A True Novel Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  A True Novel: Volume I

  A True Novel: Volume II

  About the Author

  Original title: Honkaku Shosetsu, by Minae Mizumura

  Copyright © Minae Mizumura, 2002

  Photographs copyright © Toyota Horiguchi, 2002

  Originally published in Japan by Shinchosha Co. Ltd., Tokyo

  English translation copyright © Juliet Winters Carpenter and Ann Sherif, 2013

  This book has been selected by the Japanese Literature Publishing Project (JLPP), an initiative of the Agency for Cultural Affairs of Japan.

  Production Editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  For information write to

  Other Press LLC, 2 Park Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10016.

  Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Mizumura, Minae, author.

  [Honkaku Shosetsu. English]

  A true novel / by Minae Mizumura; translated from the Japanese by

  Juliet Winters Carpenter and Ann Sherif.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-59051-203-6 (pbk. original : acid-free paper) — ISBN (invalid) 978-1-59051-576-1 (ebook)

  1. Japanese—United States—Fiction. 2. Rich people—Fiction. 3. Karuizawa-machi (Japan)—Fiction. 4. Love stories. I. Carpenter, Juliet Winters, translator. II. Sherif, Ann, translator. III. Title.

  PL856.I948H6613 2013

  895.6′35—dc23

  2012046090

  Publisher’s Note:

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Master Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Map of Karuizawa

  Preface

  Prologue

  On Long Island

  Back in America

  In California

  From Story to Novel

  1. A Welcoming Fire

  2. Two Summer Villas

  3. Fumiko

  4. Three White Pebbles

  The Families

  Preface

  TO BE A novelist by occupation or a novelist by calling—these are two different things.

  IN THE COURSE of our lives, we are asked to fill out a surprising number of forms: embarkation and disembarkation cards, DVD-rental membership applications, requests for credit cards. These forms typically come with blank lines on which one is expected to write one’s “Name,” “Date of Birth,” “Address”—and “Occupation.” Faced with the line marked “Occupation,” I always hesitate. Obviously, I could easily write down “novelist,” but the word “Occupation” reminds me that I have published only two novels so far and that their royalties aren’t enough for me to make ends meet. As I scribble “self-employed” in the blank space—embarrassed by my handwriting, which is a mess, not that anybody cares nowadays—I wonder if I’ll ever be able to claim to be a “novelist” with a clear conscience. I can only imagine how gratifying it would be if I could actually earn my living writing novels.

  But such an ambition merely concerns “occupation”—the business side of writing. It is fundamentally no different from that of, say, someone opening a small laundry downtown, worried about the future of his fledgling business. Anyone who somehow has to make a living shares this worry, yet for people who write novels it isn’t what matters most; in their case, one’s “calling” matters more.

  Let’s say in ten years’ time I have written numerous novels and am doing quite well for myself. I doubt if the day will ever come, but let’s just suppose that it does. Would I then be satisfied? No, I don’t think so. Most likely, I would still want to know if it was my mission on earth to become a novelist. However prosaic a writer’s work or person may be, a writer is also an artist, and every artist must ask himself whether he was born to do what he does, rather than whether he can live by doing it. Behind the question is a perennial—indeed obsessive—need to believe that in some mysterious way one is destined to be an artist. A novelist is particularly prone to this concern. To become a painter, a dancer, or a musician, two things are necessary: an apparent gift and hard training. In contrast, nothing seems easier than becoming a writer. Anyone can string a few sentences together and turn out a novel practically overnight. Who becomes a novelist and who does not seems almost arbitrary. Hence the strong desire to hear a resounding voice from on high telling one that one was indeed destined to write.

  A MIRACLE HAPPENED to me two years ago.

  It was when I was staying in Palo Alto in northern California, writing my third novel, or, more precisely, trying to write it. I lacked confidence, and progress was slow. Then, out of the blue, I was made a gift of a story, “a story just like a novel.” What is more, the story was meant for me alone. It concerned a man whom I knew, or rather whom my family knew, in New York at one time. This was no ordinary man. Leaving Japan with nothing, he arrived in the United States and made a fortune there, literally realizing the American dream. His life had taken on the status of legend among Japanese communities in New York—yet no one knew that he’d had another life back in Japan, one marked by the poverty-stricken period that followed World War II. The tale of that life would almost certainly have disappeared, lost in the stream of time, if a young Japanese man who happened to hear it had not then crossed the Pacific and hand-delivered it to me in Palo Alto, like a precious offering. Of course, the preciousness of his offering was something the young man never knew. As far as he could tell, he merely traveled on his own initiative, sought me out of his own accord, then went away when he’d told the story he wanted to tell. Yet I felt as if some invisible power had arranged to bring this messenger to me.

  He took all night to tell me the story. Outside, the heaviest rainstorm in California for decades raged, trapping us in the house. The angry power of nature must have affected my nerves: when he had finished, I was in shock. It felt uncanny that I should have known someone who had lived such a life—and that, by a strange series of coincidences, his tale should have been delivered to me, and me alone.

  It felt like a voice from on high.

  THE REAL PROBLEMS started afterward. My doubts about my “calling” had been allayed, only to be replaced by the difficulties inherent in writing a modern novel in Japanese based on the story I’d been given. For reasons that will become apparent later, the initial elation that accompanied what came almost as a revelation did not last. As I went on writing, I felt daunted, afraid that this novel was something I shouldn’t be writing after all, and half-convinced that the attempt would fail. But once the novel started to take shape, I came to realize none of this mattered; that what I would leave behind was only a small boat on a vast ocean of literature. And with this realization, I reached a point where I felt at ease with my work.

  If this novel finds any readers, I shall feel blessed.

  Prologue

  On Long Island

  I WAS STILL IN high school in the United States at the time. Counting back, I must have been in what they call eleventh grade. My sister, Nanae, two years older, had already started classes at a music conservatory in Boston, leaving
my parents and me behind in our suburban Long Island home. Four, maybe five years had gone by since my father’s company had sent us to New York, yet, even so, I still could not feel at home, either in the new country or the new language. I knew New York’s summers, the sun blazing down on green lawns, and its winters, snowflakes fluttering onto my eyelashes; but the days came and went, and I went on feeling that I wasn’t really in America.

  I lived in three separate worlds during those years.

  The first was the world of school, which I only attended physically. Nearly all the other students were American. Every morning at eight, a small figure would walk into the main entrance of the red-brick building with the Stars and Stripes flying high above it; every afternoon around three, the same small figure would emerge. Depending on the season, it might be wearing a sleeveless dress and sandals, or a hooded coat and fur-lined boots, but that was as much of me as was there. Thrown into an environment so different from the one I knew, I shut down, setting myself against it with typical adolescent obstinacy, making no effort whatever to become part of it.

  In contrast, the second world existed only in my mind—and the less connected I felt with America, the richer it became. It grew even richer after my sister left for her music school and my mother started working at a Japanese company in Manhattan, leaving the entire house to me on school days, from attic to basement. I would sit on one end of a sofa bracketed by a pair of lamps with pale silk shades—lamps made of Satsuma vases that, in my passion for things Japanese, I had pestered my mother to buy at the Takashimaya department store in the city—turn on the light closer to me, and lose myself in one of the Japanese novels our parents had shipped out for us, reading until it got dark, while my sole companion, an overweight collie named Della we’d brought with us on the plane, lay quietly at my feet. These books were some of the fifty-plus volumes in a set entitled Contemporary Japanese Literature that was a farewell gift from my great-uncle. Despite the title, they were all old, since the collection was published almost two decades before the end of World War II. They filled my head with quaint Japanese phrases, and my heart ached for a Japan I had never actually lived in. I dreamed day and night of returning to a country that no longer existed. There were, of course, other things besides those old novels that made their way into this second world: a fair number of Japanese translations of classical European novels, for example, the paperbacks so aged that the pages had turned a dull brown. We also went to American movies at a pair of nearly empty movie theaters across from the town’s train station, though they never made complete sense to me since my English wasn’t good enough. There were occasional ballets and operas at the Metropolitan Opera House as well, for which my mother and I made a great fuss of dressing ourselves up. I even listened to LPs of sentimental oldies my father brought back from his trips to Japan, along with 45s of silly pop songs that somehow ended up in our house. On weekends, when my parents were home, I holed up in my small bedroom upstairs and let my mind wander, sometimes spending hours on end looking at myself in the mirror, dreaming of a beautiful, enthralling, dramatic future—all that life could promise a girl. This second world of mine was probably no different really from the inner life of any adolescent given to those flights of fancy that are shaped by encounters with “art” in its various forms. But because I had been removed from my own country, that world of mine was steeped in nostalgia, and because I had no friends from my own generation, it was anachronistic to the point of comedy, and because I had made myself so isolated, it was unusually intense. I became more introverted than it was in my nature to be, and I lived unrepentantly engrossed in that world.

  All this might have been unhealthy if these two worlds were the only ones available to me. Fortunately, I had a third one, a world I shared with my parents. This was populated mainly by Japanese adults, people from my father’s office, he being the director of the small, fledgling American branch of a Japanese optical instruments company. Since I was the boss’s daughter, every one of those people treated me with indulgence. And, what gladdened my heart even more, they all spoke in Japanese. The trouble was that their world was so banal I couldn’t believe it had anything to do with me. The air teemed with terms like “retail,” “customer service,” “head office,” “accounting,” “business trip,” and “local hire”—terms that were familiar yet unappealing to a girl like me whose head was filled with novels. My heart sank on hearing them. My father didn’t relish being a corporate employee, and his distaste must have passed on to my sister and me like an infection. Although that world provided me with all my material comforts—three fine meals a day, clothes that passed muster among my well-to-do American classmates, and a Colonial-style house that was easily twice the size of our house in Tokyo—I looked down on it unawares. To the Japanese adults inhabiting it, I may have seemed only a chatty schoolgirl; I may even have seemed cheerful. But for me that world was commonplace, mediocre, a drag.

  IT WAS IN that third world that I first came across Taro Azuma.

  One evening, my father mentioned his name when we were having dinner in what Americans call the breakfast nook, an alcove attached to the kitchen. I remember the occasion because of an unfamiliar expression he used: a private chauffeur. Apparently Azuma was a driver for an American my father knew.

  Intrigued by the expression, I looked up from my plate at my father’s familiar face against the familiar wallpaper.

  “Private chauffeur?” repeated my mother, apparently as intrigued as I was.

  “Atwood found him, and he’s staying at their house.”

  He pushed his plate away to show that he was finished with his meal; in the narrow space this created, he would spread out the New York Times or line up a variety of small bottles, some brown, some transparent, containing digestives and supplements whose benefits his teenage daughter definitely didn’t want to know.

  The words private chauffeur stuck in my mind.

  Unlike California, New York—the whole East Coast, for that matter—had never seen an influx of East Asian immigrants. As the daughter of a Japanese expatriate posted to New York, my main image of Japanese people abroad was of company employees dressed in dark suits, their ties carefully knotted and their shiny black hair neatly parted on one side. The only others I could picture were those who catered to their needs, such as chefs in sushi restaurants or girls in piano bars. I had never heard of a private chauffeur. What’s more, this man didn’t even shuttle executives around for a Japanese company: he worked for an American, in whose house he lived.

  “Well, Mr. Atwood seems to be doing all right for himself,” my mother said as she poured some tea over the rice in her bowl. Despite her marked preference for the Western way of life, she didn’t feel a meal was complete without this final touch: a small bowl of rice with green tea poured over it, and pickles on the side.

  “Someone introduced the man to Atwood, and he gave him the job,” my father explained.

  My mother sounded skeptical as she asked, “So he hired him out of kindness?”

  “Oh, no. Atwood’s not as generous as that. He must have thought he could actually make good use of the guy.”

  “That makes more sense,” she said, nodding. “That’s the way rich people are.”

  “I’m guessing that it’s also a way to get a tax break. Atwood’s own business is making big bucks these days. If you examined the company’s books, they would probably show that they’re paying Azuma a pretty hefty sum.”

  “My, my! A driver making good money?”

  “Just on paper. They probably list him as an export manager or something. Besides, if they said he’s a chauffeur, they couldn’t get him a work visa. Driving isn’t exactly what you’d call a special skill.”

  While working as an executive at a major broadcasting company, Atwood also had a small business of his own, and it was apparently as its boss that he sponsored Azuma for a work visa.

  “What’s he like, Papa?” I asked him, pouring tea over the rice left in my b
owl, just as my mother had.

  “Who?”

  “The chauffeur.”

  “I have no idea. I haven’t met him yet.”

  “Has he been abroad for a long time?”

  In my mind was an image of a man, deeply tanned, who after wandering around California or Latin America had wound up in New York with nothing but the shirt on his back.

  “No, he only arrived recently.”

  “So he’s just an ordinary Japanese?”

  “It seems so.”

  “Why would someone come all the way to the States to work as a private chauffeur?”

  “Well …” My father seemed at a loss.

  “You’ve got it backward, Minae,” my mother broke in. “Nobody would come just for that. People take that kind of job because it’s the only way for them to get into this country.”

  “Hmm.”

  I felt put out. My homesickness had turned me into a little patriot. The popular portrayal of Asians in the American media at the time was offensive to me. In movies and on television, they were nearly always cast as vaguely Chinese live-in servants, whether cooks, gardeners, or maids; they appeared onscreen with inscrutable smiles on their faces, bowing with an obsequious “Ah, so,” all the time. My ears burned whenever I came across such scenes.

  I later came to realize that the image of Asians as live-in servants wasn’t that far removed from reality, given the history of immigrants on the West Coast. But in my ignorance, I took it as undue prejudice. My own family had arrived on the East Coast and lived comfortably in a suburban house surrounded by a well-kept lawn—thanks only to Japan’s economic growth, though I wasn’t conscious of it then. How could anyone allow himself to leave Japan, with all the neon delights of the Ginza and the fastest train in the world—a country in every way as good as America—to take the kind of job that would only reinforce the popular prejudice against Asians?