Inheritance from Mother

by Minae Mizumura

  “Guess what’s coming!” she would announce over the telephone, breathless with anticipation. Four out of five times Mitsuki would say no, but on the fifth time she would relent. When it came to the theater, her mother’s interest was not confined to things Western; she enjoyed Kabuki plays as well. Mitsuki and her sister shared her love of the theater, so they would both go, although any pleasure they might have derived from the performance was offset by the immense logistical difficulty of taking their mother out. The greatest challenge came from her increasingly overactive bladder.

  She became nervous about whether she could make it safely there and back without mishap. When they came to pick her up, she would be sitting at the table waiting for them with her makeup on, a scarf around her neck, and all the accoutrements of theatergoing, Noriko-style: two lightweight folding pillows to tuck under her bottom so she could see the stage, compression spinal fractures having shortened her sitting height; a warm lap robe so she wouldn’t be cold; a plastic bottle of tea so she wouldn’t be thirsty. While Mitsuki and her sister divided these items between them, slipping them into their handbags, their mother would go to the bathroom. As they were leaving, she would no sooner get her coat on than she would decide to go again, “just to be on the safe side,” and remove her coat with the slow, fumbling fingers of old age so frustrating to those waiting. As soon as the taxi deposited them at the theater, she went again, and if time allowed she would go once more before the performance began. At intermission she headed straight for the ladies’ room. Her movements were so slow that this took time; she would barely make it back before the curtain went up, apologizing to the others in her row as she squeezed past them to reach her seat. And of course the moment the curtain fell, she had to go again…

  One night when they arrived home after a performance of La bohème, she made an announcement: “I won’t try to go to the theater or the opera anymore.”

  She could be decisive in this way. Yet she was fundamentally incapable of giving up with good grace. She would lower her sights a smidgen, but keep them always just above what she was capable of doing on her own. As a result, the burden on Mitsuki and her sister never lessened.

  To avoid a scene, Mitsuki made a point of never mentioning her mother’s treatment of her father. One day, however, exasperated with her mother’s stream of demands, she said with tight-lipped anger, “You left Father in that horrible place all those years. You know very well you shouldn’t be this demanding now.”

  “How can you bring up what happened so long ago!” her mother exclaimed. So although her faculties were beginning to slip, she clearly remembered what she had done and knew moreover that Mitsuki had not forgiven her. Mitsuki took comfort in this knowledge.

  Life has its seasons. During the springtime and early summer of her life, the intensity of Noriko’s quest had given her—and her daughters—a future. But in the autumn of her life, that quest had become increasingly frustrating and vacuous. Now in frozen midwinter there was something eerie about her as she continued to struggle—not only eerie but tragicomical, as life’s tragedies so often are.

  One morning Mitsuki received a phone call from her mother. This was after, moved by a certain pity as year by year her mother’s life slipped away, she had begun calling her every evening at eight. Natsuki too had grudgingly taken to calling her once every few days. For her mother to call without waiting for their nightly chat was usually a sign of trouble. When she heard her mother’s voice come on the line that morning, Mitsuki braced herself.

  “Guess what I did last night after talking to you?” Excitement hovered in her mother’s voice.

  The previous night had been stormy as a typhoon approached. At the end of their conversation, Mitsuki had said, “You be careful now,” and her mother had replied, “I will. I’ll get out a candle just in case.” A flashlight would be better, Mitsuki had thought, but rather amused at her mother’s old-fashioned ways, she had let it go.

  “Come on, guess!”

  “I give up. What did you do?”

  Her mother tittered, the way well-bred ladies used to do. “I put out all the lights in the house, lit a candle, and sang my heart out. Sang every aria I could think of. Nobody could hear me in the middle of that storm.”

  Mitsuki was speechless. She pictured the scene to herself: in the dark of night, as rain lashed and a typhoon raged, a white-haired crone singing operatically at the top of her lungs. With the entire neighborhood engulfed in darkness, on and on she sang in the glow of a single candle.

  “But I can’t sing the way I used to, and besides that I’ve lost my sense of pitch. I can tell.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s the end of the line for Noriko.”

  Word came of the passing of Mitsuki’s host mother in Paris, a woman younger than her mother.

  With the time of ripening cherries far behind them both, Mitsuki and her sister had continued piling on years, each with her own thoughts. Even Mitsuki’s memory of Tetsuo’s first affair grew dim and remote. At the time she had been overcome. That earnest youth among the flickering candles in the garret in Paris, so stiff and nervous that his cheek twitched—that pale youth who had cast himself at her feet—how could he betray her? Her shock had been so great that the second time, she’d felt almost nothing. A corner of her mind had shut down. In life, did getting older inevitably mean getting inured to unhappiness? Part of her accepted this, but another part rebelled. Her health eventually broke down.

  Then came her mother’s cataclysmic fall—and, close on its heels, her discovery of Tetsuo’s unforgivable emails. That had given her a shock of a completely different order. It was more than the shock of knowing he was planning on leaving her for a younger woman. It was the shock of knowing with certainty that she herself was finished as a woman—that she had taken her first step toward old age. This unpleasant truth that she had fended off by remaining busy was thrust under her nose.

  But the only time she cried was the time she stayed up all night reading the emails. After that she pushed all thought of Tetsuo out of her mind, even just before bed. Above all, she needed to get her mother out of the rehabilitation hospital and settled in Golden. As she told herself this, lying in the dark with her eyes shut, the image rose in her mind of her mother sitting alone in the hospital dining room staring stonily into space. The thought that she would have to confront that figure again in the morning weighed on her.

  And indeed, at the hospital her mother remained the same, sitting alone in a desolate moor swept by a cold wind, dry leaves whirling soundlessly around her.

  A PROPER THANK-YOU

  By the time her mother left the rehabilitation hospital the cherry blossom buds had come out, signaling the start of a new school year.

  Mitsuki decided to limit her work to patent translations, which she could do at home, and take a year’s leave of absence from teaching. Physically and mentally, she was exhausted. To fill in for her she turned to her old friend Masako. Like her, Masako had started out teaching French part time and, when universities ceased to require a second foreign language for graduation, managed to keep her job by switching to English. Always willing to lend a hand, she was divorced and strapped for cash, and luckily in excellent health. Before this, Masako had filled in for Mitsuki when she had accompanied Tetsuo on his sabbaticals. If there was a class that didn’t fit her schedule, she’d obligingly found someone else.

  Mitsuki explained over the telephone that this time she wouldn’t be accompanying Tetsuo but rather needed to take some time off because of the state her mother was in.

  “Sorry to hear that,” said Masako. “My mom hasn’t changed. Still hands out free advice to the neighbors. She’s not just a good talker, she’s a good walker too.”

  Heredity was a factor then, Mitsuki thought, picturing to herself the toned muscles of Masako’s legs.

  “Believe me,” she said, “you don’t know how lucky you are.”

  “You sound pretty down.”

  She had
a right to be. There was Tetsuo’s betrayal now, on top of all else.

  Both of them were busy, so they ended the conversation without making plans to meet.

  When they were in their thirties, friends who were housewives had looked older than they did; she and Masako used to agree complacently that women who didn’t use their brains were at a disadvantage. Now in their fifties, they were finding that working women aged faster after all, struggling to maintain their stamina while juggling myriad demands on their time. And any working woman with an elderly parent to care for was a disaster.

  The day her mother moved into Golden happened to be the day Tokyo’s cherry blossoms came into full bloom. The day was memorable for another reason: for a short time, her mother had been herself again. It was as if knowing that she was entering on a new life had lit a final flame in her soul.

  Loaded into a van, wheelchair and all, she took an interest in the outside world for the first time since her accident, eagerly looking out the window and commenting: “Would you look at those cherry blossoms! Spring came out of nowhere this year.” For the first time in a long while, her dark eyes glistened.

  Clouds of white blossoms were everywhere along the cramped, ugly streets, in places where you would least expect to find them, telling of spring and the joy of new life. Neither her mother nor she suspected that these were the last cherry blossoms her mother would ever see.

  On entering the room decorated with familiar, lovely things, her mother broke into a genuine smile. She exclaimed in delight over the vase from Grandpa Yokohama, overflowing with sumptuous artificial flowers. She looked in turn at the embroidered lace curtains at the window, the bed made up with linens from home, the wall shelf displaying her beloved bric-a-brac—all of it arranged for her pleasure. Slowly she spun her wheelchair in a circle, taking it all in, before turning to Mitsuki.

  “Come here, Mitsuki.”

  She said this in a firm voice, as if she were about to deliver a lecture. There was a glint in her eye.

  “What is it?” Mitsuki asked a little impatiently, interrupting her unpacking.

  “I want to say a proper thank-you, so come sit down.”

  When she sat down, her mother gripped the wheelchair arms, bowed rather ceremoniously in her direction and said, “Thank you for everything. I really mean it.” Her voice shook slightly.

  Her mother was no fool. She knew that Mitsuki did not particularly wish her to live many more years. At the same time, she understood that Mitsuki was doing all she could to ensure that she lived out her life in comfort. She was expressing appreciation for those efforts.

  “Thank you so much.” Tears welled in her eyes.

  Touched, Mitsuki too spoke from the heart. “I know life here won’t be easy, Mom. I wish things were different.”

  That was the last time her mother was her old self. The deterioration of her frontal lobe continued unabated.

  After moving into Golden, she again kept to herself. Ninety percent of the residents were further gone than she was; the other ten percent were in good shape, yet she made no attempt to enter their circle. Her deafness made normal conversation difficult, her pride made it excruciating, and she may also have sensed the approach of senility. She held herself aloof. A few of the other residents who were from incomparably better families than she jabbered to themselves in the excessively polite language associated with society’s upper echelons. Among them all she maintained a ridiculous air of haughtiness, alone in her misery.

  Memories of physical sensations from long-ago schoolgirl days seemed to come flooding back. Sitting in her wheelchair, she would turn when Mitsuki came into the room and say with tears in her voice, “Last night I dreamed it again…I was running and jumping.” Her face would be stricken but her eyes would be shining.

  Mrs. Kiyokawa, the head caregiver at Golden, was the sort of person who calmly let annoyances slide harmlessly right over her. She had no trouble putting up with her mother, Mitsuki noted, reassured somehow that Mrs. Kiyokawa was around her age and presumably familiar with life’s vagaries. The staff were all friendly, the food decent. Her mother took to saying that she was “perfectly happy.” Even so, as if in punishment for having sought too much gaiety in life, her spirit was bedeviled by misery.

  She reached constantly for relief in the form of little white pieces of Depas. At Golden they finally managed to loosen her grip on her sleeping medicine and stool softener and take charge of them for her, but Depas, her tranquilizer, they could not get her to relinquish. She became even drowsier than before. Twice she tumbled out of her wheelchair and had to be taken to the hospital for X-rays. The first time it happened, they sent for Mitsuki; the second time, she couldn’t come and Natsuki came instead. Naturally, Golden began to insist that they needed to control her Depas as well. But Mitsuki knew that taking away the little vial her mother clutched like a talisman would only speed her descent into madness. She came up with the idea of using a placebo.

  The dispensary only stocked placebos in powder form, so she took to stopping by a pharmacy on her way home and picking up various kinds of white-pill supplements. At home, she cut them into small pieces, testing them for smell, flavor, and hardness. She finally settled on some chewable calcium pills that she herself took. About the size of a fairly large coin, they were easy to chop but felt harder on the tongue. Praying that her mother wouldn’t notice, she emptied the vial and refilled it with the placebo.

  “This new Depas is a little harder than the old.” She handed her the vial with this caveat.

  Her mother nodded, never doubting her trusted daughter’s word, and popped a piece of a calcium pill into her mouth.

  Her mother’s growing dementia showed in a variety of ways. Now when a visitor came by, even if she understood who it was, she could no longer ask pertinent questions. When Mitsuki called at eight she would pick up the receiver and say hello in a bright tone—but then be incapable of relating the events of her day. She understood only in the vaguest way that Tetsuo wasn’t in Japan. Mitsuki arranged once again for the delivery of DVDs of foreign films, but even if her mother could be reminded (with great effort) how to work the remote, she could no longer follow the story line.

  “Bo-ring,” she would say with a scowl, and after a few minutes change the DVD for another.

  And yet she was convinced that the self that loved foreign films was her true self. Clutching an armful of DVDs to her chest, she would declare dramatically, like a maiden of a bygone era clutching a trove of love letters, “These are my very life!”

  By the time it was hot enough for air-conditioning and Mitsuki’s bus trips to and from Golden had become uncomfortable, her mother no longer knew whether she felt hot or cold.

  “Mitsuki, am I hot now? Or am I cold?” When she telephoned with this tearful inquiry, it was Mitsuki who felt like crying. At her mother’s request she had purchased long-sleeved, mid-sleeved, and short-sleeved sets of underwear—all for nothing.

  Mitsuki and her sister took turns visiting daily at first, then with gaps of a day or two at most. It wasn’t so much that they pitied her, but rather that the speed with which she was failing made it hard to stay away more than two days at a time. They needed to meet constantly with Mrs. Kiyokawa to plan new ways of coping.

  Mitsuki’s nerves got no rest.

  Her mental energy exhausted, she had nothing left for thoughts about Tetsuo. Sometimes as she lay in bed in the dark just before falling asleep, the memory of those emails would come rushing back, humiliation would stop her breath, and she would cover her face with her hands. But in the bright light of day, the idea of losing her husband to a young woman seemed so tawdry that she could scarcely believe it was happening to her. She felt scornful of the whole idea.

  When Tetsuo called again, she answered him abruptly.

  “How’s your mother?”

  “She has galloping dementia.”

  FATAL SASHIMI

  Their mother began showing the food obsession typical of older people w
ith dementia.

  Isolated at Golden, she still wanted Mitsuki or her sister to come at dinnertime, and when they did, she was permitted to eat in her room. Seeing how thin she was becoming, they started to bring her some of the sliced sashimi she loved, and soon she came to expect it. She had a tendency to choke on her food, and at Golden she’d been put on a minced diet, so the artistically arranged slices of fish from the supermarket had to be cut up mercilessly with kitchen shears. Even though the result looked unappetizing, she would eagerly devour it. Out of consideration for the kitchen staff, Mitsuki took leftovers home in plastic containers and threw them in the garbage. She had no intention of eating minced leftovers all by herself in her apartment.

  Having acquired a taste for sashimi, their mother next asked for cake for dessert. Telling themselves that eating was now her sole pleasure in life, Mitsuki or Natsuki would pick up little cakes on their way to see her—fancy confections from a patisserie, the kind of thing they would serve to company.

  After that it was afternoon snacks.

  They would bring two or three cellophane-wrapped sweets and caution her, “Just one a day now!” before putting them in a drawer. At first she followed these instructions, but it wasn’t long before she would wolf them all down at once. To stop her from ruining her appetite for meals, they left the snacks with the staff. Then she started pushing her call button many times a day, pleading for snacks. The staff gave in. The sisters bought smaller and smaller snacks to keep her from overindulging, but she kept pushing her call button relentlessly. They asked the staff to give in to her demands only every third time and went around to various stores buying different kinds of bite-sized cookies, which they divided up in little plastic bags.