Inheritance from Mother

by Minae Mizumura

  Two years her senior, Tetsuo was a boursier—a student on a fellowship from the French government—just entering his third year in Paris.

  Japanese students in France generally were of two kinds: those paying their own way, and, far fewer in number, the elite boursiers. The two groups had little to do with one another. The former included students lacking even basic conversational French. The boursiers, who after passing a demanding examination had come to France with high expectations, held themselves apart from the rank and file. They were the university professors of tomorrow.

  Tetsuo was something of a maverick in that crowd. Despite being in Paris, the city of miracles, most of the others merely trudged from library to garret and back again. Young though they were, they were as fusty as their books, and although they lived in Paris they might as well have been anywhere else. Tetsuo was different. He was definitely in Paris.

  Paris had many faces.

  For the Gypsy woman wearing a headscarf with a baby on her hip and a cup in her outstretched hand, begging for coins, it was surely not a welcoming face. Nor was the city kind to immigrant workers returning to their cocoons on the eastern outskirts, pressing their exhausted, swarthy faces against the windows of crowded buses. And with the French language still riding high, neither was Paris tolerant of travelers unable to parler français.

  Parisians and Parisiennes scurried to and fro looking irritable. The Métro was dark and dirty, and the labyrinthine cavern one had to pass through to change trains reeked of ammonia, the smell of concentrated urine. Only a short way from the city center stood modernist square buildings, bleak, deteriorating, and devoid of charm.

  Urban blight was everywhere.

  And yet for Mitsuki, living the life of a fairytale princess, Paris let its most beautiful face shine. Everyone in her host family was extraordinarily kind. Her plump host father was silently kind. Her plump host mother called her “ma petite japonaise” and was chattily kind. Their book-loving daughter helped her memorize French poems. “Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine” began one by Apollinaire, and indeed the bank of the Seine as it meandered west of Paris was only a short walk away. Far in the distance she could see the Eiffel Tower.

  What she loved the most was the way the family’s daily life bespoke a living, unbroken continuity with the past. The house was new, built after the war, but many details of its design reflected traditional French architecture: the graceful curves on the newel post at the foot of the stairs in the entrance hall; the arched doorway of the drawing room; the vintage fireplace in a corner, topped by a large gilt-edged mirror. Items throughout the house were redolent of history. The carved wooden furniture in her bedroom—a bed, desk, and wardrobe brought from their country house in Brittany—was over a century old. And the family’s life maintained ties to the lives of past generations. For an evening meal with company they lit candelabra on the dining room table, and after a glass or two of wine, Mitsuki was hard-pressed to tell whether this was the twentieth century or the nineteenth—or even earlier. The daughter had modern tastes, so there was a scattering of contemporary bric-a-brac that blended into the traditional decor to oddly pleasing effect.

  Mitsuki’s wonderment at the family’s way of living was inseparable from her wonderment at the city.

  The Paris that she discovered hardly resembled the Paris that chansons had led her to envision. As evening came on, the streetlamps on Alexandre III Bridge would light up, magically transforming the bridge into a shimmering palace in midair; Notre Dame Cathedral was majestic from a distance, delicate close up; and seen from Montmartre at night, the incomparable capital appeared strewn with thousands of stars fallen all at once from the sky. Yet behind that romantic exterior lay a Paris that was prosaic to the core. More than prosaic, it was solid and dependable, like the sandstone buildings that lined its streets.

  The world of chansons teemed with lovers, embracing la vie en rose or killing themselves one “gloomy Sunday”; nameless poets and winsome seamstresses; harbor prostitutes, scoundrels, and beggars who slept under bridges. The actual Paris afforded fewer glimpses of such romantic figures than it did of stern-faced bureaucrats and city planners with outspread blueprints, putting their grown-up heads together to pool their wisdom. Parisians were said to have lamented the loss of the twisting, medieval byways that once branched out in all directions, yet the concerted efforts of many had resulted in a city where the past was not unthinkingly destroyed, but what deserved to be saved was saved—and what needed to be made new was made new. People had combined their wits to make the most of changes wrought in years past, sometimes through repeated bloodshed, and create a city of miracles. Terms such as “history,” “civilization,” and “accumulated knowledge” that had hitherto seemed mere abstractions took on concrete significance in ways she could see, touch, and smell.

  Mitsuki mulled Paris’s good fortune in not being a city of the Far East, and France’s good fortune in never having experienced the kind of cultural shock and disjunction that countries on the other side of the world had to face upon encountering the West. How many Japanese, following their country’s opening in the Meiji period, had come to Paris and returned to their remote archipelago with bittersweet memories?

  Students from Japan, whether self-sponsored or boursier, inevitably included some who took it upon themselves to rebel against Paris and disparage it. “It’s a stone prison,” they would say, or “It’s cold, like the people,” or “It’s artificial and stifling. You can’t smell the earth.”

  Tetsuo was different. He liked Paris. And just by virtue of being there, he seemed to have undergone a physical transformation, turning into someone visibly in tune with the city. His clothes were tasteful, and like the French students he would casually wrap a narrow scarf around his neck and carry a slim leather briefcase. Moreover, he had the height and the features to carry off the look. That he himself was aware of all this in no way detracted from the effect, but made it all the more agreeable.

  When did it start? Before she knew it, he was always around. At first he would sit in some unobtrusive spot when they all went to a café together. After a while he took to sitting near her, then in the seat beside her. Unlike most boursiers, he was not too proud to mingle with the other students, and he seemed to have endless free time. Looking back, it was evident that this was because he spent little time in the library, but at the time this elementary deduction escaped her.

  Soon he would invite her on walks. They strolled almost every day through the quaint little streets north of boulevard Saint-Germain, a route she never tired of. Rue Jacob. Rue Fürstenberg. Rue Bonaparte. Surprisingly, there were hardly any tourists.

  Like a receding tide, the other male students melted away, leaving, besides Tetsuo, only the boyish Masako. From time to time, Mitsuki told her host family she wouldn’t be home for dinner. Tetsuo cooked for her himself in his garret, wearing a dishcloth slung low around his hips for an apron. Such attic spaces, with a skylight in the slanting ceiling, had once housed servants before being rented out to the poor, including artists and students. With the Latin Quarter often beyond their means, many Japanese students in those days lived like Tetsuo, occupying a shabby garret a little removed from the heart of the city.

  Naturally, as Mitsuki and Tetsuo spent more time together in the garret, they exchanged more than mere words and looks. He was not Mitsuki’s first lover, but he had apparently had a number of older women as lovers in the past from whom he had learned a great deal; his manner was skilled. When Mitsuki reacted with some surprise, he said with a straight face, “As I’ve been saying, you have a lot to learn.” She doubled over in laughter on the narrow bed.

  For someone who was always trying to enlighten her, he was no saint. Even this discovery increased her regard for him.

  She loved best climbing the stairs to his dingy garret. There were six flights, dim even in the daytime, leading to the top. French people were so thrifty that even if you switched on the stair light, it turned of
f automatically every time you went up a flight of stairs, so you had to switch it on again at each level. As she mounted the stone steps, surrounded above and below by darkness, her high heels clattering, she would feel a welling excitement. The higher the floor that residents lived on, the more impoverished they were—and the closer to the stars. The closer to the stars they lived, the bigger their dreams must be.

  That’s how it seemed to her.

  Si, mi chiamano Mimi. Yes, they call me Mimi. Sometimes she would imitate her mother and softly sing the old aria. To any onlooker she was just another flat-faced girl from the Far East, but in her own mind, she felt like the little Parisian seamstress of a century ago.

  “I feel like Mimi.” When she first set foot in Tetsuo’s attic room and told him this, for once she became the teacher, enlightening him about Puccini’s opera La bohème, how it was set in the Latin Quarter where poverty-stricken artists, musicians, and philosophers lived; how even though the characters could hardly pay their rent, they were constantly building castles in the air. Mimi’s lover Rodolfo, a penniless poet, lived in carefree poverty with the soul of a millionaire.

  As she explained the key role a candle played in the lovers’ meeting, they decided to celebrate her birthday with a candlelit dinner.

  Mitsuki’s twenty-fifth birthday came with the advent of spring.

  THE PROPOSAL IN THE GARRET

  She didn’t let on to her host family that it was her birthday. They were so good-hearted that she felt conscience-stricken just telling them she wouldn’t be home for dinner and couldn’t bring herself to say she would be celebrating her birthday out. She left the house not knowing that Tetsuo had chosen that day to propose.

  Young though she still was, climbing six flights of stairs in high-heeled boots hadn’t been easy, but as she visualized the lighted candle on the table above, she felt as thrilled as if she truly were mounting to the stars.

  She knocked, and a moment later the door opened. She caught her breath. She had pictured a single taper on the small table, but candles were everywhere—the floor, the windowsill, the bookshelf—their tiny flames swaying and dancing. The sight was magical; she felt faint.

  Throughout the meal she was in a trance. At the end when he served her a steaming cup of lemon verbena tea, she little imagined that the coming revelations would mark a turning point in her life.

  It began when Tetsuo’s face stiffened. “There’s a job waiting for me in Japan,” he said. His eyes held hers as he leaned toward a candle flame, an unlit Gauloise between his lips. “In Tokyo.”

  Only then did it strike her that he had been quieter than usual during the meal.

  “Starting when?”

  “This fall.”

  She was relieved. If it could wait till the fall, then that would be around the time she too went back to Japan—assuming she went back.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I thought I’d take it.” He kept his eyes fixed on her face.

  She was a little distressed. The idea of marrying him had occurred to her. She had imagined, however, that it would mean staying on in Paris a while longer. She would move into his garret, and they would sleep together in the narrow bed close to the stars and eat baguettes and cheese, scrimping so they could get by if her parents helped—which they would hardly refuse to do if she married a Japanese scholar in the making. But if he had a job lined up in Tokyo, then marrying him would mean leaving Paris. She felt torn. She didn’t want to be separated from him, yet part of her wanted to stay on where she was. Seeing her distress, he began to explain.

  A special delivery letter had come from a professor he knew well, someone whose name Mitsuki was familiar with as it appeared rather often in the media. The professor would be leaving his post at a national university at the end of March to create a new faculty of international studies at a private university. His first order of business was to assemble a team of teachers. Though details were not yet clear, Tetsuo would probably be asked to teach French—the language, not the literature—among other subjects. If that condition was acceptable to him, he was welcome to join the team. He would start as an assistant lecturer, but would soon be promoted and receive tenure.

  Thinking it over later, Mitsuki realized that that professor had known Tetsuo much better than she did. Tetsuo wasn’t a born scholar and had no particular urge to pursue a single discipline, whether French literature or something else. On the other hand, his willingness and ability to adapt to whatever was required of him would be a great asset in starting up a new faculty.

  She thought a moment and then inquired innocently, “Shouldn’t you go ahead and finish your doctorate?” In the back of her mind was the face of her father, who surely would have become a scholar if his family had not suffered financial ruin.

  “No,” said Tetsuo with finality. “I’m in my third year, and the thesis is going nowhere.”

  She had always assumed that the reason he didn’t talk about his thesis was that he thought it would be over her head. She hadn’t known he was stuck. No wonder he had so much time to spend with her.

  “Besides,” he said, “a doctorate is no guarantee of finding a job in Tokyo.” He lowered his eyes, rubbed out his cigarette, and added in a low voice, “If I couldn’t get a job in Tokyo, you wouldn’t marry me, would you?”

  This was the first time he had ever said the word “marry.” Her pulse quickened; flustered, she didn’t know what to say. The silence between them lengthened. The glowing candles made shadows on the walls, marking the silent passage of time.

  Eventually Tetsuo looked up. “I’m not from a good family.” His dark tone took her by surprise. His face looked grim in the candlelight.

  “My family is nothing to brag about either,” she responded, her tone purposefully light.

  More than once she had explained to Masako and him too that her family was by no means wealthy, that her current situation and her sister’s marrying into money had both come about purely by chance. She didn’t want the two people closest to her to misunderstand. But to what extent they did understand, she had no way of knowing.

  “It’s worse than that.” He sounded gruff.

  “What do you mean?” she said. “You told me your father was a businessman.”

  “I exaggerated.” He laughed and added in a self-mocking tone, “I didn’t want you to turn against me.”

  “So he’s not?”

  Tetsuo’s father was the third son of poor farmers. Though currently an accountant in his brother’s plant, he was a businessman only in the broadest sense of the term. Neither he nor his brother had a head for making money, and although Japan was experiencing rapid economic growth they lagged far behind, enmeshed in poverty.

  “My mother was always too thin.” She would join them at the supper table, he said, but at her place there would be only chopsticks and a half-full rice bowl, as she urged his father, his younger brother, and him to eat everything. She strove to keep the family presentable and sewed his father’s old underwear into underthings for herself. Tetsuo earned top grades and on his teacher’s recommendation applied for and got into a selective high school, but then more of his friends were of good family: sometimes, having nothing fit to wear to Parents’ Day and realizing how embarrassed he would be, she would go off by herself and cry.

  Tetsuo continued speaking in a detached tone of voice. Her people were poor farmers too, and at one point she’d been obliged to take in her much younger brothers. The room he and his brother shared with their uncles got so crowded that he’d had to move his desk out into the hallway to do his homework.

  By the end of his high school years, his uncle’s plant had finally started to ride the tide of Japan’s high economic growth. From then on things went smoothly. The family even had a little money to spare. His mother gained weight, and the house was rebuilt. But apart from Tetsuo, no one in the family had ever been to college. When he went back home, the scenery changed year by year but the topics of conversation ne
ver varied: ups and downs of the high school baseball team, marriages and deaths, who knew and who didn’t know their proper places at Buddhist memorial services. He felt stifled and wanted nothing more than to leave that world far behind.

  His father never went beyond elementary school under the old system. His mother graduated from senior elementary school and was somewhat more of a reader than his father. She’d wanted Tetsuo to go to university, but his father’s reaction had been less than enthusiastic. And so when a low math score kept him from getting into the University of Tokyo, rather than taking a year off to bone up for the examination he had gone to a national university that specialized in languages (one of a handful of institutions a rank below the most prestigious schools) for fear that otherwise his father would balk at his attending college at all. When he said he wanted to go to graduate school, there’d been more trouble, his younger brother having already finished vocational school and gone to work for their uncle. Their normally placid father was incredulous and irate: “You’re telling me a college graduate hasn’t had enough of being a student?” His mother’s tearful pleas on his behalf carried enough weight that he was able to enter graduate school, but he resolved at the time to make a drastic leap, fearing that otherwise he would never escape.

  “So after I got into grad school, I studied like a maniac to be a boursier.”

  His efforts paid off. In his second year, just as he was getting his master’s degree, he passed the competitive test and set off in the fall for Paris.

  Mitsuki kept her eyes fastened on him as he talked. This Tetsuo was different from the one she knew so well. Normally he acted vaguely condescending toward her, but now his face was pale and stiff as he talked on. She saw his cheek twitch.

  In a voice barely audible, he swore to her that if she married him, she would never want for anything. He was the elder son, but she would never have to look after his parents in their old age. If his tradition-bound relatives criticized her, he would defend her. He must have sensed that his constant reminders about how much she needed to learn had spurred her to think about graduate school; he promised that if she decided to go, he would give her unstinting emotional and financial support.