That Tetsuo was not one to reach for the stars failed to strike Mitsuki for a long time. After a number of years she sensed dimly that he had lost interest in literature per se. Then she saw that he lacked even the scholar’s ambition to understand the world through books. He would sit at his desk and write abstruse articles. He would even read abstruse books. But he taught in the International Studies Department, where he could freely choose the subject of his research; in the course of examining colonial and immigrant literature he had drifted away from books and begun flying around the world like a cultural anthropologist, becoming a spokesman for disappearing cultures and oppressed minorities—a laudable gesture, she should have thought, but somehow couldn’t. The more he distanced himself from actual books, the better he was served by his inclination to be on the move.
Still, he retained a modicum of academic ambition. Using his former training, he wrote short articles that Mitsuki found baffling, based on French literary, philosophical, and sociological theories, and published them in journals no one read. None of them attracted attention, but he plugged away and in time had enough for one book, then two. Then he began to follow media currents in eastern and southeastern Asia. His third book dealt with the Asian reception of Japanese contemporary pop culture. That book sold rather well, and he began appearing more often in the media.
In Mitsuki’s eyes, Tetsuo didn’t seem to be acting out of any deep-felt commitment. She could only think that his efforts were aimed at hanging on to the little space he had finally carved out for himself in the media. But until his second fling came to light, she avoided taking such a jaundiced view, partly for her own sake.
Was it fate or mere coincidence?
It happened just after his second fling. It was also just after her mother, walking with a cane and prone to falling, had broken her left shoulder. Mitsuki had been standing in the kitchen in the house at Chitose Funabashi, wearing an apron and slicing pickled radish, a favorite of her mother’s. Her mother lay on the sofa wearing a cast and calling out orders: “Don’t cut them in slices, now. My teeth are so bad you’ve got to cut them up in fine little strips.” The television was on, Tetsuo due to appear on-screen any minute. His first television appearance.
“There he is, there he is!” Her mother sounded as excited as if some rare animal had come into view.
Mitsuki rushed over, wiping her hands, and then stopped in her tracks. Tetsuo looked momentarily like a stranger. The medium of television, as if it were the all-seeing eye of God, laid bare the banality of his aspirations. That man wearing the “literati shirt” and prattling about something or other with a complacent look on his face—was that her husband?
“He does look handsome on camera.” That was all her mother said.
Since he was naturally photogenic and the camera made him look younger than he was, he appeared on the tube fairly often after that. But Mitsuki no longer bothered to watch.
The Tetsuo who had sat amid the flickering candlelight in the garret in Paris, looking grave—how many different heroes she had happily projected onto him! It wasn’t only Rodolfo from La bohème. There were Julian Sorel from Le rouge et le noir and Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights, not to mention Kan’ichi from The Golden Demon. Young men who were penniless but reaching for the stars, longing to rise above life’s vulgarity, and passionately in love with one woman. Men who appeared in the novels she had read over and over in childhood while lying stretched out on a sofa or bed, face up or on her side, munching rice crackers as she devoured the pages. How naively, how rapturously she had projected those characters onto Tetsuo! And fallen gloriously in love.
When she first brought him back to Japan, her mother and sister had projected the same images onto him as she had done, but her father, as one man to another, had not. He hadn’t taken a dislike to him, but she realized now that to her father the word boursier must have suggested someone with more of the scholar in him. When he met Tetsuo he had seemed rather surprised.
Once she became used to measuring her husband with a cold and objective eye, doing so often amused her.
There was the time they all went to the opera. Unaware that this would be their mother’s last such excursion, she, Natsuki, and their mother had taken a taxi from Chitose Funabashi as usual. Tetsuo had taken the subway straight from home, meeting them at Tokyo Bunka Kaikan, the concert hall in Ueno Park. On such occasions, they didn’t invite Yuji along, ostensibly because he was too busy but actually because he didn’t really fit in. Tetsuo blended into the family and made himself useful, carrying their mother’s coat and bags, making restaurant reservations and finding a taxi on the way home, so when he was available they often did ask him to join them.
Their mother’s last live opera, La bohème, opened.
“Che gelida manina…” What a cold little hand, Rodolfo began, taking Mimi’s hand in his and singing the celebrated aria. “Who am I? I’m a poet. What do I do? I write. How do I live? I live! I am a poor man…But in hopes and dreams and castles in the air, I have the soul of a millionaire!” The tenor’s golden voice made them forget this wasn’t La Scala or the Paris Opéra but Tokyo Bunka Kaikan, whose outdated modernist architecture oozed the sadness of a country condemned in its early modern era to a policy of “leave Asia, enter Europe.” Mitsuki’s mother, already in her eighties, had gazed at the stage with radiant eyes.
Next to her, Tetsuo was fast asleep. He often drifted off at the theater. After a restful Friday—he had no classes then—and Saturday, it wasn’t fatigue that made him sleep through the Sunday matinee. The sight of his sleeping figure brought her not melancholy, Mitsuki noticed, but a stab of malicious pleasure.
In one email to his current inamorata, Tetsuo had written, “The family is always going artsy on me. It’s hard to take.” When she came across that line, Mitsuki couldn’t keep back a smile; it so perfectly captured the absurdity of the Katsura household. With the other woman, Tetsuo did not pretend to be something he was not. He could be defiant—or rather, completely honest.
People sometimes were untrue to themselves.
Tetsuo had been untrue to himself during those few hours amid the flickering candlelight in the garret in Paris. That brief time had been a festival for two, a topsy-turvy world where up was down. He’d been beside himself, deeply in love for those few hours, and his sincerity had touched her, swayed her, sent her into raptures. The festival had ended when the candles burned out and he returned to his normal self. Mitsuki had simply gone for a very long time without facing this fact.
An explanation for the sad little episode back in Calais still eluded her. Had he been repelled by a woman childish enough to suppose that her singing would bring a man pleasure? Had he been alienated by the very act of singing, an act completely ordinary in her family? Had he felt, even though she was singing an old popular song, as if she was foisting the arts on him? Whatever the reason, he had definitely felt uncomfortable in her presence.
HUSBAND-AND-WIFE RICE BOWLS
They were already sleeping in separate rooms by then. He had always kept a single bed in his study to use when he worked late, so the change occurred naturally, before either of them quite realized it. They went on sharing the closet space in the master bedroom, where Mitsuki’s desk was, but the double bed became hers alone. Many a sleepless night she had lain there thinking about her poor late father and her outrageous mother, with scarcely a thought about herself and Tetsuo, presumably asleep on the other side of the wall.
That lapse was catching up with her now.
Here in the night stillness at Hakone, her thoughts roamed back through time, dwelling incessantly on Tetsuo and various incidents that came to mind. It was past two in the morning by the time she stopped staring at the ceiling, took her usual assortment of pills, and fell into an artificial sleep.
Even in sleep, memories continued to disturb her.
Despite the clear air, she had only a bit of murky sleep and again woke up feeling tired. She pulled open the curtains, see
king the solace of morning. The lake was the same as the day before, but she could tell from the light shining on the ridge above the far shore that the sun was higher in the sky. As she stood watching, she felt as if she could see the sun rising higher with each passing moment. In the morning light, the previous evening’s gathering in the lounge seemed unreal, a mere chimera.
She went downstairs to breakfast in the Japanese-style restaurant.
As she was being shown to her seat, she looked around unobtrusively for a figure in a dark suit, intending to just nod in greeting to Mr. Matsubara if he was eating too. He had come to this place to face his grief in solitude; last night, Kaoru’s high-handed approach had surely led him to reveal more than he intended. Today he should be left to himself.
Instead of Mr. Matsubara, she spotted a young Asian-looking couple. She could only describe them as “Asian-looking,” for as she passed by she heard them speaking American English and couldn’t guess their ancestry. Chinese? Korean? Perhaps they were even of Japanese extraction. But unlike Japanese young people nowadays, who seemed likely to shatter with one soft karate chop, they were solidly built. American travelers with no money stayed at cheap inns or business hotels, those with money at luxury international hotels. Odd that these two should be staying at this in-between hotel where the azaleas weren’t even in bloom. But they were young, life was just getting under way for them, and the air around them was charged with youthfulness, something Mitsuki had never been aware of when she herself was young.
Though the American divorce rate was around fifty percent, among Asian-American couples it was low, she had heard. Perhaps the old-fashioned ways of their grandparents and parents, who never invested marriage with futile dreams, had some influence on them. What lives would this couple lead on a continent far removed from the land of their forebears?
Farther on she saw the elderly couple who had ridden here on the bus with her. She was surprised to see they were still at the hotel, before reflecting that only two nights had passed. Recognizing her, they set down their teacups and greeted her with smiles and nods. Their son and daughter-in-law were nowhere in sight; they must have stayed only the one night.
Morning light coming through the window shone on their mild faces. They seemed to have settled in at the hotel, and no longer appeared out of their element. They shared a common quietude of mind. As they wordlessly sipped their after-breakfast tea, they had the air, unique to couples who have grown old together, of a well-aged pair of matched rice bowls for husband and wife.
Grandma and Grandpa. An old man and an old woman.
Once upon a time, there lived an old man and an old woman…
The elderly couple, who seemed to have stepped out of a folktale, were still tied to the Japan of old. They may well have had an old-fashioned arranged marriage. There were still plenty of such couples, amicably growing old together. Tetsuo’s parents were like that. They were quietly on good terms, having married after meeting only a single time. As custom dictated, she had served him tea and cakes on a tray, and when he helped himself that settled the matter, without a word being spoken. The episode may have taken place deep in the countryside beyond Toride, but not in the Edo or Meiji eras. It had happened in the recent Showa era, in the postwar world, after that watershed of modern times, the dropping of the atom bomb. Once their younger son had children, they took to calling each other Grandpa and Grandma. Why were Japanese people no longer satisfied with that sort of marriage?
As she sat down, her eyes fell on the book lying on her table.
Madame Bovary. Gustave Flaubert. First serialized in La Revue de Paris, 1856. The story of a French country girl who read too many romance novels. Emma, a sentimental, dreamy girl, was the daughter of a farmer with a small fortune. She received an education above her station in a convent, where she came secretly to devour popular novels that talked about nothing but “amours, amants, amantes,” instilling in her a yearning for excitement and romance. The man she married, however, was a common country doctor, gentle but dull. Emma imagined her friends from the convent “living in the city…enjoying the buzz of the theater and the bright lights of ballrooms, their hearts buoyed, their senses aroused.” To fill the emptiness inside her she took a lover, then another, ordered frocks in the latest Paris fashions, and ran up enormous debts, only to take arsenic and die an agonizing death.
All across France, many a woman reader suspected the novel was about her. Ever since, the word bovarism has denoted women who read too many novels and have unrealistic fantasies about love and life.
Western novels made much of love and lovers, an influence that came to Japan after the country opened its doors to the West. Although the eponymous hero of the classic Tale of Genji was known for his amorous adventures, in Japanese literature romantic love had always been merely one theme among many—certainly less central than the change of seasons. The Western novels that had reached Japan in the last century and a half were almost all romance novels, transforming Japanese readers—especially women—into romantics. Women became more particular. They grew discontented with the husbands chosen for them by parents, relatives, or neighbors, longing like Emma for someone to whisper thrilling words of love. Their dissatisfaction with reality increased until, like Noriko, they rejected barbers’ sons and fled, each to her “Yokohama.” Not all of them went so far as to commit suicide like Emma, of course, but they led small, discontented lives and then died.
Novels are heartless.
One eye on the pretty face of the bonneted young woman on the cover, Mitsuki sipped her miso soup, chopsticks in hand. The old couple stood up and paused by her table in friendly greeting. Mitsuki set down her soup bowl and said hello. “Another lovely day for a walk.”
“Yes it is,” agreed the old husband. “We already took ours today.”
“You were out early then.”
“It’s our habit.”
They smiled at her, their smiles much alike, and disappeared.
Mitsuki too retired to her room, but she was weary of thinking. She opened and closed Madame Bovary several times. Sometime before noon, she dressed against the cold and went out into the bright hotel garden.
If she followed the stone path to the right through the garden, past withered azalea shrubs, she would come to a cheap-looking chapel with a cross on top. It was made of plastered concrete, painted white, and on either side of the double doors were alcoves fitted for some reason with twin statues of Mary. Lately, as marriages founded on romantic love spread, more and more couples who had never opened a Bible in their lives were pledging eternal love at altars, under a cross, and hotels that profited from wedding receptions were vying to construct chapels in the building or on the grounds. The Hôtel du Lac must have erected that bizarre-looking structure in an effort to keep up with the times. In front of it was a vaguely Romanesque plaza with a fountain in the center that looked like a studio set, and surrounding the plaza was a fake stone cloister.
When she first stumbled on the scene, she’d been so put off that from then on, she went out of her way to avoid it, retracing her steps when she came to an old granite monument honoring the hotel founder. The meaning of the elegant inscription in classical Chinese escaped her, even though she could read each individual character. Every time she went by, she marveled anew that in a mere hundred years Japanese people had lost the ability to read such texts, while putting up fake stone chapels all around the country.
Today she again turned around at the monument and then came back to the center of the garden, where she encountered a group of men in caps. Gardeners. They were looking at the azaleas and variously making notes in notebooks, taking photographs, and attaching number tags. Some of the shrubs had retained their leaves, others had shed them; some were small, others so big it was hard to believe they could be azaleas. As in a botanical garden, the various shrubs were tagged with their Japanese name and its scientific equivalent: “Hanaguruma; Rhododendron macrosepalum Maxim.” Flower names rendered in picture
sque Chinese characters leaped out at her: Okinawan Silk, Young Egret, River Asuka, White Man’yo, Damask Princess. The mental picture each name created seemed to open a world more aesthetically pleasing than the coming array of spring blooms. The magic of ideograms—fortunately that tradition had survived.
The group of men stood murmuring in front of a leafless shrub. “What’s this?”
“Dodan.”
“You sure?”
“Dodan. Trust me.”
Farther on she came to a sign explaining the cultivation and care of azaleas. On display were names and headshots of the main gardeners, who were identified grandly as “garden conductors.” The rugged, honest faces made the odd, quasi-English job title seem even odder. She studied the board for a while before going down to the lake, this time turning right along the stone path. After a while the stone paving became irregular, the trees encroached on the way, and walking was more difficult. She went as far as she could before turning back, arriving at the hotel just in time for a late lunch.
She decided on a light meal and headed for the lounge, taking a table by the window. Most of the customers were female, possibly because it was midday. Some pairs were mother and daughter, others sisters or friends. All seemed to be unburdening themselves earnestly and intimately to each other. Then a stout middle-aged man in a sweater came by, paused at a window near Mitsuki’s table, and turned to call with oblivious male heartiness to someone farther back in the room: “Look here, you can see Mount Fuji!”
“What if you can?” A middle-aged male voice boomed back.
“Come on, see for yourself.” He gestured with one hand. “They’re gonna make it a World Heritage site, you know.”
The other man sauntered up to the window, grumbling. “That? That’s gonna be a World Heritage?” He too was stout and wore a sweater. The two men stood regarding Mount Fuji like a pair of carefree bears. Then there was a series of muffled loud noises, sounding like a small volcanic eruption.
Inheritance from Mother Page 27
