Inheritance from Mother

by Minae Mizumura

  “Si, mi chiamano Mimi.” Yes, they call me Mimi. When Mitsuki was little, her mother’s soprano voice used to soar through the house thanks to the arias taught her by that tenor, whose family pedigree was every bit as illustrious as that of “Madama Butterfly.”

  Though she carried her head high in that world, Noriko understood that she and her tenor could not meet openly. For a while they used her tea ceremony and flower arranging lessons as pretexts to take long walks together. He promised to win over his parents and marry her—but he was studying voice with their support and was moreover about to leave for Germany to continue his studies there, again with their support. No sooner did he inform them of Noriko’s existence than he was sent packing on the first ship out of Yokohama.

  Accused of lax supervision, “Yokohama” could only apologize.

  Pity gave way to disapproval: instead of “poor Noriko,” people said, “Noriko, that little upstart.”

  THE FAMILY REGISTER

  There was nothing for it but to marry “that little upstart” off without delay. Having made up her mind to it, Noriko’s aunt plunged into the task with characteristic vigor—a vigor that Noriko herself was heir to. Armed with a suitable photograph of her niece, she moved resolutely beyond the pool of “Yokohama” regulars to ensure that the picture circulated among any and all families that might come up with a prospective groom. Noriko’s looks spoke for her. In person, her intelligence and quick wit were no less captivating. Just like that, a suitor appeared, one whom it was hard to fault.

  He wasn’t wealthy, but like her father he was of samurai stock and a college graduate. Seven years her elder, he earned a fair salary, and he was good-looking besides. Moreover, as the second son he wasn’t obliged to live with his parents. Best of all, he was willing to take in her mother. Anyone could see he was really too good a match for someone of Noriko’s background.

  Noriko’s aunt was satisfied with the fruits of her labors. Her father was grateful. Her mother, after the humiliation of being shunted off to relatives, could now look forward to living with her daughter again. Grandpa Yokohama, the one to whom Noriko felt the closest, had no doubt that this suitor was all she could want in a husband. At age nineteen, Noriko, “the little upstart,” felt the full weight of the pressure to marry, and with it a measure of relief.

  Wedding plans were set.

  Noriko’s father was determined to provide his daughter with a handsome dowry and so, in a departure unimaginable from the modest lifestyle he had always followed, he loosened his purse strings to buy her a pair of solid paulownia kimono chests from Kawagoe, a carved dressing table with cherry-blossom motif from Kamakura, and a set of bridal quilts of figured satin from Kyoto. This prodigality was a form of atonement for burdening his daughter with her mother. How could he have known that a few years down the road she would run off with another man—Natsuki and Mitsuki’s father?

  “If it weren’t for the war, I could never have married your father—the Katsura family was of good lineage. They would never have heard of it.”

  As children, Mitsuki and her sister had often heard their mother say this, without understanding what she meant. Puzzled by the absence of wedding pictures, they once asked her why there weren’t any. “Well, it was just after the war,” she said. Wartime suggested chaos and so, still without really understanding, they let it go.

  The truth came out after Mitsuki started college. One day for some reason their mother went to the ward office in Itabashi, where the old Katsura Clinic had been, to get a copy of the family register. Their father was away. After the three of them had eaten supper and cleared away the dishes, she sat at the table holding a manila envelope. “Natsuki and Mitsuki, come here.” There was tension in her voice. Mitsuki and her sister exchanged glances before joining her.

  “I took a good look at this copy of the family register,” she informed them. They stared at her blankly. After a pause she added, “I was married once before, but there’s no record of it here.”

  They were grown by then and took the revelation fairly calmly. It was their mother who seemed worked up. She explained that she hadn’t wanted to disturb them so she’d said nothing before, but in fact this was her second marriage. She had vaguely known that after World War II the family register system had undergone drastic change and was now focused on nuclear families, so the record of her illegitimacy was bound to disappear; but for years she had believed the current register must certainly contain a record of her divorce, which she had worried would hurt her daughters’ chances for marriage.

  At the time divorce had been considered beyond the pale.

  She spread out the bluish paper happily. “There isn’t even any record of your father’s divorce!”

  “Wait, you mean he was married before, too?” asked Mitsuki.

  “Well, yes.”

  This revelation was a bit more shocking. That someone like their mother might divorce and remarry they could well imagine, but the idea that their bookish father would do anything so bold came as a surprise.

  “How did that happen?” Natsuki asked.

  “His first wife was overly serious, not at all interesting. Not much to look at, either.” The answer was clear, concise, and resounding with superiority.

  Years later, they heard their father’s first wife had actually been a sweet, attractive woman; their mother had pushed her way into her house and made off with her husband by force, prying him from her grasp as the poor thing clung to him, weeping. This version of events came from relatives on their father’s side with no fondness for their mother, leaving its accuracy in doubt; yet knowing their mother, it was strangely credible. The first marriage hadn’t been long and was childless, so his first wife had gone home to her parents and eventually remarried.

  Mitsuki became a bit anxious. “Did you have a child?”

  “One, a girl.” She added with some hesitation, “But she died.”

  Left behind by her mother when she was five years old, the girl had been raised by a stepmother, and she’d had a younger half brother too, but at the age of twelve she drowned in a lake. The sisters listened speechless to this tale.

  Their mother topped it off by saying a bit proudly, “She was a stunning little thing.”

  Imagining the twelve-year-old’s small coffin, Mitsuki and Natsuki were overcome with pity for the elder sister they never knew.

  As to why she herself got divorced, their mother said little, whether out of consideration for the husband she had left or shame, after all, at her selfish ways. “Your father was an intellectual,” she said, as if that were explanation enough.

  They later learned that their grandfather had flown into a rage and disowned their mother when he heard the talk of divorce. After all the expense he had gone to, this was understandable. But perhaps because she was his only child, he must have soon relented, for by the time they were old enough to remember, he’d become a familiar figure, their Kyoto grandfather. Fortunately—if such a thing could be said—their great-aunt suffered a stroke and died without ever knowing her efforts had come to nothing. Their great-uncle, Grandpa Yokohama, though not a blood relative, was tolerant and allowed their mother to keep coming to the house to visit, although he would have been within his rights to forbid it.

  “Anyway, I wonder—why aren’t the divorces mentioned here?” she murmured aloud, carefully inserting the bluish paper back into its manila envelope. The question had no answer.

  It was after Natsuki was fetched home from Germany and sent to “Yokohama” that their mother again produced the family register copy.

  Mitsuki knew that while their mother could be as calculating as anyone, she wasn’t so by nature. When she sent Natsuki to accompany Madama Butterfly’s pupils at their voice lessons and thereby give her access to that coveted “Yokohama” circle—the circle from which she herself had ultimately been shut out—she probably did so more from ingrained habit than anything else. It was unlikely that she had a definite motive of marrying Natsuki
to someone from those rare heights. She could scarcely have imagined that just such a proposal would come her daughter’s way.

  At the time, Madama Butterfly had a female pupil whose family was old money with government connections; after graduating from the Yokohama music school, she’d married a doctor and kept up with her singing while raising a family. She’d been treated with due respect at “Yokohama.” Her younger brother was a cellist named Yuji Shimazaki.

  It all started when Yuji drove to Chinatown for dinner with some friends one day and stopped in on the way back to pick up his sister. He ran into Natsuki and was instantly smitten. The next time she was there, and the next, he found an excuse to be present. It wasn’t long before he asked her out on a date.

  As soon as their mother heard this, she’d set out for “Yokohama” with the copy of the family register tucked in her purse. In case the Shimazakis started poking around, asking questions, she wanted nothing said about the divorces unless absolutely necessary.

  “Yokohama” must have been dumbfounded to see Noriko wave around a copy of the Katsura family register. She had grown up during a time when the family register—the bastion of Japan’s prewar social structure—played a crucial role in people’s lives, recording everything from ancestral social class under the bygone system (nobility, samurai, commoner, untouchable) to illnesses, marriages, births, and deaths. The constant mortification she had endured before marrying was beyond most people’s ken: she had been listed as an illegitimate child, albeit one recognized by her father; her mother and grandmother, both former geisha, were also illegitimate and, what was worse, unrecognized by their fathers. In her mind, it meant a great deal that her daughter Natsuki was untarnished and would be the first woman in at least four generations to marry with her head held high. Yet the stigma of divorce remained a threat. Going to “Yokohama” was an act of pure maternal love, motivated by determination to show that the record was clear: nothing on paper could stand in the way of her daughter’s marriage.

  Yuji, three years older than Natsuki, was just back from New York City with a master’s degree from Juilliard, paid for by his parents. He met Natsuki precisely at the moment when he was searching for an orchestra position and a wife. That she was a little different from the prim girls he knew may have intrigued him. Her relative lack of interest in him may have added further to her charm. When he took her home to meet his parents, his father kept exclaiming, “What a lovely lady! Wherever did you find her?” She was at her comeliest just then.

  From the Shimazakis’ perspective, her father’s status as a mere corporate employee must have posed a problem, but Yuji and his father (who had married into the Shimazaki family, taking his wife’s surname) evidently went to bat for him. Yuji’s father had vastly increased the family holdings, which gave him a strong voice in family affairs. Natsuki’s having studied abroad spoke well for her family. And in a betrothal, fortunately it was the paternal lineage that came under greatest scrutiny. “Yokohama” stayed quiet about the rest.

  The Katsuras had known dimly that the Shimazakis were richer than they were. On learning that Natsuki was marrying into a family of old money, at first they were elated, then slightly uneasy.

  What must have gone through Natsuki’s mind? No doubt Yuji’s ardent wooing gradually won her over. No woman pursued that ardently would be displeased. And she must have been unconsciously driven by the knowledge of how furious her mother would be if she turned him down.

  “Yokohama,” serving as matchmakers, were triumphant. Who would have thought such an offer would come to the daughter of “poor Noriko”—or “that little upstart”? It must have set them back on their heels a little to realize Natsuki would now be richer than they were, but then again they had no daughter of their own (as in the previous generation, there were only two sons). All was well.

  Seeing the air of triumph on “Yokohama” faces, their mother Noriko perhaps remembered the look of distress her late aunt wore long ago when the affair with the tenor came to light. Bittersweet emotion must have swept over her at the thought that she was actually marrying her daughter into that elite circle.

  A WORD OF THANKS

  Marrying into a moneyed family proved to involve a great deal of rigmarole. To begin with, before the ceremony the families met over a formal dinner in the Hotel New Grand, accompanied by “Yokohama” as matchmakers. Naturally Mitsuki was invited too. Among the distinguished attendees, the father of the groom stood out, energetic and manly and anything but stuffy. Their mother, even while conscious of people’s eyes, couldn’t help instantly hitting it off with him. The rest of the Shimazakis spent their time name-dropping, leaving the Katsuras with little to do but shrink into their seats.

  Then it caused a commotion when they found out that Natsuki’s future in-laws were planning to come to Chitose Funabashi bearing traditional symbolic betrothal gifts known as yuino. “Yokohama” begged off, judging this bit of ceremony unnecessary, and Yuji himself was all for skipping it, but his mother, in whose veins flowed the blood of hidebound traditionalists, overruled him. The formalities must be observed. Yuji had already been to the Katsura house, and everyone had more or less assumed that one day his parents would come over too, but the pomp of the occasion took them aback—all the more so as the two families had already met over dinner. To the Katsuras, the ancient Japanese tradition seemed out of keeping with a wedding between two devotees of Western music. Their sense of incongruity marked the first of many jolts they would receive during the course of their association with the Shimazakis.

  At least the house in Chitose Funabashi had been rebuilt—that much was a relief. Natsuki had visited the Shimazaki home in an upscale residential district near Shibuya several times. Having spent two years in Germany, she was disdainful of Japanese living space in general and did not hesitate to make her feelings known. “That house of theirs is nothing grand!” This declaration did not, however, make their own house any grander.

  The Shimazaki home was full of antiques. It stood on three hundred tsubo of land, not sixty-eight like the Chitose Funabashi house, and the classically landscaped garden boasted a reconstructed teahouse that had once belonged to a feudal lord famous for his appreciation of the tea ceremony. The three women tried looking at their newly rebuilt house as it might appear to the Shimazakis and lost heart. What to do? Replacing the still-new dining room table and sofa for the sake of this onetime visit would be ridiculous. They decided finally that the most effective way to improve the decor would be to replace the curtains with heavy drapes. Having neither the time nor the money to get them custom-made, they decided to sew them themselves and also make some throw cushions trimmed with the same material to scatter on the sofa.

  They worked night and day to get ready. One day, their mother looked up from her sewing machine and said, “You know what? If the neighbors spread fertilizer that day, it’ll be a disaster.”

  The family next door still had fields to tend and occasionally spread fertilizer on them. When that happened, the odor was intense even with the windows shut. They had long since switched over from night soil to chemical fertilizer, but all the same, the smell was pungent and persistent. Since Mitsuki was always the one sent over to buy their vegetables, she knew them well, and so it fell to her to call on them, explain the situation, and ask them politely not to spread fertilizer on the big day.

  “Natsuki’s gettin’ hitched, is she?”

  Mitsuki nodded. When she was a little girl, this man used to come over with his manure buckets and scoop up excrement from their household to take home. Come to think of it, that smell they all used to wrinkle their noses at had been partly of their own making.

  “Who’s the lucky guy?”

  “He’s a musician, and a whole lot richer than we are.”

  The neighbor in a straw hat with a towel wrapped around his neck owned various plots of farmland in Chitose Funabashi. He must have been pretty rich himself.

  “Well, how about that,” he said. “That�
��s great. Congratulations. We’ll sure miss her piano playing.” When Natsuki practiced piano as a little girl, his three daughters sometimes used to stick their heads out of the window overlooking the field and listen.

  When the day came, they laid out new slippers for the guests and served special tea with salted cherry blossoms. Besides a decorated envelope containing a wad of betrothal money, among the yuino gifts was a bizarre assortment of objects that ancient Japanese had apparently thought auspicious, including clam shells, dried kelp, and hemp thread. The array of objects laid on stands of unvarnished wood, symbolizing purity in Shintoism, made the family feel strange—almost as if they themselves were now connected to the unbroken line of Japanese emperors. Even Natsuki’s father, who normally derided such ancient customs as nonsense, accepted the gifts with a show of solemnity.

  Soon came the day of the wedding. Although Yuji was the second son, Natsuki still was marrying a Shimazaki. The ceremony and reception at the Imperial Hotel were not the only extravagance. His parents built the newlyweds a house in Kamiyama-cho, not far from the family home in Shibuya. To install Natsuki’s battered old upright Yamaha in such a house was unthinkable, so her parents included a grand piano in her dowry. Also, despite their growing suspicion that kimono might soon become mere relics of bygone days, they outfitted her with one for every occasion: a formal black tomesode, worn only by married women; several semiformal homongi, worn on visits; and two mourning kimono, one in heavy habutae silk and one in summery silk gauze, since death knows no season. For each kimono there was a matching obi. In keeping with the grandeur of the occasion, Natsuki appeared in her wedding dress at the reception and then changed twice into long-sleeved furisode, one of which, resplendent with silver and gold embroidery, was borrowed from Auntie. Shimazaki guests outnumbered Katsura guests two to one, even though to keep up appearances and spare the Shimazakis the embarrassment of taking a bride from a family with no connections, Natsuki’s father had swallowed his pride and prevailed upon some of his relatives, who generally held themselves a little aloof, to attend.