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Azuma had visited us two or three times with a number of other employees, around the time he first started at the company, but I only vaguely remember his impassive face among this group. There was, however, one incident that made a strange impression on me. I suppose he must have heard other guests—people who had known me since I was a child—calling me by my first name. “Minae,” he said, “could you get me some tea?” He had never spoken to me before. Though flustered to realize I’d stupidly served him beer again, I was more startled that a man like him would address me directly, and in such a familiar way.

  THE FIRST TIME the two of us spoke alone was at one of the Christmas parties my family hosted each year. We had invited Azuma along with other unmarried employees and the New York bachelors. It was the Christmas of my last year in high school, and Nanae, a sophomore at the music conservatory in Boston, came home with her latest boyfriend. Every year it was the same: The dining-room table would be fully extended and loaded with every plate in the house, along with an array of my mother’s specialties—an eclectic mix of Japanese and Western dishes including raw halibut wrapped in kombu seaweed, fried chicken flavored with ginger and soy sauce, roast beef, Waldorf salad, and other delights—which we feasted on while listening to my father’s favorite holiday music in the background, a Fritz Kreisler recording of Brahms and, inevitably, Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas,” until finally dinner was over and it was time to troop into the living room to listen to Nanae play the piano. At that point my mother and I would retire to the kitchen to clean up. I never minded helping in the kitchen, because it had always been that way, since early on. As for listening to my sister’s piano, I’d long since had about as much of it as I could take.

  I was in the middle of collecting plates on a tray when I heard my mother say to the tall young man who had just stood up, “Mr. Azuma, may I ask you a favor?” He was the last to leave the dining room.

  “Yes?”

  Her dark eyes sparkling, she said, “Would you mind helping change the bulb in the ceiling light in my daughter’s room?”

  The lightbulb in my room had burned out several days earlier. To change it, we had to get a stepladder out of the basement and carry it up two flights of stairs. Asking my father to do anything of the sort was out of the question, and both my mother and I were too lazy. She must have remembered about the bulb when she saw Azuma stand up and realized he was so tall he would be able to reach it with only a chair.

  On hearing her make this request, I thought of Nanae’s new boyfriend from the conservatory. He was Japanese but, unusually, one-quarter Scandinavian. It must have been those genes that made him so tall—taller than Azuma, for one—and he had already been with us for a few days, eating his meals with us and accepting our hospitality as if it were his due. Why hadn’t she asked him? I suppose it had never occurred to her. His grandfather was a three-term prime minister and his half-Scandinavian father a famous conductor. Not the sort of people who would have deigned to visit our “humble abode” in Japan.

  Taro Azuma’s low “yes” to my mother’s request bothered me. I detected something diffident, perhaps even reluctant, in his tone. The image of that rather forced smile he gave my father the first night I saw him flashed into my mind. I’d been right: this good-looking man was someone you’d be better off keeping at arm’s length. I was annoyed with my mother for the casual way she was always asking people to help, but I was annoyed with Azuma too for his apparent unwillingness.

  If only I hadn’t been so lazy. Or if only I’d asked Yaji and Kita before dinner. I could still go out to the living room now, I told myself; all it would take was a quick pleading glance—“Could you two do me a favor?”—and they’d be happy to leave my sister’s recital. But both of them left a lot to be desired when it came to height, and they would have to lug the stepladder up from the basement. If Nanae’s lordly boyfriend had to be excused from being asked, I was forced to admit that my mother had made the right choice.

  As I led Azuma upstairs, feeling some compunction, I was still annoyed by his reaction. Yes, he shouldn’t have been imposed upon, but, given all my father had been doing on his behalf, why couldn’t he happily do us a little favor like this? I went on blaming him in silence.

  My room upstairs was very much a girl’s bedroom. The walls were covered with flowery wallpaper. There was a white built-in bookcase and desk on one side, a white dresser and mirror along another, and against the third wall stood a white four-poster bed, complete with canopy edged in frilly white lace and matching bedspread. My mother had made the canopy and bedspread for me on her electric sewing machine—something that wasn’t yet on the market in Japan—saying with a sigh as she worked on it, “You have no idea how I dreamed of having a bed like this when I was a girl!”

  Azuma positioned a chair under the lamp and stepped onto it. I stood attentively beside him, showing him that I, at least, did not take his labor for granted. He removed and handed me first the drop-shaped metal cap that held the glass shade in place, then the glass shade itself, and finally the burned-out lightbulb. I handed him back a new bulb, then the glass shade, and finally the metal cap. I performed these tasks, something a small child could have done equally well, with appropriate solemnity.

  For a while I was still annoyed with him, but as I watched him quietly deal with this simple task—once asking for a Kleenex to wipe off the dead insects on the shade—my compunction returned. He was dressed like a gentleman, in a dark suit jacket, yet his fingers, quickly reattaching the shade and screwing the metal fastener back on, had the nimbleness of someone used to working with his hands.

  Something in his movements caught my attention.

  “You’re left-handed!” The words slipped out of my mouth.

  “Yes.”

  There was a smile on his lips when he looked down at me. It was a surprisingly disarming smile, which confused me, yet my heart felt lighter, as if a burden had been lifted. Perhaps not an unkind person, after all.

  After I flicked the switch to make certain the light worked, he climbed down from the chair. Still too young to be smoothly polite, all I could manage was a bow and a few clumsy words of thanks. It was when I looked up again that he asked, pointing at the built-in bookcase, “Did you bring those with you from Japan?”

  “That’s right.”

  He was referring to the Girls’ Library of World Literature, a multivolume set which I no longer even glanced at but which it seemed a shame to throw away. The books were translations of Western classics, done in a simple prose style. Each volume had a pretty slipcase, white with a sugary pink floral design.

  “I’ve read some of them,” he said.

  Seeing the look of surprise on my face, he gave me that disarming smile again. He reached out for one of the books with his left hand, but abruptly pulled it back, probably realizing his fingers were dirty. The books themselves had been sitting there for years, gathering dust.

  “Go ahead.”

  “No, it’s okay.”

  “Really, please, go ahead.”

  I handed him another tissue. He wiped his fingers, and, after pocketing the tissue, reached out again to pull out the same book and remove it from its case. His fingers leafed through it—the same fingers that had neatly screwed the metal cap back on the lampshade moments before. I watched, fascinated, as those lithe but strong-looking fingers turned the yellowed pages of the Girls’ Library. He continued to turn the pages without a word, seeming far away. From downstairs I could hear polite applause followed by a brief silence, and then Nanae starting her favorite crowd-pleaser, Chopin’s étude “Winter Wind.” Taro Azuma was too absorbed in the book to register the sound from below. It was a book I’d read over and over again as a child and, as he flipped through the pages, illustrations appeared along with the story. We stood side by side in silence for a while. He was lost in some reverie, forgetful of everything, even himself; for me it was a strange interlude during which I shared an invisible world with a man I barely knew.

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p; I could tell that he would have preferred to go on reading rather than rejoin the others. I could have invited him to stay and left him there by himself, but I was still a young girl, and I didn’t have the boldness to offer my bedroom, with its frilly canopy bed, to a young man. When he finally looked up, as if startled from a dream, I managed to mumble that he was welcome to borrow the book. But he smiled at me again, put it back in its pink-and-white box, and returned it to the shelf.

  “So you’ve got a younger sister?” I said.

  “No,” he replied, and after a pause: “The books weren’t in our house.”

  I must have looked puzzled. He continued, seemingly amused by the expression on my face, “I didn’t grow up in the kind of family that owns books like this.” With his eyes still fixed on me, he added, “In fact, we didn’t have any books at all. Not one.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Now wary, he seemed to regret having revealed even that much. He asked where he could wash his hands.

  “The bathroom is just out to the left.”

  As he walked past me in his dark suit jacket, I caught a whiff of some sweet and pungent smell, like a tangerine. It was faint, barely there, especially compared to the strong odor some Americans have, but unusual for a Japanese. Not an unpleasant scent, but it embarrassed me, and I then was embarrassed by my own embarrassment.

  When I went back downstairs to the kitchen, my mother, who was working at the sink, turned to look at me.

  “That took a long time. Did you say thank you?”

  “Of course I did.”

  She motioned toward a pile of dishes in the drainer.

  “Quick, grab a towel.”

  Before long, I took a fresh pot of green tea out to the living room, where I found Azuma sitting by the Christmas tree, listening to Nanae’s piano playing. His face, oddly illuminated by the miniature flashing red, blue, and green lights, looked disturbingly sullen—so different from the smile I’d seen upstairs. I hoped no one else in the room noticed.

  After our guests left and my father went upstairs, the rest of us gathered at the round table in the breakfast nook, and our conversation drifted inevitably to the subject of Taro Azuma, whom Nanae had just met for the first time.

  “So, that’s the famous private chauffeur?” she asked me, lighting a cigarette held between two of the long, slender fingers she liked to show off. She had just recently begun smoking.

  “That’s him.”

  “He’s quite good-looking,” she said in English. Now that she was living in a dormitory with Americans, English expressions had begun to appear quite often in her Japanese conversation. “And quite sexy too, I thought.”

  After blowing a cloud of smoke up toward the ceiling, she glanced at her boyfriend and turned on the charm: “Sorry, dahling, but you know what I mean.” Then, to the rest of us, she added in Japanese, “But there’s something about him that bothers me.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I don’t know … It’s hard to explain. Maybe it’s because I’ve heard too much about him, but somehow he strikes me as a bit vulgar.”

  “Hmm.” You’re one to talk, I said to myself, looking at her multilayered eye shadow and black eyeliner, and her eyebrows, plucked to a mere pencil line, the brow ridge bare as boiled chicken.

  “What do you think?” She looked at her boyfriend.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he answered, clearly unwilling to say anything further.

  Because he came from such a prominent family, any opinion he offered was liable to sound presumptuous. I was pleasantly surprised to find that this young man, who usually seemed rather slow and unobservant, knew what his social standing did or did not allow him to say.

  “Why does he have to be so gloomy?” asked my sister.

  “Maybe that’s just his personality.”

  “No. It’s more than that. He looks frustrated. It’s as if he can’t contain his frustration.”

  The ill humor on Azuma’s face hadn’t escaped people’s notice after all. Though I thought Nanae was quite observant, I held my ground.

  “You think so?”

  “Perhaps he’s ambitious,” put in my mother, who had just returned from the bathroom at the end of the corridor. “Your father seems to think very highly of him.”

  Nanae looked around the table and said, half joking, “I bet he’s memorized my entire set of flash cards by now. But why did you have to give them to him? They don’t cost much. He could have bought his own.” She put on her usual pouty face. I had called to let her know what had happened to them.

  Ignoring her remark, my mother pointed at the cigarette in her hand. “You know, Nanae, you can get addicted to those things.”

  I was mulling over the word she had used: “ambitious.”

  A NEW YEAR started, the spring came, and then the first days of summer.

  In New York, where winter is long and cold, when the first signs of summer appear people starving for sunshine immediately start arranging picnics for their weekends. As the trees and grass turned green, my own family took part in this ritual as well, inviting people from my father’s company, loading the trunk of the car with food, charcoal, and a cooler full of beer, and heading for the public park on the shore. Unlike the parties held at our house, there was no need to limit the number of guests, and those who had families there were welcome to bring them along.

  The picnic area was on a small rise with a view of the ocean; one side was lined with barbecue grills made of bricks and the other with picnic tables and benches made of logs. It felt good to be moving around in the warm sunlight as I helped my mother spread paper tablecloths and set out stacks of paper napkins, plates, cups, plastic knives and forks, and disposable chopsticks. Among the other young men was Taro Azuma. Now that I think of it, it’s hard to believe that he once made time for such idle amusement, but I suppose he did it partly out of respect for my father but also from a feeling that his position in the company might be precarious.

  After I had finished setting the table, I went and stood next to Mrs. Cohen, who was bent over the brick barbecue, cooking clams.

  “Smells great!”

  “Minae, you’re in a good mood today.”

  “Why not? It’s nice weather, plus soon I’ll be graduating from that school I hate.” I was about to say, “And then I’ll go to college,” but stopped, sensing that Taro Azuma was standing nearby.

  Mrs. Cohen put a few of the clams on a small paper plate, along with a slice of lemon, and called out to my father, “Let’s start!”

  After we were done with the barbecue—typically a little hectic, what with sitting one minute and standing the next—we cleaned up, and, feeling relieved that an important ritual had been duly performed, started to stroll down toward the beach in a group.

  Though America is a vast territory, its shoreline is no more extensive than Japan’s, a country of islands. The most valuable stretches, which often have their own private roads to the beach, are the property of the very rich. This is especially true of the North Shore of Long Island, known as the Gold Coast, where families celebrated in the pages of American history—the Vanderbilts, Morgans, Whitneys—once had estates running to hundreds of acres. Perhaps it was only natural that F. Scott Fitzgerald should have set his novel The Great Gatsby on this shore. These millionaires built palatial residences in a variety of styles—Tudor, Georgian, Gothic; some even shipped entire castles from Europe, stone by stone. With staff and the staff’s families living full-time on the property, they could invite guests from Manhattan any summer weekend to party grandly in the gardens, their gaiety spilling out onto the beach.

  Over time, as railroads and bridges were built, easy accessibility proved a mixed blessing when it resulted in rampant real estate development. The huge houses, a thousand of which had once existed, were demolished one after another, and typical middle-class suburban housing sprang up with astonishing speed in their place. Still, even today, much of the precious oceanfront land remains in the ha
nds of the wealthy, if generally in more modest parcels. Making use of public parks and beaches on weekends was the only way ordinary residents had access to the ocean. Our family lived fairly close to the shore, yet we too had to go to this public area to enjoy an ocean view—a dock, seagulls, white sails, and the shimmering horizon.

  I stepped away from the group and headed out toward the dock.

  I was still at an age when I believed my real life lay in the future. I felt quite happy surrounded by Japanese people speaking Japanese, but I had no wish to blend in with the group. These people were all adults, whose lives were fixed and who seemed content to stay within the borders described by “retail,” “customer service,” and “head office.” For me, the future stretched out ahead, filled with the unknown. While I basked in the comfort this limited community provided, I also needed to be by myself from time to time.

  AS I APPROACHED the dock, I saw that Taro Azuma had arrived before me; he was leaning on the railing, gazing out at the water. I hesitated. He was the person there closest to my age, yet the one with whom I felt least comfortable. I ought to have been able to talk to him in the most casual, easy way, but instead I felt constrained. The memory of that moment in my room when I thought we’d shared an invisible world now seemed distant.

  Something—maybe the cry of a seagull—made him look up and notice me. I acknowledged his presence with a slight bow and walked toward him, awkwardly conscious of wearing shorts rather than a skirt. My years in the States obviously hadn’t fully freed me from my Japanese prudishness: I stopped some distance from where he stood, and leaned on the railing myself.

  It was he who spoke first: “I thought we were going to see the Atlantic today.” He had to raise his voice to cover the distance between us.

  “Isn’t this the Atlantic?” I shouted back, surprised.

  “No, this is the Long Island Sound. It’s like a big bay. That’s Connecticut over there on the other side. You have to go to the South Shore to see the Atlantic.”

  All this time, I’d assumed that the water out there was part of the open sea and that England was somewhere on the other side. That’s how clueless I was.