Slowly she stood up.
Returning to the bedroom, she took out her wallet, found Mr. Matsubara’s business card, and tore it into tiny pieces. She picked up the little mound of white paper scraps that a puff of breath would scatter, laid it on her palm, and regarded it for a few moments as a passing dream. He was a fine man, someone she could respect. Only a man of rare depth could love one woman his whole life like that. His heart belonged to Wakako: she had no desire to turn it toward herself. Wakako had died without ever singing for him. Someone who could love a woman that modest would not, in the end, love Mitsuki the way she wished to be loved…
She moved in March, just before Tetsuo came back to Japan. As soon as the movers left, she went directly to the window. Through the gossamer-thin, gold organdy curtains that she had already hung, she could see the green of the park. Drawn by the color, she opened the curtains; along with the tender green foliage, the stirrings of early spring leaped to her eyes. Around the pond, cherry trees extended long branches covered with tight buds toward the surface of the water.
Any day now the buds would burst.
When she was young, she had preferred the autumn.
In junior high she had learned the word wakuraba, a poetic term for blighted leaves, leaves that change color out of season. Having never experienced real adversity, she’d felt drawn to the darkness the word evoked. She hadn’t cared for spring, hadn’t liked fabrics with floral designs. She had even felt a slight aversion to paintings of flowers, wondering what good it did to paint beautiful things in a beautiful way. But as she grew older and more intimately acquainted with sickness and old age, as the face of adversity became familiar, little by little she had come to appreciate spring. That was why she chose posters of Monet’s water lilies to put up over her father’s bed in the nursing home. But not until today, here at this window, had she ever appreciated the full value of spring, the season when nature returned from nullity with fresh, vibrant colors, singing a paean to life.
Just then the doorbell rang. Natsuki had come over to help out, bringing with her some boxed lunches from Shibuya’s department store. She too made straight for the window, bags in hand.
“I’m sooo jealous.”
Realizing what she had said, she burst out laughing, and Mitsuki joined in with some emotion. Natsuki seemed not to have the slightest idea that she herself had made this view possible for her sister. Perhaps it was this nonchalance, this happy unselfconsciousness, that Yuji saw and cherished.
From that day on, Mitsuki slowly opened cardboard boxes.
When emptying the house in Chitose Funabashi, and again when clearing out the apartment she and Tetsuo had shared, she’d been in a rush. Now with time and room in her heart to spare, she opened the boxes packed in such a hurry: some of them had been moved twice without ever being opened. Items she was used to seeing in Chitose Funabashi or that she had until recently used in her life with Tetsuo, she was able to unpack and put away efficiently. It was different with items she hadn’t seen in a while—familiar, well-loved items, some of which she hadn’t really seen in decades: those she took in hand, running her fingertips over them to reacquaint herself with their texture and bending down to inhale their aroma. Her father’s English-Japanese dictionary, the pages curling. Her mother’s ivory earrings from her youth. A big hair ribbon Mitsuki used to wear on special family outings to Ginza…
As the days went by, she no longer bothered to find places to put things but just went on opening box after box, almost in a trance. The apartment was a mess. Half-empty boxes, rolled-up cushioning, and mementos lay everywhere, with hardly room to move about. The mementos spoke to Mitsuki of various periods in her life. Each item she unpacked sought to engage her in dialogue with the past. She found it hard to believe that on the night of the storm in Hakone, nothing but dark memories had come to her. Her memories now weren’t dark, yet neither were they full of light. The simple strangeness of it all—the strangeness that she’d been granted those times in the first place, granted the privilege of being born, of being alive like this—struck her with force.
Often she lost track of time, and she’d find herself working well past midnight.
Ten days or so went by in a haze, a stretch of time with no here or now. One morning she woke up and, still short on sleep, went out into the living-dining area. Through the gold organdy curtains, she glimpsed a white cloud around the pond in the park. With a sharp intake of breath, she drew the sheer curtains, and the cloud became a cloud of blossoms. Yesterday’s glorious sun had warmed the sky and the earth, bringing the cherry blossoms out all at once.
I am happy: in that moment, Mitsuki thought that not to be happy now would be a sin. It had been a long time, a very long time, since she could bring herself even to say the words.
“I’m happy,” she said aloud and begged forgiveness of no one in particular.
THE END
MINAE MIZUMURA is one of the most important writers in Japan today. Born in Tokyo, she moved with her family to Long Island, New York, when she was twelve. She studied French literature at Yale College and Yale Graduate School. Her other novels include the Yomiuri Prize–winning A True Novel; Zoku meian (Light and Dark Continued), a sequel to the unfinished classic Light and Dark by Soseki Natsume; and Shishosetsu from left to right (An I-Novel from Left to Right), an autobiographical work. Her most recent book in English, The Fall of Language in the Age of English, was published in 2015 by Columbia University Press. She lives in Tokyo.
JULIET WINTERS CARPENTER studied Japanese language and literature at the University of Michigan and the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Tokyo. Carpenter’s translation of Kobo Abe’s novel Secret Rendezvous won the 1980 Japan–United States Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature, and her translation of Minae Mizumura’s A True Novel won the same prize for 2014–2015, making her the only person to have won this prestigious award twice.
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Minae Mizumura
A TRUE NOVEL
Translated from the Japanese by Juliet Winters Carpenter
The winner of Japan’s prestigious Yomiuri Literature Prize, Mizumura has written a beautiful novel, with love at its core, that reveals, above all, the power of storytelling.
A remaking of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights set in postwar Japan, A True Novel begins in New York in the 1960s, where we meet Taro, a relentlessly ambitious Japanese immigrant trying to make his fortune. Flashbacks and multilayered stories reveal his life: an impoverished upbringing as an orphan, his eventual rise to wealth and success—despite racial and class prejudice—and an obsession with a girl from an affluent family that has haunted him all his life. A True Novel then widens into an examination of Japan’s westernization and the emergence of a middle class.
“A riveting tale of doomed lovers set against the backdrop of postwar Japan…Mizumura’s ambitious literary and cultural preoccupations do not overwhelm the sheer force of her narrative or the beauty of her writing (in an evocative translation by Juliet Winters Carpenter)…A True Novel makes tangible the pain and the legacy of loss…[Its] psychological acuteness, fully realized characters, and historical sweep push it out of the realm of pastiche and into something far more alluring and memorable.” —New York Times Book Review
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