Inheritance from Mother

by Minae Mizumura

  Mitsuki grew up unhurt by these jabs. Her grandmother told her she was pretty and so did her sister. Other people assured her she looked pretty as well. In an impoverished Japan just recovering from the war, a little girl in matching outfits with her sister, sometimes even wearing white gloves and clutching a little purse her father had brought back from America, couldn’t have helped being adorable.

  Besides, her mother had never singled Natsuki out for praise on account of her looks, even though she resembled her and was much the prettier of the two. If Natsuki wasn’t belittled like Mitsuki, neither was she considered particularly beautiful—a source of some pain to her.

  Natsuki got hurt easily anyway.

  In their mother Noriko’s astonishingly unshakable view, the word “beauty” applied only to a goddess of the silver screen, whether of the East or the West—the sort she had swooned over as a schoolgirl. In the real world, the word referred to someone like herself with finely sculpted features of a vaguely Western cast. Others had regarded “O-Miya” as a beauty, in her prime, but Noriko had only ever known her mother as a doddering old woman and seemed to give the idea short shrift. Her assessment of her daughters was no less critical.

  As an adult, Mitsuki came to understand that mothers have a streak of sadism in their treatment of their daughters. Her mother, whose standards for beauty were so stringent, had seemed to take pleasure in looking down on her and her sister.

  In private, they had voiced their dissatisfaction: “If she wanted us to be beautiful, what on earth did she marry him for?” Their father was never known for his looks. “You can say that again.” “I mean really!” They had chattered on in this vein, forgetting that if their mother hadn’t married their father, neither of them would ever have been born.

  Their mother not only belittled Mitsuki for her looks, or rather her lack of them; she pitied her. Even in height, Mitsuki lagged behind the others. And alas, she resembled their father.

  “Still, you have gotten better-looking.” As she grew up, their mother would offer such scant comfort—comfort that was as presumptuous as it was unnecessary. By the time she was old enough to be conscious of men’s glances, plenty of them were heading her way. Soon men started to flutter around her. So in the end Mitsuki too joined the ranks of les belles—the pretty young things.

  Even now, when she was out walking, taking the train, or entering a restaurant, she would look around at young girls and marvel. Whether from heredity or upbringing or the mix of hormones that had bathed them in the womb, girls’ consciousness of their femininity varied. Some of them seemed so oblivious that she could picture them as they must have been yesterday, covered with mud on the soccer field. Others exuded awareness from head to toe, some giving off a soft fragrance and others a deadly perfume. It had less to do with their clothing and more to do with subtle mannerisms—a way of sitting or moving the head.

  Natsuki’s and Mitsuki’s mother was decidedly feminine, and their grandmother, having been a geisha in youth, must have been so in her day as well. The sisters also were definitely more conscious of their femininity than most girls, if less so than their mother. In this day and age, that wasn’t such a good thing. Very feminine girls did not, for the most part, devote themselves to their studies. As a result, they couldn’t hope to enter a top university and get a top job. “That’s why I make it a point never to go on about a woman’s appearance in front of Jun,” Natsuki often said. The mother of a girl and a boy, she had given her daughter the breezy, androgynous name “Jun” and was careful not to raise her the way she herself had been brought up.

  But being aware of one’s femininity wasn’t altogether a bad thing either. Fortunately for Natsuki and Mitsuki, they had grown up at a time when girls like them were only expected to find a husband. “Pretty young things” could, in the season of ripening cherries, give themselves over headlong to the folly of youth.

  Looking back, she thought that must be why she had been so involved in the drama club in college while studying French literature with other “pretty young things.” That must be why after graduation she’d poured all her earnings from tutoring English into voice lessons and rejoiced on receiving bit parts at a theater through connections to former members of the drama club. Eventually a girl she met at the theater had taken her to a chansonnier on the Ginza and arranged for her to sing there on slow nights, which she had done with great satisfaction, all for the same reason.

  Young girls fresh out of college were made much of everywhere.

  Mitsuki was all the more valued at the chansonnier since not only did she take after her mother and sing a little, but she also had her father’s gift for languages and could, with the aid of a dictionary, translate the back covers and lyrics of albums imported directly from France. What if she had gone on working and singing there, she sometimes wondered. What would have happened? For one thing, she would never have met Tetsuo. At the time she had assumed people were supposed to get married, so she probably would have married someone, but who?

  Their mother had always been preoccupied with Natsuki, a tendency that grew even stronger just as Mitsuki was making her debut as a “pretty young thing”: first, she’d sent Natsuki to Freiburg to study, and then she’d had to send their father to bring her back home—and before that hubbub had time to die down, the undreamed-of marriage proposal had come out of the blue. Their mother, still working then for Auntie, had no attention to spare for what her younger daughter might be doing after college.

  Only when everything quieted down and she finally caught her breath did she realize that Mitsuki was dabbling in activities that were vaguely improper. Daughters, even if they found jobs, were expected to retire happily upon marrying. Natsuki hadn’t looked for employment after graduating from a music conservatory. Before going to Freiburg, she had taught piano to neighborhood children while continuing her own lessons in preparation for her studies abroad. But unlike Natsuki, Mitsuki had no clear objective in life. What’s more, the chansonnier where she worked served liquor, and on evenings when she was asked to sing, she also entertained drunken customers, returning home late at night.

  Mitsuki’s mother couldn’t very well force her to find a job. But one day, she found an opportunity to ask Mitsuki what she intended to do with her life. She’d been out of college for some two years. It was a balmy spring afternoon, and the two of them, her mother then still in her fifties, were folding laundry.

  “Mitsuki, what do you want to do with yourself?”

  STONE BROKE

  “You know,” her mother said, reaching for a towel, “a proper young lady shouldn’t spend time in a place like that.”

  By “a place like that” she meant the chansonnier.

  “Everyone there takes their work seriously,” said Mitsuki, folding her father’s white underwear. The faces of the other singing staff rose in her mind. France still epitomized Western civilization, and the chanson was the fragrant, last fleeting flower of the country’s golden age. Many of those engaged in transplanting that flower here in this Far Eastern archipelago were dedicated students of the art. “And I only sing now and then.”

  “I know. If I were only younger, I’d like to do something like that myself.”

  The topic was a delicate one; Mitsuki sensed that her mother was attempting to placate her.

  “Anyway, I know you’re too smart to take up drinking and smoking just because you frequent a place like that.”

  This was a subtle dig at Natsuki, who had fallen into such unladylike habits in Freiburg.

  “But you can’t go on this way forever, you know. You need to settle down.”

  Mitsuki sensed that her mother meant “You need to find a husband before it’s too late,” but was refraining from saying so out loud. Women were supposed to marry before the age of twenty-five. Mitsuki did plan to marry someday, but after being left to her own devices for so long, she found it annoying to have the topic brought up. Without thinking, she countered, “Just pretend I’m studying abr
oad in Paris. At a bargain price.”

  After a moment, her mother quietly asked, “Mitsuki, do you want to study in Paris?” Her hands had left off folding towels.

  Picking her father’s socks out of the laundry pile, which smelled of spring sunshine, Mitsuki said, “It doesn’t matter if I do or not, does it? We’re stone broke.”

  As she said the words “stone broke,” her voice might have revealed a trace of rancor. She knew the family coffers must be nearly empty. She went on laying out her father’s socks in a pool of sunshine on the table while images of her family’s profligacy over the past few years unfolded in her head like scenes from a movie. In every case, her mother had loosened the purse strings for Natsuki.

  First came Natsuki’s two years in Freiburg. The exchange rate, after over two decades at 360 yen to the dollar, had risen, but even so, the expense had been considerable.

  Then there was the rebuilding of the house in Chitose Funabashi, undertaken during Natsuki’s absence so it wouldn’t interfere with her practicing. The rest of them could live in an apartment while the new house was being built. Their practical mother had planned this long before Natsuki ever left. For one thing, the old house, built after the war, was showing its age, but beyond that, she had in mind her daughters’ coming marriages—particularly that of Natsuki. Eventually both girls would find husbands, she reasoned, and when talk of marriage arose it would look better if they were living in a nicer house. Since rebuilding was inevitable anyway, they might as well do it when they had the chance. An architect acquaintance of hers oversaw the construction of a house designed to her taste, not large, but vaguely Western in style. Grandma was by then long gone, so the new house had no tatami rooms.

  They’d taken out a loan to pay part of the construction cost, but the rental apartment and moving expenses had not been cheap. They’d also bought some new furniture, including the large dining room table where Mitsuki and her mother were now sorting laundry.

  Shortly after they’d finally moved into the new house, a thick airmail envelope edged in red and blue—not the usual aerogram—arrived from Natsuki. She wrote that she wanted to stay on in Germany another year and continue her studies. Instantly her mother sensed that this was not the whole story. She placed an overseas call and grilled Natsuki, who finally grudgingly admitted she was having an affair with a German professor of piano, a married man with a family.

  “I knew there was something fishy about that child volunteering to stay on and continue with her piano.” Her mother had spoken with barely repressed anger.

  Natsuki had set off from Japan forlorn and on the edge of tears, and after arriving in Germany she had sent letter after letter with a litany of complaints—the food in the dormitory was awful, nothing but potatoes and cabbage; her room was cold; Germans weren’t nice—and expressing her longing to go home.

  After a year or so, the letters tapered off. Once the affair came out into the open, her mother had ordered her to return home immediately, but Natsuki dug in her heels and refused. On opposite sides of the earth, mother and daughter shouted at one another over the phone day after day, at a time when the cost of international calls was prohibitively high. Finally her father had been forced to fly to Germany and bring her back, at even greater expense.

  Once home, Natsuki had done nothing but sulk, yet in less than a year she’d received a marriage offer beyond anybody’s dreams. When she flew off from Haneda Airport, she had been a typical Japanese young lady; she came back an Asian woman of indeterminate nationality. The daughter who had listened obediently to her mother was gone. She let her wiry, slightly frizzy hair hang loose down her back, hippie style, and wore tight jeans and high heels. No matter what her parents said, she obstinately resisted changing her behavior.

  “Why did we ever let her go?” muttered her father, to which her mother replied, “Who ever thought she could be this stubborn?”

  Only in visiting the home of her mother’s relatives, always referred to as “Yokohama,” did Natsuki show resignation, or better yet, philosophical acceptance. She would even put on a skirt at her mother’s urging and kept mum about her indiscretion in Germany. Knowing her mother’s fixation on “Yokohama,” she must not have had the nerve to rebel.

  Philosophical acceptance led eventually to marriage to Yuji, another frequent visitor at “Yokohama,” and still more outlandish expenses for the family.

  While Mitsuki gathered up her father’s socks, her thoughts turned to the elaborate wedding for Natsuki and Yuji in the Imperial Hotel, so vivid in her memory that it might have been the day before. The glitter of chandeliers in the wedding hall ceiling rose in her mind’s eye (why did wedding hall chandeliers always look so garish?). She could see her mother greeting guests, more flushed with excitement than the bride as she floated gracefully through the sea of men in black morning coats and women in black crested kimono. She was reminded once again of the strength of her mother’s lifelong attachment to “Yokohama,” and familiar feelings assailed her, the basso ostinato of her life. Deliberately avoiding looking her mother in the eye, she began laying out pairs of her father’s socks on the table.

  “Mitsuki, do you want to study in Paris?” Her mother stopped folding laundry and repeated the question.

  “It doesn’t really matter if I do or not, does it?” Looking down, Mitsuki repeated her answer.

  The swirl of emotions inside her darkened further. Her mother’s sudden question struck her with awareness of something she normally gave little thought to: the unequal treatment of her and her sister. “Yokohama,” the hilltop house named after the nearby port, had lodged in her mother’s heart since girlhood with the particular shine of things forbidden—and so, for as long as she could remember, Mitsuki and her sister had been treated unequally. The inequality was as regular and predictable as the sun’s rising in the east.

  LESSONS AT “YOKOHAMA”

  One day back when Mitsuki was in the fifth grade or so, the three of them—her mother, her sister, and herself—had got off the train near Yokohama and climbed the twisting road that led to the house on the hilltop. Along the way, they passed the wintry park on the right. The uphill path was long for Mitsuki’s small legs, all the more so because she had to fight the north wind sweeping down from the crest of the hill.

  It was getting on toward evening, the hour when the day’s melancholy hangs heavy in the air.

  “Mitsuki,” her mother said, turning to her, “take your sister’s bag.” In response to Mitsuki’s wondering look, she explained, “If her fingers get frozen, she won’t be able to play well at her lesson.”

  Natsuki’s music bag wasn’t heavy, but Mitsuki was shocked by her mother’s command. This happened at a time of great disparity in the sisters’ physiques. Natsuki, already in middle school, was bursting with health. She had begun menstruating and was tall and well filled out. Mitsuki, whose growth was slower, had a sticklike body balanced on a pair of childish legs that looked as if they might snap in two.

  Her mother had issued the command with the two of them right before her eyes.

  Natsuki may not have felt comfortable handing over her bag to her little sister, but their mother’s command was absolute.

  Mitsuki’s soul slipped out of her small body and looked down from on high at the three of them climbing the slope. Leading the way was her mother, wearing more makeup than usual and wrapped in a woolen coat, her heart a mix of eight parts excitement and two parts anxiety. She was nervous about whether Natsuki would be able to demonstrate the fruits of her practicing. Behind her came the two sisters, a pair of ducklings, one large and one small, trailing up the hill after the mother duck.

  Natsuki, the larger duckling, definitely wasn’t thinking about anything. Mitsuki, the smaller duckling, had likewise thought of nothing until she was handed the music bag, merely moving her childish legs automatically and getting out of breath. With this sudden imposition, she felt not bitterness but something more like righteous indignation stirring in her i
mmature heart.

  Mothers were supposed to be fair.

  All the unfairness she had suffered until then was encapsulated in that moment. Forever after, whenever she encountered an instance of the ongoing unfairness, this indelible scene from her childhood rose unbidden in her heart.

  It wasn’t as if she had never been given the opportunity to play the piano. At the time, piano lessons were de rigueur for every family that could afford them. Back in the Edo period, unmarried girls used to write poetry, study calligraphy, play the koto, and learn traditional dancing, but as the country modernized, the contents of such lessons gradually shifted, becoming more and more Westernized until one kind of lesson came to symbolize the enlightenment brought about by the West: piano lessons. That pianos were available only to daughters of the well-to-do gave the lessons even more cachet. The image of a graceful woman seated in a Western parlor before a darkly gleaming piano, slim fingers dancing over the keys, was implanted in girls’ hearts; and after the war, as Japan became increasingly wealthy, families who could manage it vied to buy pianos (usually the modest upright kind) so their young daughters could learn to play “Für Elise” and “Turkish March.”

  Her own family was no different. But individual dreams intertwine with the flow of history in myriad ways. Her mother’s unfulfilled dream had borne a touch of pathos. And so Natsuki, the elder daughter, had been fated to study piano with Uncle Yokohama even before she was born. To make matters easier, she had inherited more of their mother’s looks than Mitsuki and temperamentally was much more suited to the piano. In the way of all mothers, their mother had sought to relive her life through Natsuki, but with a determination made all the more intense by her passionate nature.

  At first the sisters had studied with the same teacher. Every Saturday, after school they would have a quick lunch, change into good clothes, and set off again, music bags in hand. Uncle Yokohama did not teach children; about this he was adamant. And so for the first few years they had learned the basics together from a most charming student of his, his favorite. After a while, Natsuki alone moved on to Uncle Yokohama. Mitsuki, still small, didn’t really understand what this meant, and as she wasn’t crazy about practicing anyway, she often felt that she might be the lucky one.