A True Novel Read online

  Finishing her rice, my mother said, “There you go again. You always look at everything on your own terms. That’s not how the world works.”

  I didn’t hide my dissatisfaction, but I kept quiet. It had nothing to do with me anyway. My father went upstairs to watch television in the main bedroom, and Taro Azuma was no longer on my mind when my mother and I started washing the dishes and I listened to her tsk-tsking about my sister. “What does she think she’s doing, going around in those miniskirts, half naked? She may think she looks ‘cool,’ but no decent Japanese boy would go near a girl dressed like that.” My mother didn’t want her daughters to become too Americanized, and she fretted constantly about Nanae, who was now living in a dormitory at the conservatory.

  I HAD ALMOST forgotten the story about the private chauffeur when one evening I heard a car pull up in front of our house. Lifting a slat in the venetian blind, I peered out and saw a long, shiny car parked by the curb; a figure in profile, tall and thin, was opening the car door for my father. By the streetlight, I could see that the man was wearing the billed cap of a chauffeur. He disappeared into the front seat and drove off before I could get a glimpse of his face.

  That tall, thin figure was Taro Azuma.

  When I ran downstairs to meet my father, he told me, “I was out with Atwood. That man, Azuma, was driving the car.”

  Mr. Atwood lived a little farther out on Long Island, so I guessed he’d given my father a ride home after they had dinner together in Manhattan.

  “Papa, was that a limousine?” I asked excitedly as he was hanging up his coat in the hall closet.

  “Yes.”

  The effects of the drinks he’d had at dinner were noticeable as he reported, with particular satisfaction, the way the interior of the car was equipped with a wireless telephone and a minibar containing whiskey, gin, and other kinds of drinks. Being a grown-up, however, his interest in limos only extended that far. I hopped up the stairs after him, just in time to hear him tell my mother as he slipped off his necktie, “You know, that Atwood driver’s got a brain in his head.” His favorite saying was “A man with no brain is no use to the world,” so these were high words of praise.

  Sometime later, when the subject of the private chauffeur had faded from memory, my father came back again in the limousine. Atwood had left from LaGuardia Airport on a business trip and apparently told Azuma to give my father a lift home. The two Japanese men, driver and passenger, must have started a conversation as a matter of course, and, on arriving, my father invited him in.

  Dressed in a navy-blue uniform, Azuma sat stiffly on the sofa in the living room. “I don’t drink,” he said, and didn’t touch the glass of Budweiser that I brought out on a lacquer tray we used for guests.

  “That’s very sensible,” my father cheerfully told him in a tone of approval. He had already taken a long swig of his own beer, and almost at once his neck and face flushed red. “After all, you’re making your living driving a car.” As though keeping his distance, Azuma’s response was at best reserved, if not guarded.

  Being still a young girl, I felt flustered in the presence of this strapping young man. What a contrast he was to my father, laughing sloppily with his face flushed and round behind his glasses, drunk on beer and his own talk. Azuma acknowledged my presence with only a glance. I skipped back into the kitchen, returned to the living room with a cup of tea, then quickly withdrew again. Azuma not only ignored me but also my mother. My mother tended to monopolize guests, getting deep into whispered conversation or breaking into peals of laughter. That night, though, she followed me into the kitchen as soon as she’d exchanged a few words with him and, pouring some tea for us, sat with me in the breakfast nook to talk about nothing in particular. Some guests we would leave in the living room with my father and not give another thought to. Others distracted us.

  “I wonder why he looks so serious,” she said in a hushed voice.

  At that moment, my father entered the room, smelling of beer, and asked in that voice he used when in a good mood, “Those Linguaphone tapes you used to listen to. Where are they?”

  The tapes were the large old reel-to-reel kind.

  “I put them away somewhere. I’m not sure exactly where, though.”

  “Will it take long to find them?”

  “I suppose not,” she said, sounding slightly peeved, and put her teacup down. “Shall I get them out?”

  After a few minutes, she came downstairs again, stopping in the living room on her way back to the kitchen.

  “Your father loves acting like a big shot. That’s his way,” she told me.

  He had bought a whole set of tapes for her soon after we arrived in the States, but it didn’t take her long to realize that she could make do with a few English phrases—“This, please,” “Oh, great,” “Thank you”—and stopped listening to them. So they were now being handed on to this visitor.

  “Weren’t they really expensive?” I asked a little grudgingly, though I’d never even touched the tapes, intent as I was on not learning English and on rejecting a country that, looking back on it now, had always been pretty nice to me.

  “I’m sure they were, but if that young man can find some use for them, I’m happy for him to have them. It’s better than letting them just sit in the closet and collect dust.” She stood up and put her apron on, returning to her usual hospitable self. “He doesn’t drink, so maybe I should cut up some grapefruit for him.” She bent down to peer into the refrigerator. Once nicknamed Slimhips, my mother was rather vain about her figure. She looked elegant in a kimono, but her quite understandable pride in this was wasted on her daughters, who never really learned to appreciate the too subtle variations in Japanese women’s body shapes.

  Azuma stayed for about an hour. When we heard our collie, Della, barking, we hurried out into the hall to see him off. There he stood, clutching his driver’s cap awkwardly in his hands. I noticed how tawny his skin was for a Japanese—and how lustrous.

  “You’re still young, so you’ll be able to learn a lot.”

  “I hope so.”

  I assumed they were talking about the Linguaphone tapes, but my father’s next words told me otherwise.

  “It’s quite an education, to spend time around rich Americans.”

  Azuma smiled, apparently making an effort to be obliging. Something about his smile made me uncomfortable. This is someone you’d be better off keeping at arm’s length, I thought. I felt uneasy about my father’s taking such a liking to him.

  “And besides, that’s about the only job you can take right now, because of your visa.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Whatever you do, make learning English your top priority. Study really hard, as if you had to memorize the whole lot.” My father motioned toward the tapes with his chin.

  “Yes, sir.” Taro Azuma put on his cap, bowed, and took his leave.

  Through the tall, narrow windows on either side of the front door, I watched the car’s lights recede into the distance. Silently they moved away, floating into the darkness.

  AS I LEFT the living room with a loaded tray after clearing up, I heard my father filling my mother in on our visitor. “That guy doesn’t even have a high school diploma.”

  “He doesn’t?” I said in surprise, entering the kitchen.

  “That’s what he told me. Both of his parents died when he was little.” He sounded sympathetic. He too had lost his parents early on. “His uncle raised him. He’s had a rough row to hoe.”

  “How old is he?” I asked as I put the glasses in the sink.

  “Twenty or twenty-one, I’d guess.”

  “That young!” I was surprised again. It was the first time since coming to New York that I’d met a Japanese man that close to my own age. I had lumped him with other adults, not only because he had a job, but because he seemed to lack the freedom from care that typified youth.

  “Yes. He started working without finishing high school.”

  “That’s
not something you see much anymore,” my mother commented.

  “That’s what I thought at first, but then I realized some of the people at the office don’t have a regular high school diploma either.” He was counting those in question on the fingers of one hand.

  “So it’s not that unusual.”

  “No. But they all went to night school after they started working. Some even kept it up as far as a college degree.”

  “Is that right?” She sounded impressed.

  I took a seat at the table and asked, “How about Mr. Azuma?”

  “What about him?”

  “Did he go to night school too, to get a diploma?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t mention it.”

  “So you think he didn’t try to graduate?”

  “Couldn’t, more likely—probably had no chance.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, not entirely convinced.

  It was still a time in Japan when going to college was a privilege even for men, a stark social reality that hit me only after our family moved to the States. I gained this insight partly because I was growing up, but also because my father started working for the company that he did. Something of a maverick, he had changed jobs often back in Japan before opening his own import business, an attempt that, after a couple of years of unexpected and bizarre success, ultimately failed. Then, fortunately, a manufacturer of optical devices, best known at the time for making compact cameras, hired him; it was rapidly expanding its export business and had been on the lookout for someone fluent in English to head its U.S. office. The branch office was small in the beginning, and with my family entertaining the employees on weekends and holidays, I got to know nearly all of them. They were mostly repairmen—politely called technicians. I suppose they found it easier to open up to a young girl, like me: through mixing with them I got to know the feelings of men whose background and education limited their prospects in life—their frustration and bitterness, their resignation and pride.

  But Azuma was too close to my own age for me to group with those men.

  A memory floated hazily into my mind of a black-and-white photograph I’d seen once in a magazine back in Japan. My sister and I were forbidden to read magazines meant for adults, and so it was with a guilty conscience that one day when no adults were around I sat down on our couch—a fake leather thing bought secondhand from the Occupation authorities before I was born—and was leafing through one of them when I came across a certain photograph. It showed a group of young people lined up on a dingy station platform, dressed in dark school uniforms, the boys with high stiff collars, the girls with pleated skirts, their faces tense. They were recent graduates of middle school—the end of compulsory education—who had just arrived at Ueno station from northern Japan to work in Tokyo. In large letters on one side of the page, the headline read “Our Golden Eggs”: these boys and girls were to provide the much needed, yet increasingly scarce, cheap labor as Japan entered a new economic age. The boys all had buzz cuts, while the girls wore their hair either in a short bob or in braids. The picture reeked of the dismal poverty of the snow country and the endurance of the children who lived there: looking at it, I could practically smell the miso and soy sauce, the wooden pickle barrel and the iron cooking pot, the straw and firewood of their lives. Perhaps because they were not much older than I was, the photograph left a strong impression on me.

  Yet just as I found it difficult to connect the uniformed young man I’d just met with the company repairmen I knew, I also found it difficult to connect him with those boys with their shaved heads.

  “Do you think his family was poor?”

  “I’m sure they were.”

  “But he’s very well-spoken, don’t you think?” my mother said.

  “That he is.”

  “Then how did he manage to get to New York?” I asked, all ears. This was before the age of inexpensive international travel, when you didn’t dare ask your parents for a return trip home during summer breaks. My father’s position as a branch director allowed him to go back occasionally, but others hardly ever received the privilege. No one thought of sending their families home. I was less concerned with Azuma’s poverty than with finding out how someone like that could make his way here.

  “Apparently Atwood managed to get a work visa for him.”

  My father, with the visa on his mind, had missed the point of my question.

  “So Mr. Atwood paid for the ticket?”

  “No, he wouldn’t have gone that far.” He added, “Oh, yes, now I remember. Azuma told me he came by ship.”

  “A ship?”

  Given my infatuation with old novels, literary scenes set on ships immediately sprang to mind, especially scenes from Takeo Arishima’s A Certain Woman, a novel that reworked Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina in a Japanese setting. Having read it over and over again, I dreamed of growing up to become someone like its heroine, a woman named Yoko traveling alone on a voyage across the Pacific. I would dress in an elegant kimono, and my sudden but carefully timed entrance into the ship’s dining room would make everyone turn to admire me.

  Naturally, I would travel first-class.

  “He came on a freighter,” my father said.

  “On a … freighter?”

  “That’s what he told me. By the southern route.”

  Confronted by the word “freighter,” my imagination failed me. I couldn’t recall ever reading a novel in which freighters appeared.

  “But even traveling that way would be pretty expensive, wouldn’t it?”

  “I guess so. Especially for a Japanese.”

  “So I still don’t see how he managed to get here.”

  “Oh, if someone really wanted to come to the States, I’m sure he’d find some way to scrape together enough for a ticket. Besides, Azuma was already working before he came here.”

  I was still not fully convinced.

  “You know,” he now said to my mother, “I get along all right with Atwood, but I know that he basically looks down on us Japanese.”

  Since Azuma didn’t have a car of his own and was stranded at the Atwoods’ on weekends, they evidently gave him odd jobs to do around the house, and even set him to mowing their extensive lawn. His job title may have been chauffeur, but he was more like a manservant in reality.

  “And then there’s that young lady friend of Atwood’s.”

  This was news to me but apparently not to my mother, who nodded as she reached over to take a toothpick from the small container on the table.

  “Azuma said that he sometimes drives her in the limousine. Atwood of course is careful not to let his wife find out.”

  “Oh, my.”

  “Azuma doesn’t seem to quite get it. He asked me what Miss Rogers does! I wasn’t sure how to answer.”

  My mother smiled a faintly sardonic smile.

  “Besides, Atwood himself told me that just the other day when that dumb son of his was home on vacation with his girlfriend, he let him use the limo. So the boy has plenty of liquor and a girl to play with in the back, while Azuma does the driving. That must have been a bit hard on Azuma. He’s a healthy young man himself.”

  To an adolescent girl who’d only just met the person in question, these words were uncomfortably suggestive.

  “I thought the son was a family man.”

  “No, I meant the younger boy, the one still in college.”

  “Oh, him, the one with lots of freckles but not much else?” My mother got a faraway look, as if trying to visualize the various members of that family. “Well, I’m sure Azuma has to put up with a lot, but at least he gets to live in that gorgeous house.”

  “Right.”

  “Not everyone gets that kind of experience.”

  “Exactly what I told him.”

  It was unusual to see my parents in such complete agreement.

  LESS THAN A month after we first arrived in the States, the Atwoods had invited us to dinner. That day, for the first time, my mother let my sister and me
wear our kimonos, the ones she had packed in Japan “for those special occasions when we’re invited to visit American homes.” I remember how excited I was by the scent and feel of silk even before we left. My excitement only grew on our arrival at the Atwood residence. Visiting other people’s homes as a child was like traveling to a foreign land; in this case, doubly so, since we were now abroad. And this was the first time I saw with my own eyes the lifestyle of wealthy Americans.

  My first surprise was the garage. As Mr. Atwood drove us through his gate, we saw a large white Colonial-style house ahead of us, and to one side a building in the same style, but wide and low: the garage. It stood like a humble servant to the main house but was still much larger than our place, also a white Colonial. He was eager to show us around inside, where there were four or five cars neatly lined up, mostly classic models like you see in old movies, their curves reminiscent of horse-drawn coaches. All of them were freshly buffed, their brass parts dimly shining like faded gold. Why own so many cars? Why own so many old cars and have them polished? The uselessness of it all boggled my mind.

  As for the main house, I can see with hindsight how the simple, plain interior was considered good taste in the States, where the Puritan tradition still held strong. Furniture that looked quite ordinary to me was positioned in ordinary ways in room after room. That’s not to say I was unamazed by our tour. There was more than one living room. There was also a library. There was even a large screening room for the eight-millimeter films that his sons shot as a hobby. But what astonished me most of all was a room filled with rifles. As I entered, I took in the Stars and Stripes hanging on the wall facing the door and, at the same instant, rifles of all shapes and sizes displayed in every corner—on desks, walls, and even inside glass cases, as if in a museum. I had no idea they were antiques. They were simply the first firearms I had ever encountered, and they were all within arm’s reach. What would happen if I got nervous, lost my balance, and fell on one of them? The possibility that they weren’t loaded never occurred to me: I wanted to turn right around and go home. Collecting old cars and polishing them was odd enough, but collecting old guns seemed even more bizarre. Atwood didn’t look like a violent man to me, but while he went on showing us his house, his back as I followed him acquired an air of menace.