A True Novel Read online

  I don’t know how they justified the reduction to Azuma. I only heard that he signed the contract without a flicker of emotion and, by redoubling his efforts, managed to make as much money again as in the previous year—something generally seen as an extraordinary achievement. The next time his contract came up, management offered him 6 percent, perhaps thinking that he wouldn’t dare bite the hand that fed him. Besides, 6 percent still added up to a very large sum. This time, though, Azuma asked for some time to consider the offer. Three days later, he returned the contract unsigned.

  Not only did he walk away from the company, but it was soon known that he had signed with a rival American firm. It was a flagrant betrayal. Azuma had by then been granted a green card, with the right to permanent residency, having hired a lawyer and prevailed upon his medical connections to act as guarantors; he was free to do as he pleased. The company retaliated by restoring the commission level of the other salesmen, with whom the initial cut had obviously been unpopular.

  ON MY VISITS home after this episode, I sometimes heard my father describe Azuma as “shrewder than a Jew,” an unexpected phrase from someone who prided himself on his liberalism. After helping Azuma get hired, and thinking that he’d done a favor both to the man and the company, he must have felt personally betrayed. Still, I don’t think he was really shocked, because he had long since stopped mentioning him at dinner anyway—a sign of the distance he felt between them. My father could understand and relate to the old Azuma, yet he could neither understand nor relate to the new one who “rode around in a big Mercedes.” Whatever Azuma did now had no power to upset him; he even took some pleasure in seeing his initial reading of the man confirmed in such a spectacular way. Once in a while I’d hear him mutter a comment like, “The guy’s really put down roots.”

  My father was not the only one who had mixed feelings about Taro Azuma.

  Yaji, who had returned to Japan and married, had then been transferred to the Los Angeles office and came with his family to visit us at Christmas. We were reminiscing about the old days, and the topic eventually turned to Taro Azuma.

  Evidently a more doting parent than his wife, Yaji sat bouncing his baby on his lap before saying to my father, “That Azuma’s really something, isn’t he?” I thought he was just being generous, as he always was, but he added, “A lot of people are impressed.”

  According to him, not every colleague who knew Azuma from the New York days was critical of him.

  “What about Mr. Irie?” I asked. I clearly remembered him saying to my mother, “I just don’t like that kind of guy.”

  “Yes, well, even he said the company was in the wrong,” he replied with a little laugh. The baby on his lap, his spitting image, laughed too, wriggling his body.

  I saw in their reaction the ambivalence peculiar to Japanese workers who remained a long time in the States. Living year after year in the land of immigrants, they all must have had a moment when they wondered what would happen if they too cut their ties with their own country. The ambivalence would have been all the more strongly felt by those who had only limited prospects after their return to Japan.

  That said, Azuma’s betrayal was censured by most Japanese. The news of his behavior, that he had “traded Japan for America,” spread like shock waves in New York’s Japanese communities, where he soon was widely reviled.

  Around the same time, we began hearing peculiar rumors about him: that he wasn’t Japanese, he was Chinese; no, Korean; no, he’d got Vietnamese blood in him—no wonder he didn’t care about sticking it to a Japanese company. We even heard that back in Japan he’d run off with the daughter of a family who’d been good to him, and then dumped her …

  These rumors all had an oddly jingoistic tone to them, and they bordered on slander. That Azuma hadn’t even once been back to Japan, when anyone else that successful would have returned to parade his fortune, only incited nasty comment too.

  My own memories of Taro Azuma faded—it was ages since I had even seen him. Though we’d hardly spoken more than a few times, I had always felt a certain warmth for the man I knew. But now everything I heard about him made me imagine someone different. His so-called treachery didn’t bother me. Traitors, like escaped convicts, were quite romantic. But he was a nouveau riche! I imagined the Azuma who “rode around in a big Mercedes” as some kind of yakuza figure, with dark glasses, a Rolex, and a gold chain hanging down his golf-tanned chest. If corporate employees were boring, nouveaux riches were worse. My recollection of his expression when he flipped through the pages of that volume of the Girls’ Library of World Literature, of his dark stare as he gazed at the crystalline water, of his rigid face as he danced slowly to “Blue Moon”—all this now seemed like tricks of memory. Fortunately, those past scenes were by now too remote from my own life to evoke any lingering sentimentality.

  As the years went by, he continued to grow in stature. He eventually went into partnership with a former client, American and Jewish, to set up a firm to develop medical devices. In the same wealthy suburb he’d been living in, he moved up to a penthouse with a large terrace. We heard rumors that he was dating a doctor, then a lawyer. He was spotted a few times at the Metropolitan Opera, though whether he liked opera or was just accompanying an opera-loving girlfriend, no one knew. I remember thinking that a man with that kind of physical presence would have no trouble dating American women.

  THINGS CONTINUED TO change. Taro Azuma had become a stranger who led a life in another world, and we had no occasion to meet. What’s more, my family’s circumstances declined in almost comically inverse proportion to his rise, though on a much smaller scale. As my father’s health got worse, my mother fell in love with a Japanese man she’d met at work, more than ten years younger than her. By the time my father’s illness forced him into retirement, she was only coming home to sleep. He spent his days at home staring at the ceiling, where cobwebs started to appear.

  As for us sisters, the “good marriage” everyone expected for us—and which we ourselves took for granted—never took place. We wasted our youth. Suddenly we realized that the time was gone when people said, “You’re so lucky. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.” Nanae abandoned her piano playing, on which our parents had spent a fortune (even buying her a Steinway). To our mother’s fury, she decided to become a sculptor instead and was living in Manhattan, holding out on her own by taking odd jobs. The men who dated her became fewer (and poorer), and, as if to compensate, she got herself two cats, littermates whom she addressed in English as “my babies,” purring like a cat herself. As for me, after living as a student all those years, I ended up doing more of the same by going to graduate school, in French literature—out of pure inertia and without any desire to become an academic. For years I had had a dream of returning to Japan to write novels, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Instead I just dreaded the day when my scholarship would run out.

  Then my father’s eyes began to fail; despite repeated surgery, he soon was nearly blind. My mother put him in a nursing home. She then quickly put our Colonial house up for sale, and, when the house was sold, handed my sister and me some money, warning us, “Remember, this is the last you’re getting.” She then went off to live with her boyfriend, who had been transferred to yet another part of the globe—a simpleminded fellow who would have led a predictable but peaceful married life if my mother hadn’t been trying so hard to make the most of her remaining years and vitality. This left my sister and me with my father in a nursing home and without a home to go to when the cash ran out.

  The world outside had also changed with unexpected speed. Japan had been a poor country when we left but was beginning to be seen as a rich one. Americans got used to seeing Japanese tourists arriving in groups and spending wads of cash in fancy boutiques. Japanese expatriates in New York thought nothing of spending hundreds of dollars on a business dinner and walked down the streets of Manhattan as if they owned them. Only the most hopelessly backward of Americans still saw a
domestic in every Asian. In Japan, employees no longer envied their colleagues sent to the States—yet the number of Japanese people living in America continued to grow, as it happened wherever Japan did business, impelled by the country’s economic expansion.

  AN UNEXPECTED ENCOUNTER took place at a time when this new prosperity was well under way. Nanae and I had spent the day together in New York for once, and decided to have dinner at a sushi place in midtown. The chef’s hearty greeting drew my attention to the counter, and there I saw Taro Azuma, dressed in a dark suit, just as I remembered him, talking jovially with an American, also dressed in a dark suit. Ten years had passed since I had seen him dancing to “Blue Moon.” Gone was the aura of deep frustration; he looked radiant, as if touched by an invisible light. He’d been back to Japan and seen the woman, though I obviously didn’t know it then. I just felt irresistibly drawn to him. At the same time I couldn’t help feeling crestfallen: in his presence, my own family seemed all the more woebegone. That he was the last person I’d ever dreamed could make me feel so small only made me feel smaller. I felt there was little left for my sister and me, not even much of a future, while he had everything.

  It was odd that he, a man so rich, should be dining in a sushi restaurant we could afford, but perhaps he preferred to avoid the upscale sushi places, crowded with well-heeled expatriates who might know him. Anyway, now that the ugly rumors were fading from their collective memory, the Japanese in New York were starting to admire what looked like a rare success story.

  We had taken our seats and I was about to point Azuma out to Nanae when I realized he had already noticed us and was walking over to our table, flashing a bright smile. It was the same disarming smile I’d seen years ago when he changed the lightbulb in my room.

  He seemed to have filled out, which only meant that he was no longer too thin. The image of Taro Azuma that rumors had built up vanished in an instant, and I found myself facing the person I’d known as a young girl. The past ten-plus years might almost have been a dream.

  He faced me, since he hardly knew Nanae.

  “Minae.”

  I was surprised that he should address me, a grown-up woman, without a proper honorific, as if I were still a girl. I realized later that Mrs. Cohen must have gone on referring to me as Minae when she gave him updates about our family, but at that moment I felt myself turning red.

  “It’s been a long time,” he said.

  “Yes, quite a while.”

  “How is your father?”

  “Not too bad.”

  There was no point in telling him—someone who had moved out of our lives long ago—that my father was in a nursing home; that though he once couldn’t live without books, he had by this time probably forgotten how it felt to hold a book in his hand.

  “I heard he was in the hospital.” He sounded matter-of-fact, though he looked searchingly at my face. I appreciated his concern, but I couldn’t bring myself to say more about my father to this man, with his aura of golden success.

  “He’s been in and out.”

  Seeing my reaction, he didn’t pursue the subject any further.

  “I’m sorry I’ve been so out of touch.”

  “I gather you’ve done very well for yourself.” When I was younger, I would never have been able to say something so direct. He shook his head, smiling his innocent smile again.

  “No, no. But it’s a piece of luck to meet you here, so let me treat the two of you tonight. Please, order anything you like.”

  “That’s very kind of you, but, really, we can’t.” It was my turn to shake my head.

  “I insist,” he said and peered down at our faces, his shoulders in the dark suit almost as wide as the two of us huddled together at the small, square table. How would it feel to be loved by a man like this? To be looked after by someone like him? Suddenly my sister and I seemed wretched, having to count pennies on our day out in Manhattan.

  I continued to refuse his offer, shaking my head.

  He urged me with his eyes again.

  “Well, if you insist, maybe you can offer us something to drink.” If I remained too adamant, he might think that even my father had turned against him because of his break with the company. I wanted to protect my father’s honor.

  “But we’re not drinkers,” Nanae said, half jokingly, half in earnest, her eyes, framed by her long black hair, looking a little resentful.

  Azuma looked at her, then at me, and said, “Well, then, how about an appetizer as well? A plate of sashimi?”

  Nanae and I nodded yes in unison, all smiles. Now that I think of it, we must have looked absurdly happy. But we really were happy—beyond happy at the prospect of a platter of delicately sliced raw fish we wouldn’t have allowed ourselves to order, and happier still because the courtesy came from this stunning man in an impeccable dark suit. We felt special.

  Nanae said in English as soon as he returned to the sushi bar, “Wow! He’s cool! He’s got style.”

  “Yes, he does.”

  Even before the drink came, I felt heady merely from being in his presence.

  “And what a voice!”

  “You think so?”

  “It’s special. Nice.”

  “Yeah, now that you mention it.”

  “Did you see his fingers?”

  “What about them?” The only fingers I remembered were the ones he used to change the lightbulb in my room.

  “So-o beautiful! Long and elegant.” Nanae had always been more discerning when it came to the fine points of men’s looks. She was gazing approvingly at her own long, slender fingers holding a cigarette. On one finger was a platinum ring made especially for her by a Polish man named Henryk—a former member of Solidarity, the trade union, who would be one of the last of her boyfriends. It contained a diamond so tiny you needed a magnifying glass to find it.

  “He doesn’t look very Japanese,” she said.

  “What does he look like then?”

  “A Mongolian.”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  “He’s not fine-boned like a Japanese.”

  “True.”

  “I can just picture him galloping on a horse across the steppes.”

  Azuma was explaining our special treat to the chef behind the counter, then gesturing toward us.

  “But I wonder what the difference is between Mongolian and Japanese. In English, they use Mongolian to mean simply Asians, including us,” I said, prone to get hung up on the precise definition of words.

  “You’re right.”

  “Mongolian and Mongoloid can be synonyms, can’t they?”

  “Yeah. I really don’t know what the difference is.”

  The waiter came to take our main order; he had a perfectly Japanese face but spoke to us only in broken English, so it was impossible to tell if he was Korean, Chinese, or, for that matter, Mongolian. Restaurants like this were having more and more difficulty hiring Japanese people, who by this time expected higher pay.

  Nanae puckered her lips and blew out a puff of smoke, saying in English, “Maybe he’s gay. He’s just too good-looking to be straight.”

  “I don’t know. But he’s had girlfriends.”

  “Then why isn’t he married, for God’s sake?”

  If Nanae hadn’t been with Henryk at this point, she might have entertained the possibility, at least that night, of falling for Azuma. Yet what good would that have done? She wasn’t brazen enough to make an open play, particularly to somebody as rich as that.

  “You know, when you first met him, you said that there was something vulgar about him. Remember?”

  “That was then.” She turned to look over at the sushi bar. “He looks so different.” She sighed. “So … content.”

  It was just as she said. The turbulence he’d been unable to hide was gone, replaced by a jauntiness equally hard to suppress.

  “So is that what happens to people when they’re successful?” Nanae murmured, almost to herself.

  “I wish I knew.”
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  Our parents’ only aspiration for us was to see us settled in a decent marriage. Even their investment in Nanae’s piano lessons, or my stay in Paris, was only a way of preparing us for a good match. We ourselves grew up expecting nothing much else and had only the vaguest idea of what “success” might actually mean.

  Once again, as if to herself, she said, “I wonder if it doesn’t make him a bit scared, to be quite so happy. He looks cool but somehow silly too. Men do look dumb when they’re too happy, don’t they?”

  We both laughed. Azuma’s contentment was that obvious.

  It was the weekend, and the small sushi place, its walls decorated with the autographs of Japanese celebrities on squares of paper, was busy with a constant flow of customers. I noticed that several of the Japanese there spotted Azuma and were speaking in low voices about him. Before long, the waiter brought the sashimi over in a wooden vessel shaped like a fishing boat to show it was a special treat. Thrilled by the sheer size of it, enough for five people, I applauded softly.

  “I thought rich people were supposed to be stingy, but look at this!”

  “It’s difficult to tell, though,” Nanae said, breaking apart a pair of chopsticks. She having been at the conservatory, the ways of the wealthy were one thing she knew slightly more about than I did. “Rich people do spend when it’s to their advantage.”

  “Well, then, why is he spending his money on us?”

  “You got me there.”

  We giggled, but she added, more seriously, “You wonder, though. Don’t you think it’s impossible for a really good person to get rich?”

  “I guess so,” I agreed; then, after some thought, “But maybe it’s still possible to get rich without being a bad person.”