There was only one thing to do: increase her workload. Fortunately, adjunct teachers could work until sixty-eight, and the demand for patent translations was rising. With her years of experience, she’d have no trouble finding extra work.
Mitsuki stared at the figure 36.8 on the memo pad, representing her inheritance. For years she’d thought that the money would mean freedom, or relative freedom, from work. Even if Tetsuo balked, she’d been determined to cut back. Now fate had decided otherwise. She would have to work harder and longer. Now that she thought about it, Tetsuo’s salary, deposited in his bank account month after month—how generous it really had been! She felt almost as if she were being punished for having taken it so for granted.
She shook her head, closed her eyes, and steadied her breathing, then started afresh. She had to take a different tack, come up with a different scenario, or what was the point of living? She began by revising her thinking about the inheritance money. She would forget about using it for a condominium and use it to live, starting now.
She could get a condominium with just half the inheritance money, however small, old, far off, and ramshackle it might be. That didn’t matter. She could purchase the annuity as planned but give up the idea of saving for small luxuries in old age. And why not go all the way and quit teaching? Oh, what a relief that would be! She could do more patent translating, get by till her money and health gave out, and then enter a state-run nursing home—or just die alone in her apartment. What difference did it make? The point was to give up any idea of clinging to the middle class and just live, doing what she wanted to do and making the most of however much time she might have remaining.
What if she hadn’t received that inheritance? Then she’d have no choice but to accept those terms that “the devil himself would agree to.” Besides moving into a cheap place somewhere, she’d have to work herself to the bone, teaching till she was sixty-eight without hope of a pension while piling on more and more translations. Did Tetsuo’s woman have no qualms about inflicting such rigors on a woman nearly twenty years her senior, while becoming a professor’s wife herself? Anger flared in her momentarily—but the more fitting target of her anger was not the woman, but Tetsuo. He knew better than anyone that her health, never good, had lately been worsening. And yet he had the nerve to say, “This is awfully generous.”
Leaving the sheet of paper covered with numbers on the desk, Mitsuki went over to the armchair and threw herself down. With the overhead light off, the desk lamp provided the only illumination in the spacious room, emphasizing the darkness of the four corners. As she sat in the shadowy stillness, the cold anger inside her erupted for the first time into hot fury.
Tetsuo.
Tetsuo, who’d been initially attracted to her in Paris as a girl of privilege and then driven all the other boys away, making her his own. Tetsuo, who’d sworn, surrounded by the bright glow of candles, that she would never lack for anything. That same Tetsuo was now going to snatch from her the life of ease that all her life she had shamelessly accepted as her birthright. Did he figure that her sister, having married into wealth, would come to her rescue when the chips were down? Did he figure that sooner or later her mother was bound to die, so she’d be all right? Or had he simply let his mind go blank, preferring not to think about it at all?
Amid the burning silence, the telephone rang again.
As she thought, it was Natsuki, but her sister’s voice was disturbed; she sounded agitated, the way she used to do after quarreling with their mother. “What’s wrong?” Mitsuki asked. She was surprised at how perfectly ordinary her own voice sounded.
“I just had it out with Jun.”
Imagining Natsuki’s petulant face, Mitsuki realized that come what may, she could never rely on this childish elder sister of hers. The light from the desk lamp lit up the room forlornly.
“She’s in her room, crying.”
Natsuki herself sounded close to tears.
THE NIGHT THE SKY RAINED STARS
Her voice breaking, her breath coming in agitated gulps, Natsuki explained.
As she spread out family photographs on the dining room table, organizing the albums, she had muttered something like “What a mother—she never had a kind word to say about her daughters’ looks.”
Then Jun, who was doing something with her laptop on the sofa, suddenly turned and said, “Neither did you, Mom.”
“You could have knocked me over,” Natsuki said bitterly. “I avoided the topic on purpose! I didn’t want to be one of those mothers who’s all focused on her daughter’s looks.”
“I know.”
“I mean, all that talk about being beautiful or not—we had a bellyful of it growing up, didn’t we?”
“Yes, we did.”
“But Jun took it the wrong way. Now she hates me.”
“If you explain, she’ll understand.”
“I tried. She says it’s too late. She says I never said she was pretty, so she’s never felt confident about her looks, and now it’s too late to do anything about it.”
“But Jun is pretty!” Mitsuki said, and meant it. She was a nice girl too. As an infant she had watched round-eyed from her carriage, uncomprehending, as her mother and grandmother quarreled endlessly over that architect with the hair that went diagonally across his forehead. But she had grown up normally, gone to school normally, found a job normally, like other girls of her generation.
“There’s more. She’s mad because when she was in fifth grade and wanted to quit piano lessons, I never tried to talk her out of it. She says it shows I thought she had no talent. All I wanted was not to bring her up the way I was brought up.” Her voice had become shriller; she was practically screaming. “What was I supposed to do, for God’s sake!” At such times all Mitsuki could do was listen in silence. Perhaps daughters were condemned to resent their mothers.
“Ken is a boy so I never expected him to understand, but Jun is a girl! I always thought she understood!”
“Is Ken coming home for Christmas?” Mitsuki smoothly changed the subject, the way one does to distract a child.
“Yes.”
He hadn’t come home for summer vacation, partly because Natsuki had been busy looking after their mother, partly because he himself had been busy preparing for his orals.
“How’s his English now?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
Natsuki didn’t pursue the topic. Calmer now, she went back to talking about their mother. “Have you noticed that after she took up with That Man she has a disgusting look on her face in all of her pictures? I’m not putting any of them online.”
Particularly when she posed in a long gown in the photographs taken at the chanson recitals, the expression under their mother’s heavy makeup was chilling, like that of one possessed.
“I’m still not free of her, and now Jun hates me. Life is too hard. My health isn’t getting any better either.”
“I know.” Mitsuki repeated the words mechanically.
She went on administering comfort a while longer in this vein and hung up without having told her sister that she had decided on divorce. Her silence weighed on her. But how could she bring up the topic with her sister, who even more than Mitsuki had been sheltered from life’s harsh realities? If she did tell her, how capable would Natsuki be of grasping the implications?
The clock indicated it wasn’t yet ten.
In her mind’s eye she saw again the shimmering night sky she had reached out to from her window, the closeness of the shining stars. Swiftly she put on her coat. On a night like this, one should look up at the stars with one’s feet planted firmly on the earth. Leery of the hovering staff, she kept out of sight after taking the elevator down, slipping out the back door toward the veranda, and then hurrying over to the garden.
It was the kind of night when stars seem to rain earthward from the heavens. The air was miraculously clear. Looking up as if through magic glasses, she saw the stars, untold light-years away, gr
ow still more radiant as she watched. She walked rapidly downhill and to the right till she came to the chapel, which she knew was hidden from the hotel. The tawdry chapel and plaza were magical at night, all light and shadow. Even the water spraying in the fountain had an uncanny beauty.
How many couples got married here every year? How many of those brides found their happy-ever-after? Just as she began to walk along the faux-stone cloister, a dark figure emerged from the shadows. She jumped. It was Mr. Matsubara.
He seemed equally startled. She hadn’t seen him since yesterday noon, but his face was unshaven, and he had his usual faraway air. Even the shirt beneath his jacket was a bit rumpled.
“I come here every night,” he said. “Never expected to see anyone else here.”
“You come because you were married in a chapel like this?”
“No, we were married in the usual way.”
With proper go-betweens and a traditional ceremony conducted by a Shinto priest, he must mean. She pictured Wakako dressed in a scarlet outer kimono and the white headdress meant to conceal horns of jealousy, sipping the ritual sake, her slender fingers gracefully aligned. Then she imagined her at the reception afterward, sitting in front of a gold screen with her gaze cast demurely down. Even in a tuxedo Mr. Matsubara would have been dressed in his usual style, she thought, all black.
“I like to come here because it’s away from the eyes of the hotel staff. I started coming at night when I was in my room and couldn’t take it anymore.”
Just like me.
“The time my wife and I stayed here,” he went on, as if picking up a previous train of thought, “I think she may have already given up. She’d look out the window at the lake and tick off on her fingers all the happy things she could remember. She didn’t have enough fingers and toes to count them all, she said. But it only gave me more pain…”
Mitsuki didn’t know what to say. For a while they were silent, standing amid the fantastic play of light and shadow and watching the cascading waters of the fountain.
Then she spoke up: “I decided to leave my husband.”
He looked at her, waiting.
“He has a young woman.”
Mr. Matsubara frowned slightly, as if she had said something indecent. Mitsuki herself could hardly believe that she had just uttered those words. To distance herself from them, to keep from seeming even a little pathetic, she lifted her chin and looked him in the eye. His first question went straight to the point.
“Do you still have feelings for him?”
“No.”
The coldness in her voice was startling. His second question was no less pertinent.
“Can you manage financially?”
“Yes. Fortunately my mother left me a little something, so I’ll be all right.” Unconsciously she looked up at the stars as she replied. “That’s good.” He sounded relieved.
“But I feel as if I’ve wasted my life.”
Her admission left him wordless.
“I only wish I could give what’s left of my life to your wife.”
He looked down, thanked her, then raised his head and murmured, “But life is for the living.”
Words he needed to take to heart even more than she did, Mitsuki thought. She smiled a little mischievously. “You seem about half alive.”
That made him smile too. They turned and headed for the hotel. The stars traveled with them in perfectly orchestrated harmony. For the first time in years, she felt the urge to sing. Then she remembered that Wakako had also been a singer.
“What kind of songs did your wife like?”
“Maria Callas. More than anything, Callas. She would listen to all sorts of singers, but in the end she always came back to her.”
“No, I mean what kind of songs did she herself like to sing?”
He swept back his hair. “She never sang in front of me.”
Mitsuki looked at him in surprise. “But didn’t you say she studied voice?”
“Yes, but she always said she wasn’t good enough to sing for me. And she was a mezzo soprano, not really a soloist.”
“Well, even for a mezzo…there’s Handel’s famous ‘Ombra mai fu,’ for one. It’s even more famous now thanks to that whiskey commercial.”
The popular aria had been featured in a television commercial for Nikka Whiskey. There were any number of arias just as easy, if not easier, for a mezzo to sing. Melody after melody came to her as they walked, songs familiar and well loved, as numerous as the stars.
“No, I never heard her sing it.”
“Did you ever ask her to sing for you?”
“I did, but she wouldn’t hear of it. Too shy.”
Mitsuki walked on in silence. Maybe Wakako had dictated what her husband should wear, but even so, what a modest and retiring woman she must have been at heart! She felt herself redden at the contrast with herself. This very moment, if only she could, she would love nothing more than to look up at the stars, stretch out her arms, and spin in a circle as she sang, spin and spin until she spiraled up into the star-filled sky.
While they waited side by side for the elevator, he said again, to no one in particular, “Life is for the living, after all.”
When she returned to her room, it was almost eleven.
Her mouth set in determination, Mitsuki took off her coat and went directly to the telephone, not bothering to remove her boots. She dialed Natsuki’s number. It was a bit late to be calling, and she would probably disturb her sister’s family, but she wanted to share her news before the night was out.
“Hello?” she said, perched on the edge of the bed.
“Ohmigosh, you sound just like Mother!” Her sister’s voice sounded amused, unsuspecting.
ATAMI BEACH
With Natsuki she went into greater detail than she had with Masako. She told her about Tetsuo’s past two flings and said that for all she knew there might have been others.
Natsuki, after her first startled “He whaaat?” listened in shocked silence.
Feeling more wretched as she went on, Mitsuki deliberately made her voice cheery at the end, wrapping up with “And that’s that!”
“I can’t believe it.”
Natsuki had never sounded so stricken. The younger sister familiar to her since childhood had vanished, replaced by an unknown woman on the other end of the line. She sounded as if she took this news as blasphemy against her own life. Mitsuki struggled not to be caught up in her sister’s shock.
“But it’s true, so there you are.”
A short silence followed. Then, “Now that you mention it, you lost that happy glow you always used to have.”
“Well, if I have, that’s not all his doing.” An oblique reference to their mother.
“No, I know.”
Another silence, and then in the same gloomy tone Natsuki said rather hesitantly, “You know, Mother had taken to criticizing him, more and more.” Even though they’d been at odds, their mother had privately said some derogatory things to her about Tetsuo, it seemed, often alluding to his shallowness.
“Did you think he was shallow?” asked Mitsuki.
Natsuki answered cautiously, choosing her words. “I don’t know. Of course I always stood up for him. Sometimes little things made me wonder, but he was the man you chose so I trusted him. I never dreamed anything like this could happen.”
Mitsuki imagined her sister’s utterly shocked face. “Never mind. It’s okay. I don’t feel married to him anymore.”
“Will you have enough money?” An astute question, for her.
“I have the money from Mother, so I’ll be fine. I’m actually thinking I’ll quit teaching.”
“Really? Are you sure?” She sounded nervous.
“Oh yes. I’ll be doing more translating—and if worse comes to worst I know the Shimazakis will always be there for me.”
“But you have such a strong independent streak. You always wanted to do things yourself.”
And look where it got me. Natsuki’s wo
rds did not strike her as complimentary.
Compared to their mother and Mitsuki, Natsuki had less emotional resilience. Right now she still seemed dazed by the news. Mitsuki decided to call her back in a day or two, to give her time to recover. She announced she was hanging up, and her sister made a final comment in an abstracted tone, as if thinking aloud.
“What’s going to happen to you from now on? I mean, you’ve got no children or anything.”
Mitsuki was momentarily at a loss for words. Then she summoned all her bravado and said jauntily, “There are any number of people like that in this world, and guess what? They’re all doing just fine.”
With the remnants of bravado, she began briskly preparing for bed after hanging up. Her movements soon lost their verve, however, as Natsuki’s all-too-frank words caught up with her. What kind of future did lie ahead for her? For the first time in her life, she would be all alone. Unlike someone who had stayed single, she’d have to make a fresh start—knowing that at her age a truly fresh start was, however necessary, impossible.
What had been a vague awareness then struck her with force: I will die without ever having accomplished anything in my life. This would be true even if her marriage hadn’t collapsed, but now that she was forced to start over, the fact hit home. Why now all of a sudden should she be struck by the fear that she would disappear leaving no trace—except for the detritus on Google? Did she after all harbor a modern ambition to carve a place for herself in history? She hadn’t fulfilled her girlish dreams. She hadn’t made any real contribution to the world. And as Natsuki had pointed out, she had no children.
And yet. Burrowing under the covers, she thought it over. With the Japanese population shrinking so fast, you perhaps couldn’t say so out loud, but it might be just as well to be childless. No one could age without changing for the worse. She too was doomed to become some degraded, barely recognizable version of herself. Better not to have children, who would have to watch that happen.
Inheritance from Mother Page 34
