Inheritance from Mother

by Minae Mizumura

Something was wrong, in a way she couldn’t explain even to herself.

  Her mother used to hum as she did housework, and Mitsuki picked up from her several popular songs that were out of date yet curiously modern, like “Just a Cup of Coffee” and “Song of Araby.” On the weekend she and her mother would spread out sheet music and sing to Natsuki’s accompaniment on the piano: great old songs of early modern Japan like “The Flowers of Karatachi” and “This Road”; French chansons like “Under the Bridges of Paris” and “Mademoiselle Hortensia”; German lieder like “Gypsy Life” and “Rose on the Heath.” The opening lines of “Gypsy Life”—“In the shadows of the forest, among the beech trees”—had always beckoned her young and excitable mind to an unknown world.

  Soon after they started singing, her father would leave his second-floor study, come slowly down the stairs, and sit on the sofa patting their collie, Della, while he listened. When it was over, he would slowly get up and return to his study. The scene had been reenacted countless times during her adolescence, and she had always innocently assumed that every husband enjoyed listening to his wife sing.

  Now that she thought about it, even in Paris Tetsuo had never shown any interest in hearing her sing. Yet he had to have known how much singing meant to her…Gradually she’d left off singing. In time she almost forgot she had ever liked to sing. It was as if she had put a precious memento of her childhood into a box and then lost the key.

  Of course different families had different ways of doing things. There were no LP albums in the house Tetsuo grew up in, and nobody ever sang. His father, though poor, had been the family patriarch, his mother, self-effacing. How completely different from her family, where her demanding yet gay and cheerful mother had been the sun that everyone revolved around. Though she and Tetsuo were both Japanese, they might just as well have come from different cultures. And yet his behavior that evening in Calais could not, she felt, be written off as the product of a different upbringing. The disturbing scene lingered in her mind, unexplained, and as time passed it came to seem symbolic of their marriage. From then on, every time she felt something was wrong between them, she would see his figure growing smaller as he headed for the pier in the salt breeze.

  He was a considerate husband. If she took to her bed with a cold, he would bring her a bowl of steaming rice gruel with a pickled plum on top. Yet over the years, there were other occasions when the question rose in her mind—why? Sometimes she even put it to him directly, but as the whys multiplied, the frequency of her asking dropped off. She didn’t want to think he didn’t love her, so she invented excuses for him in silence.

  THE 72.3-SQUARE-METER APARTMENT

  Her mother had never bothered to conceal her egotistical ways, but not all egotists were like that. The world was full of people like Tetsuo, people who were generally considerate but selfish at bottom. What she wanted ultimately mattered less to him than what he wanted. She had sensed this fairly soon after marrying him but for a long time failed to admit it.

  She hadn’t wanted to think that he didn’t love her.

  Eventually the realization had become unavoidable, and this, of all things, through his dogged longing for a condominium in the city center.

  In the fourth year of their marriage, they had moved from a small rental apartment into a two-bedroom condominium with a living-dining room, slightly larger but still a mere 58.8 square meters in area, on the top floor of a three-story building.

  Mitsuki was still in graduate school, but Tetsuo had been promoted, so they’d begun to think about buying a place of their own. They only had a small amount of savings for a down payment though, and even on the new salary, monthly payments on a loan would have been a strain. Her mother, who had free rein with the family finances, stepped in with an offer of five million yen from her father’s first retirement bonus, which had just come through.

  “Five million? Really?”

  “Really. You’re paying your own way through graduate school, after all.”

  Her mother had by then distanced herself from Natsuki and was taking chanson lessons; for all Mitsuki knew, she might already have been in deep with That Man. But her father was newly employed, was in fact president of a subsidiary of the corporation he had retired from. The house in Chitose Funabashi remained cobweb-free. Mitsuki conveyed her heartfelt thanks to her parents. Tetsuo’s parents, by then financially better off, chipped in another million yen since, they said, the wedding had cost them nothing.

  Their new life started out happily enough.

  On moving day, Mitsuki danced around her new home, piled high with cardboard boxes, and Tetsuo was exuberant too. Naturally, neither of them expected that to be their final residence. Between them they had tons of books, and they both worked at home, so they wanted someday to move somewhere bigger—though Tetsuo’s salary made the prospect unlikely anytime soon.

  Then the following year, after Mitsuki got her master’s degree, to their surprise and delight she was offered a job teaching French part time at a private university. The invitation came from a professor who died a few years ago, a brilliant literary translator with a forehead so pronounced you’d have thought his cranium was swollen from overtaxing his brains. Mitsuki had never been much of a scholar, but in graduate school she’d fit easily into the top echelon thanks to her year with a French family; her deep love of novels had also served her well, winning the professor’s approval. And so, despite having never aspired even to teaching elementary school, she became a college teacher.

  Her parents too were surprised and delighted.

  She taught three courses per term, sometimes at a campus downtown, sometimes out toward the end of the Chuo line. Twice a week she taught two classes in the morning, one in the afternoon. She didn’t have to attend faculty meetings or help with entrance examinations. Vacations were generous. The extra income averaged out to a tidy 150,000 yen a month. In the summer there were special intensive classes that also paid well. The uplifting sensation of standing at the lectern to teach a college class vanished the moment she took in the reality of rows of faces that looked vacant if not brain dead, but she kept at it because they needed the money.

  The pressure to save mounted as the Japanese economy entered its bubble years and real estate values soared. Even when the requirement of a second foreign language was dropped from the curriculum, forcing her to switch from teaching French to English, she didn’t really mind, happy just to be employed. She even took on patent translation work that a friend began passing along. Anything related to biology or computers was beyond her; design and trademark patents became her specialty. Though hardly interesting, the work paid well. The sound of documents coming in over the fax machine late at night gave her a sinking feeling, but she did her best.

  Around that time, her family began to collapse.

  The damage started slowly and imperceptibly, then picked up speed until by the time anyone noticed, it was too late. Her feud with her mother—sometimes open, more often silent—began and went on all the while she taught college, translated patent documents at home, and went to see her father in the hospital. She was still young then, in her thirties, but slowly the layers of sediment were building up inside her.

  Then the financial bubble burst, bringing real estate prices back down to a reasonable level. Finally they were able to move into a larger apartment in the same building, one with three bedrooms plus a living-dining room—a jump from 58.8 square meters to 72.3, standard size for a family of four. The master bedroom with double bed served also as Mitsuki’s study, and another room as Tetsuo’s study, leaving them a whole extra room for books and other overflow.

  Though small, the library, as they called it, made a huge difference in their lives. The daily battle with a stream of detritus (mostly books and papers) was suddenly over. They lined the walls with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves for extra books, and as they added shelves in the middle to hold supplies of printer paper, tissue, toilet paper, and even laundry detergent, everything see
med to march into place like toy soldiers. Mitsuki’s mother also gave her a paulownia chest—one of a pair from the dowry of her first marriage—where she could keep kimono, kimono accessories, wool sweaters, and the like. The living room, made to look even more spacious by the addition of a large wall mirror, was now always tidy.

  Being on the first floor, they enjoyed the luxury of a small garden. A rose of Sharon bush planted there was still blossoming in September, after they’d finished moving in. The pale purple flowers seemed to sing of the joy of gracious living—or uncluttered living, anyway. Mitsuki breathed a sigh of relief. Her family might have fallen apart, but she at least was settled in for good.

  At about the same time, Yuji and Natsuki sold their house in Kamiyama-cho, Shibuya, and moved into a 150-square-meter condominium in a low-rise building nearby. An enormous sofa by the Italian maker Cassina was the centerpiece of their great twenty-two-mat living room. When they had large parties, her sister flattered her into helping out: “You’re so much better at it than I am.” Mitsuki would put on an apron and work in the kitchen until guests arrived, then mingle among them offering food and drinks. Mostly they were well-to-do people who made music their occupation, people she marveled at since they never read books, never even seemed to feel they ought to. Late at night she would return to the jumbled neighborhood where she lived in a place less than half the size of Natsuki’s, yet a place where books made their presence felt. And she would feel almost as if she had returned to the abode of a spiritual aristocracy.

  In bed she would report humorously on the evening and then lean her head on Tetsuo’s shoulder and murmur, “Home is the best.”

  “You’re not jealous?”

  “No. We have plenty.”

  She did have one small dream—to quit teaching someday, if there was any money left for her to inherit after her parents were gone.

  When Tetsuo became an associate professor, his salary went up. Mitsuki hoped eventually to cut back on her hours of teaching as his salary increased. So many people had to work daily that she was in no position to complain, and yet teaching wore her out, the fatigue lasting all the next day. Besides, her heart simply wasn’t in a career, hardly surprising given the times in which she’d grown up.

  Her mother had worked for Auntie until her late fifties, true, but then she had always liked to be out and about. Besides, she hadn’t worked in the usual sense of the word. Whenever Mitsuki stayed home from elementary school with a cold, she was allowed as a special treat to lie down on her parents’ double bed, where she could watch as her mother made leisurely preparations for work. She would sit in front of a vanity mirror, her expression intent as she carefully powdered her face with a big puff, applied rouge and lipstick, then swiftly dressed in a long under-kimono, kimono, and obi tied in back. She would twist around and give the bow a smart pat before putting on earrings, the final touch. She never looked as if she were going off to work. Watching, rather than feel inspired to grow up to be a working woman, Mitsuki used to long for the day when she too could wear makeup and pretty kimono. She never felt particularly grateful for her mother’s working outside the home, although her mother, perhaps sensing this ingratitude, kept saying, “I work hard so that you girls can have nice things.”

  Sometime after they moved into the new apartment, the professor who had found her a part-time teaching job invited her to translate a children’s picture book published in France. Translation had never particularly interested her, but once she got started she found herself sitting at the computer till late at night. She translated two more picture books, followed by a slim modern novel. The work had to be finished within a certain period of time, so she turned down patent translations to make sure she would make her deadline.

  The pay was negligible.

  “That’s all you get?” Tetsuo had said incredulously.

  “We don’t really need the money anymore, so what’s the difference?”

  At the time he had let it drop, out of consideration for her feelings. But the 72.3-square-meter apartment that she proudly thought of as the abode of a spiritual aristocracy wasn’t good enough for him—as she would soon realize.

  A RATHER NICE OFFER

  “If we lived in the city center I could just take a taxi home.”

  This was true. Tetsuo had begun to make a slight name for himself in the media; he often got home later now, and she did feel sorry for him, rattling around in those crowded trains while tipsy. But beneath his talk of taxis was a layer of vanity. After the umpteenth time he brought it up, she said teasingly, “The real problem is you want a fancier place with snob appeal—admit it!”

  The building where they lived was already starting to look old, and no matter how the management repainted the outer walls or redid the communal floors, it was essentially a concrete box and nothing more, a leftover from Japan’s pre-bubble era. Neither was the neighborhood itself anything to brag about.

  Tetsuo was briefly speechless. Then, “All right, so I’m a snob. Being a snob has made me what I am.”

  His defiance left her in turn momentarily at a loss for words. “But we don’t have that kind of money.”

  “With both of us working, we could swing it.”

  She let slip the chance to tell him that she wanted to cut back her hours.

  Even then, she made excuses for him, justifying his desire: he couldn’t help it; he was scarred by his childhood.

  The story of Tetsuo’s impoverished childhood was so redolent of Japan’s postwar Showa years that it sounded almost like a fable—one filled with pathos.

  The fields where he and his schoolmates romped had been covered with shepherd’s purse, trembling in the breeze; they would pluck these wildflowers and bend down the stiff leaves so they dangled and made rattling sounds like little drums. In the evening the aroma of grilled fish rose up from houses everywhere. Before dinner, he and his brother rubbed shoulders on their way to the public bath, each carrying a battered washbasin tucked under his arm. When they got back, the frosted-glass overhead light would be on, hanging over the little round table and illuminating the cheap tableware and simple fare awaiting them.

  One story in particular made an impression on her.

  After Tetsuo started commuting to the select high school that had admitted him, he became good friends with the son of a treasury bureaucrat who lived in the upscale residential district of Mejiro. The difference in their circumstances was so great it verged on the ludicrous, but they vied with each other to read authors like Soseki and Tanizaki, or Dostoevsky and Tolstoy—the authors that bright students of their generation invariably read. His friend’s house had a Western-style living room with bookshelves containing a crimson clothbound edition of Soseki’s complete works. Tetsuo once gingerly took a volume in hand and found it was a first edition, probably from the grandfather’s generation. He did not of course invite his friend to his house. He used the pittance his mother was able to squeeze out for his spending money to buy cheap paperback editions of the classics that he and his friend discussed, fancying themselves critics.

  Then one day while running to catch the train he slipped and fell on the station stairs, breaking his ankle. After that he had to stay home from school with a cast on his leg. A few days later his friend dropped by, having looked up the location of Tetsuo’s house on a map.

  “How do you do, ma’am,” he greeted Tetsuo’s mother, removing his school cap. “I am Shoji.”

  Seeing the polite young man standing before her in his school uniform, Tetsuo’s mother let out a small cry. She had heard all about her son’s friend. She had even spoken to his mother at Parents’ Day, having made special efforts to look presentable for that big event. She was proud to think a son of hers was friends with such a fine young man from such a fine home. The idea that his friend might someday turn up in the tiny entryway of her tiny three-room house never crossed her mind. As she led him into the room where Tetsuo lay in a thin futon on old, faded mats, she imagined how humiliated her
son was going to be. Once out in the narrow hallway, she went into the adjacent room where his little brother was watching the Ultraman show, turned off the television, and warned him to be quiet. Then she went back to the kitchen and got out their cheap tableware to serve cheap sweets and tea.

  Shoji politely demurred. “Really, ma’am, you needn’t put yourself out for me. I don’t want to be any trouble.” His grace and poise would have done any adult proud. After she recovered from this speech, she sat with her younger boy in the room next door, breath bated.

  Tetsuo bravely carried on his usual style of conversation with his friend, but once Shoji had left, he lay staring morosely at the ceiling. His mother, aware of how he must be feeling, returned wordlessly to the kitchen sink. The younger brother, failing to grasp the implications of the situation, switched the television back on with a puzzled look.

  As Tetsuo told the story, Mitsuki could almost hear the sound of tap water striking the tin sink in the kitchen and the irksome sound of the television through paper sliding doors. She could see the knotty boards in the ceiling over his futon. The wish to live in a house where he wouldn’t be ashamed to have anyone come over must have been implanted in Tetsuo’s heart that day.

  And his house had been practically in the middle of nowhere. The closest station was Shin-Toride, three stations from Toride. To get to school he’d had to take the train to Toride, transfer to the Joban line, and then transfer again at Nippori or Ueno. Riding the jam-packed train and staring at the impassive faces of the adults being jostled to and fro, Tetsuo must have vowed to himself that when he grew up he would never end up like them. After they married he had chosen the location of their apartment, convenient to Shinjuku and Ginza; but gradually he began to desire more.

  Nor was his desire unrealistic.

  As the years went by, magazines began displaying glossy photos of posh-looking condominiums. Unlike those inhabited by old-money families like the Shimazakis or by upstart IT specialists, or worse yet by highly paid expatriates (who in their heart of hearts regarded the Japanese as mere “natives”), these were not spacious—some were hardly larger than their 72.3 square meters—nor were they priced beyond the reach of a college teacher. Even so, there would be an expansive entry hall tastefully decorated with marble. Residents might include a pair of architects, man and wife, he with a goatee and she with a short bob and light, glowing makeup, raising herbs on their terrace and living stylish lives—people like that. Magazines gave the impression that with-it people were all moving into such places, and anyone who didn’t must be out of it.