Inheritance from Mother

by Minae Mizumura

  That night again her rest was fitful.

  “Would you like to go for a drive?”

  The next day after lunch as she was standing by the elevator, Takeru issued this invitation. Having spent the previous evening mired in self-pity, she was wide-eyed with surprise. Perhaps the correct response was a demurral—“You want to go out with an old lady like me?”—but she saw no reason to pander to society’s norms. Nor did he seem to expect her to.

  “A drive where?”

  “Wherever you like. We can always add dinner into the bargain.”

  “What about your aunt Kaoru?”

  “She’s not coming.” After a beat he added, “Actually, she approves.”

  More likely, she had issued a command after observing how Mitsuki looked these past few days.

  They agreed to meet in the lobby in half an hour, and Mitsuki went back to her room, where after a moment’s hesitation, not troubling to think why, she quickly showered and put on brand-new black underwear, top and bottom.

  Later, fastening her seat belt in a beat-up old Toyota Corolla, she said, “Would Atami be too far?”

  “Atami?”

  “It’s famous for the beach scene between Kan’ichi and O-Miya. The town is nothing special, though.”

  Before, when she came with her mother, they’d gone there by taxi after two nights in the hotel. Mitsuki remembered appallingly bleak scenery hugging the shore, but for some reason she wanted to make sure.

  “Kan’ichi and O-Miya,” he repeated. “I know I’ve heard of them…”

  Mitsuki gave him a simple explanation. From her experience teaching, she was accustomed to the ignorance of the younger generation; Takeru was doing well just to have heard of the two names. After she finished talking, he drove the winding downhill road to Atami with scarcely another word. She understood that he preferred to keep to himself, and she found it pleasant not to have to make conversation.

  After winding all the way down to the coast, the road finally brought them to the hilly town of Atami, which was just as drab and depressing as she remembered. Despite an astonishing and somewhat disquieting variety of buildings and signboards in every color and shape, the town wasn’t particularly lively, and she couldn’t help noticing a number of dirty, abandoned concrete buildings covered in mold, perhaps as a result of the humid ocean air. Even the main street seemed run-down.

  They reached the shore, and Takeru parked next to “O-Miya’s pine.”

  When she and her mother had come, they’d gotten out of the taxi and gasped on seeing the famous tree hemmed in between a wide roadway and a sprawling parking lot. Its predecessor, alas, had succumbed to exhaust fumes. The enormous stump left in commemoration seemed completely out of place, along with the small, unprepossessing second-generation pine tree waving its branches between the traffic, the parked cars, and the hordes of people. Nearby was a ridiculous statue of the fictional lovers, looking nothing whatever like the exquisite figures in the ukiyo-e-style illustrations that had accompanied the serial novel. It depicted the pivotal scene at the Atami shore—the one where Kan’ichi kicks O-Miya to the ground.

  The scene is from early in the novel. O-Miya, “blinded by a diamond,” agonizes over her unfaithfulness to Kan’ichi and, to escape his recriminations, leaves for Atami with her mother, ostensibly for a rest. He finds her behavior suspicious and follows her there. They stroll together along the pine-studded beach—the man who gave chase, the woman who fled and was found—and he questions her. He learns from her own lips that his suspicions were correct, and as she clings to him, begging forgiveness, he gives her a swift kick.

  “Adulteress!”

  The bronze statue attempted to re-create that dramatic moment: Kan’ichi with one foot raised, about to deliver the kick, O-Miya fallen helplessly to the ground. But there was no life, no drama in the rendition. The surreal location only added to the absurdity of the effect.

  Amid the din of traffic, youths took turns posing in front of the statue, fingers raised in a V sign, grinning, while someone snapped photos of them on a cell phone.

  “Hey, listen,” one of them said. “Somebody’s singing.”

  Through nearby speakers came strains of “The Song of The Golden Demon,” a once-popular sentimental ballad:

  Strolling along Atami Beach, Kan’ichi and O-Miya

  Never again to walk together, never again to talk together.

  Her mother had beat time with her free hand as she sang along, flicking her wrist jauntily like a festival dancer—almost as if, overwhelmed by the tide of vulgarity, she had decided to react by doing something droll.

  Though the sensational plot might cater to popular taste, The Golden Demon was written in a poetic, romantic style redolent of the riches of premodern Japanese literature. And a mere century on, was this what had become of the setting of that renowned work? Even granting that reality was always drab compared to the world of fantasy, this travesty was beyond the pale.

  Mitsuki had grieved.

  NOT FIT FOR A NOVEL

  It had taken forever to descend from O-Miya’s pine to the shore with her cane-wielding mother. The shoreline, artificially extended by sand that looked almost too white, was now far away from the pine tree, and in order to get there you first had to go up on a huge promenade that doubled as the roof of a parking lot. This was apparently designed to enable visitors to go for a stroll while looking down on the beach, but the promenade was like none other. According to the sign, it was supposed to create the atmosphere of a villa on a Mediterranean resort such as the Riviera or the Côte d’Azur. A concrete balustrade, painted white, meandered along the edge. The scale was vaster than that of the hotel chapel, the effect just that much tawdrier and cheesier.

  How could anyone go for a stroll there and enjoy the experience? Even her mother, with her strong affinity for all things Western, had been dumbfounded by the white balustrade with its endless row of posts: “What the heck is this?”

  The expanse of white sand below was called “Sun Beach” by day, “Moonlight Beach” by night—English names with no Mediterranean connection. It was like being suddenly whisked to California for no reason. Since it was wintertime, no one had been swimming in the sea. Instead they’d seen youngsters batting a beach ball, middle-aged men practicing their tee shots, and a couple holding the hands of a tiny tot, helping it to walk. Mitsuki hadn’t felt like leaving the promenade.

  “I won’t ever be coming back here,” her mother had pointed out, and so they’d gone walking on the sand side by side, her mother leaning on her cane. That was when her mother had blurted out, “There never was any Kan’ichi in your grandmother’s life.” She’d continued, “How silly, her thinking she was O-Miya!” Yet her voice quavered. Mitsuki could tell she felt not contempt but pity for such arrant foolishness, mixed with a sentimental longing for bygone days. Mitsuki said nothing and just walked along.

  A year or so before they took that walk, a major newspaper had run a front-page article on the source of The Golden Demon: an American dime novel, as it turned out.

  Her mother had called her in shock over the news, not waiting for their usual nightly chat. “They found the source, and it’s a cheap novel written by some woman, an Englishwoman or an American. This is just terrible.”

  After hanging up, Mitsuki had checked the newspaper. The dime novel in question was Weaker than a Woman, written by one Bertha M. Clay. Meiji writers had not only translated Western novels extolling love and lovers but routinely reworked and adapted them, making them their own. Ozaki Koyo, the author of The Golden Demon, never tried to conceal that his novel was an adaptation. The news was shocking only because Japanese people had forgotten their country’s literary history of a mere hundred years before, when modern Japanese literature began taking shape through translation and adaptation. They were astounded to read about it in the newspaper.

  Now Mitsuki walked on that same shore alongside Takeru. In the distance was a breakwater, and inside it a row of yachts and
motorboats, along with ferries and excursion and fishing boats. On the sand, a game of beach volleyball was in progress.

  “Doesn’t make me at all jealous to watch young people like that,” said Takeru.

  Mitsuki laughed. “From where I sit, you’re equally young.”

  To thank him for the outing, she decided to take him to dinner at the Hyatt Regency Hotel near the Hôtel du Lac. He steered the car back up the winding road, taciturn again. The approach of evening brought with it dark clouds. Big drops of rain splattered against the windshield, and then with the abrupt change of weather typical of the mountains, the rain began coming down hard. By the time they reached the hotel parking lot, where there was an impressive lineup of Mercedes-Benzes, BMWs, and Audis, it was coming down in torrents.

  The hotel interior was softly lit with the indirect lighting characteristic of exclusive international hotels. They passed through the soaring lobby, where the fanciful dimness enhanced the sense of luxury, and entered the restaurant. Mitsuki was surprised to see Japanese people dressed informally in hotel yukata, eating with gleaming knives and forks by candlelight. Yukata belonged to a different world—the world of traditional inns, where guests changed into cotton robes after soaking in a hot spring, had dinner in their rooms, and once their stomachs were full and they were pleasantly drunk, just collapsed on the futon laid out on the floor and went to sleep. The sight of yukata-clad guests sipping wine and dining on French cuisine was incongruous. So this was how international hotels were trying to bring in local flavor. Japanese-run hotels used to post reminders: “Please refrain from leaving your room dressed in hotel yukata.” Probably many still did, Mitsuki thought, looking around with faint amusement as they were shown to their table.

  After they were seated, she looked up from the menu at Takeru and asked on a whim, “Do you have Western blood in your veins?”

  “You can tell?” He gave her a languid look.

  “More or less.”

  Now that she had a good look at him straight on, she could see that the eyebrows, the bridge of the nose, and the warm brown eyes did not align quite as they did on Asian faces.

  “I’m one-quarter French.”

  “Were you bullied for it as a child?”

  “You can tell that too?” Now his eyes showed some surprise.

  “Well, more or less.” She returned his gaze. “A lot?”

  “Not that much.” He looked away.

  It seemed that Kaoru’s older brother, the one who went to Paris as a boursier, had married a Frenchwoman, Takeru’s grandmother. Probably when Takeru was little his hair had been shinier and even lighter in color. Her initial automatic response to his looks now somehow embarrassed her. She sounded him out about his background.

  Takeru responded with seeming reluctance. His mother had grown up in Japan and France, neither fully Japanese nor fully French. Unhappy with her in-between status, she married a Japanese national with the intention of raising their children as Japanese, but when her husband took to drink she turned against Japan, left him, and went back to France. His younger sister, still in grade school, had gone with her, but Takeru, a high school student at the time, had remained in Japan.

  “I was angry at her. Not for abandoning my dad, since he was an alcoholic. But abandoning your child is different. She made me into a Japanese, and in the end she abandoned me along with Japan.”

  He was named after Yamato Takeru no Mikoto, the mythical hero of prodigious strength. Mitsuki smiled at this revelation.

  Concerning his aunt Kaoru, Takeru was a little more loquacious. She had had a daughter by the elderly White Russian. After the daughter grew up, whether because of something in French society or in the language, she and Kaoru had quarreled—an irrevocable quarrel, normally unimaginable between Japanese mothers and daughters—and separated without another word. When Takeru’s mother went back to Paris a dozen years or so ago she had searched for the daughter at Kaoru’s request, without luck. Then just three months ago she had struck up a friendship with a Russian immigrant in Chinatown on the Right Bank who claimed to know descendants of a White Russian. She’d asked him to make some inquiries, and it came out that the daughter had died a quarter of a century before, alone in a tiny appartement on the Left Bank, cause of death unknown. It was after learning this that Kaoru had begun to talk about adopting him, Takeru.

  So Kaoru, who seemed so elegantly proud, was actually an old woman just recovering from the news that her only child was long dead and doubtless had gone to her grave resenting her. She too harbored her own unspeakable grief. Small wonder that a psychic would smell death around their little group. Perhaps the heart of anyone who chose this hectic holiday time for an extended hotel stay harbored a darkness which—however commonplace its origin—forced them to hide from the world. Even that close-knit mother and daughter seemed to draw a kind of curtain around themselves.

  Mitsuki learned a few other things from Takeru: that he was registered with a temporary employment agency and sometimes worked part time as a network engineer; that when he walked down the street, people would stop him and ask if he’d like to do modeling work—something that made him cringe; and that Kaoru had instructed him to get her, Mitsuki, to tell him about herself.

  “My story is such a cliché I don’t feel like going into it.” This was the honest truth.

  The newly built hotel seemed as completely cut off from the outer world as a spaceship, but glancing out the window she saw the rain was coming down harder than ever. Fat raindrops struck sideways against the window, making countless wide bands as they trickled down the pane. It was as if the hotel stood in a cataract.

  While they waited for dessert, Takeru excused himself. Five minutes later he was back. “I asked at the front desk, and they said they have just one room available.” He seemed to be studying Mitsuki from across the table. “Shall I take it?”

  She drew a sharp breath and tried to read what was in those brown eyes. A faint embarrassment. Not what she’d taken for granted when she was a young woman face to face with a young man—a look that stirred something within her. Self-conscious, acutely aware of the brand-new underthings beneath her clothes, she forced a smile. “Would driving back be dangerous?”

  “Depends on the driver.”

  “Then let’s go back.”

  She looked steadily into his eyes. If something did happen between them now, it would only be a way for her to remind herself that she was still a sexual being. If that’s all it was, then she might as well let it go, even if this were her last chance. She reached out and laid her hand over the back of his. He turned his hand over and wrapped it around hers. The masculine feel of his grip took her by surprise.

  “You’re so nice,” she said. “You’re bound to find someone special.”

  “Am I?”

  Handsome too, she was on the point of saying, but stopped in time.

  Outside, the rain was coming down more fiercely than she had imagined. This was less like being in a cataract than like shearing through a stormy lake. Takeru kept his eyes ahead and drove in silence. At any moment the car could veer off the road. Dying with Takeru—not so bad, she thought. Something in the way he gripped the wheel told her that while he would never go recklessly fast, if a slip of the tires should send them both plunging to their deaths, he wouldn’t mind. She began to feel as if this were a loveless michiyuki—the lovers’ journey in classical puppet dramas, ending always in death. She too stared wordlessly at the windshield, seeing nothing but pouring rain.

  Even if she died like this, her death would scarcely be noticed. In the eyes of society, a woman her age hardly existed. A woman her age wouldn’t even make a good heroine in a novel. She knew it was silly of her, but she couldn’t help feeling that was the worst part of it all. No one paid attention if a female character her age died—not even if she ended her own life. When Emma Bovary takes arsenic and when Anna Karenina jumps in front of an oncoming train, they are still in the flower of youth. In Kan’ichi’s
nightmare, O-Miya, also in the flower of youth, kills herself not once but twice, first stabbing herself and then drowning in a river. In a famous ukiyo-e-style illustration of the scene, the cloud of hair framing her pale face trailed in the water, and the delicate lines of her wrists and feet were faintly erotic. But what novelist would ever create such a scene featuring a woman like Mitsuki?

  If something should happen to Mitsuki now, there would be neither poetry nor romance in her demise. And yet in this lashing rain there was every chance of a fatal accident. The rain kept increasing in intensity until it seemed a marvel that it didn’t start seeping through the cracks of this beat-up Toyota. Let death come now—however unpoetic and unromantic it might be—if that was her fate. Just as she had decided to entrust her life to the raging storm, a thought pierced her: If I die now, the inheritance from my mother will go to Tetsuo.

  Takeru’s cell phone began to ring. He ignored it. The phone rang insistently, then at intervals. The mechanical sound kept ringing, ever louder, as if to urge the car on.

  THE STORM

  The moment the car pulled up to the hotel, two men, one of them the assistant manager, came rushing out with umbrellas to hand them.

  “What a relief you’re back safely!” said the assistant manager, still looking upset. “Everyone’s been worried.”

  They headed straight for the stairs to the lounge and hurried down them. Mr. Matsubara, sitting next to Kaoru, got to his feet. Had Takeru failed to answer his cell phone simply because he wanted to drive safely? Or did he also have a sadistic desire to worry his great-aunt, who wielded such authority over him? Mr. Matsubara at least greeted them with a smile, but Kaoru, complaining that she’d called Takeru on his phone over and over, did not.

  The sight of him evidently released the tension of the past hours. Kaoru looked her age as she sat slumped back in her chair and explained the situation, her face pale. The elderly couple were fortunately safe in their room, but the mother and daughter were nowhere to be found, although their car was still in the parking lot. The hotel management feared the worst—the psychic’s prediction perhaps echoing in their minds—and had formed a search party to look down by the lake. In hopes that the women would be found and a scandal avoided, they were waiting till midnight to notify the police.