain, but she needed to speak loudly to make herself heard. The woman was around seventy. If she wasn’t stone deaf, she would soon realize that there was something a bit odd about the way this family talked among themselves, at times overly dramatic, at times drily cynical. They were not exactly your typical Japanese family.

  Her mother sighed. “I’d rather be dead.”

  “Well, you’re not dead,” Mitsuki replied. “You’ll just have to pick yourself up and go on. What else can you do?”

  “I should have died.”

  “You’ll have surgery and rehab. They’ll get you up walking again.”

  At the time, Mitsuki had still believed that her mother was likely to walk again. She would have a far harder time of it than before, but for the past few years she had been living downstairs anyway, and she should be able to totter around well enough with her cane.

  Her mother ignored Mitsuki’s assurances and looked about her. “Even if I run up a bill here I won’t go broke, will I?”

  “You’ll be fine.” Mitsuki sounded confident, but as she spoke she couldn’t help envisioning her mother’s shrinking savings balance.

  “And did you call my care manager?”

  “Yes, first thing.”

  “Good girl.” She turned to Natsuki, who had been silently putting things away. “Did you get all my medicines?”

  Whenever the three of them were together, Natsuki, always a bit sulky, let Mitsuki do the talking. Now in answer she held up a Ziploc bag with the medicines in it.