Kanazawa, page 17
He perused the manuscript during breakfast, keeping one eye on his father-in-law’s bedroom. All morning he stayed in bed, only venturing downstairs in the afternoon—for a hardboiled egg, clear soup, and rice, and also to draw in the living room, which he kept nearly dark.
For dinner he prepared only rice and a few pickled vegetables, and ate alone in the living room among photographs of statues he had taken and printed out.
After dinner Emmitt put off working again on Kechō to sit with him. His father-in-law had photographed not only various sculptures in Kanazawa, but also their titles, artists’ names, and the years they’d been cast and erected. Emmitt read through the titles he could understand: Fulfillment of Life’s Desires; Waterside Poem; Wall; Dream Flight; Pure; Sound of the Tide. His father-in-law had scratched notes for each photo, but Emmitt had difficulty making them out.
The next day, too, his father-in-law stayed home. If Emmitt hadn’t known he was still sick, he might have guessed he felt repentant. But by late afternoon he was well enough to go walking. As he left, he told Emmitt not to wait for him to have dinner, and that he’d get something when he came home.
Mirai returned early from her ikebana school to make dinner and clean the house before her mother got back from Yashagaike that evening.
“All those photos of statues . . . ,” Mirai said, hovering over the coffee table. “I suppose I’d better not touch them.”
“What do you think motivates him to study them?”
“I don’t know, but he can’t keep doing this. What’s wrong with him, anyway?”
Emmitt thought his father-in-law’s interest in the statues mysterious, but nothing to be upset over. “Don’t statues exist for people to gaze at and admire? If Otōsan sees beauty in them, surely what he’s doing isn’t abnormal. As an artist yourself, I’d think you’d find what he’s doing acceptable.”
But she only shook her head and said, “It’s good that Okāsan wasn’t here to see him two nights ago, or to watch him spend all day with these photographs.”
Emmitt had looked up the name of the sculpture his father-in-law sketched today. It lay on the floor beneath the coffee table, and he showed it to Mirai.
She read the title aloud: Mizube no Uta. Waterside Poem. In the photograph, three statues stood together under a stone wall fronted with trees, facing the Sai River. “The title is more appropriate for a flower arrangement than that sculpture.”
“It seems fitting for either one.”
Mirai smiled. “Most men would probably say the same thing: There’s poetry in the sight of three well-endowed nudes. I’m curious to know how the women who modeled for it feel when they see it.”
“Okāsan might have something to say about that. Of course, I have no idea what kind of modeling she did. It’s not the sort of thing I’m about to ask her, either.”
“I’m not sure myself.”
“You never asked?”
“She doesn’t like to talk about it. And Otōsan isn’t forthcoming, either.”
Emmitt recalled the pictures his father-in-law had shown him while cleaning their frames in the living room. It was true that it seemed an uncomfortable subject after all these years, though Emmitt still couldn’t guess why. Mirai’s family wasn’t what he would describe as secretive, but he knew that stories from the past had been buried and weren’t to be dug up.
In the sketchpad, his father-in-law had scribbled what appeared to be a title in the upper right corner. The kanji differed from the original, and he’d written it so hastily Emmitt couldn’t make sense of it. He asked Mirai to read it for him, but she said it was unimportant.
“It probably just means he’s trying to make it his own. That he has a different vision for it.”
“Isn’t that good? That’s what you did with Dr. Nakaya’s snow-crystal photographs, after all.”
“It’s not the same thing. In any case, it depends on what he does with it. Hopefully he’ll have the sense not to paint them in Okāsan’s image again.”
Before Mirai’s mother came home, Emmitt finished translating a difficult paragraph in a latter section of Kechō, when Ren’ya toppled from Tenjin Bridge and almost drowned in the Asano River. Having read the story in its entirety many times, he knew how the boy was saved, and how the experience led him later to nearly turn into a bird one night on Mt. Utatsu, but he didn’t want to rush the translation—he didn’t know how to present it in English as Kyōka had done in Japanese, both with its imagistic richness and its colloquial narration. What Emmitt had translated up to now still needed much work, and he wanted to make sure he hadn’t missed certain nuances in Japanese. Still, it was better than he’d hoped. He expected to finish a draft in several weeks, but looking at the translation again now he thought it no better than what he’d encountered in Red on White.
“I’M HOME!” EMMITT’S MOTHER-IN-LAW called from the genkan. As she shut the door, Mirai took her small suitcase and a bag of gifts she’d bought in Fukui. Her mother looked tired but happy.
“Are you hungry?” Mirai said, but her mother didn’t answer. She walked into the living room and sat heavily in a chair. Her husband was on the floor before her, drawing in his sketchpad.
“I’m home,” she said again. “If you welcomed me back, I didn’t hear you.”
“I didn’t say anything,” he said. “Welcome back.”
She fanned herself with a handkerchief and smiled at him as Emmitt brought her a glass of cold tea from the kitchen.
“Thank you,” she said, and drank half the glass.
“How was your trip?” Emmitt said.
She told them that although the weather had been good, in the mountains where they hiked storms had arisen out of nowhere and then disappeared just as quickly. It was cold when they came to the pond, she said, and a strong wind battered them once they ascended five hundred meters. But the pond was beautiful, surrounded in places with orange day lilies, and they had indeed found offerings in the shallows. Although they had intended to read “Demon Pond” upon reaching Yashagaike, the weather forced them to do this instead at their ryokan.
Mirai asked about her accommodations. After showing Mirai photos of where she’d stayed, her mother turned to Emmitt and said, “I have bad news for you.”
Emmitt couldn’t imagine what she was talking about. He smiled, thinking she had planned some joke. “Bad news?”
“You can stop translating Kechō.”
His smile fell away. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that we’re too late. One of our club members, who hadn’t come to any of our recent meetings, went to Yashagaike with us. When we were talking on the train and I mentioned the club’s plan to translate Kechō she interrupted me. She said it was already being translated into English. The translation was to include multiple introductions and illustrations on every page and would be published with much wider distribution than we could ever manage. I’m still not clear why I never heard about this edition before now.”
“I see,” Emmitt said. The news hit him harder than he thought it would. He had enjoyed working on it and it had been good practice for his Japanese. It had also brought him much closer to Kyōka’s work and to the part of Kanazawa where the story was set—though that area had largely changed by now or disappeared.
“I should have inquired directly with the Izumi Kyōka Museum about what kind of translation work was being done. I’m sure they would have told me. But I imagined no one was. The city authorities that funded our last project never mentioned it. Aside from one or two academics in America, I thought we were the only ones translating Kyōka’s work into English.”
“I see.”
“I called the museum from the train and was told that the other version of Kechō had already gone to print. It should be out by the beginning of autumn. I’m sorry to disappoint you.”
“It’s all right.”
For the first time since quitting his job, he felt as if the life he had chased all this time had been illusory. The translation he’d been working on had given him an unexpected sense of purpose. Now that it was gone, he felt unmoored.
“What other translations does your literary club plan to do?” he said. “I’m ready to help however I can.”
“Unfortunately, our members are clamoring to translate other Kanazawa writers. A majority of them feel we’ve put too much effort into translating Kyōka and want to move in a different direction. It seems people are interested in more contemporary works.”
“It sounds interesting.”
“Our club won’t convene this summer, so there won’t be anything for you to do until at least winter. Even then, it seems likely we’ll hire a professional translator. We hope to have enough funds to attract someone well known.”
Emmitt congratulated her on the news.
“You’re back to having nothing to do,” Mirai said, hugging him from behind.
But that wasn’t true. Two days ago he had rediscovered an insert from the practice translation tests he’d bought, and circled an exam date in September. He had also called a regional test center to ask if they offered classes in Kanazawa, and the man he spoke with had promised to email him information. He had it in mind to enroll in one if he could.
Now there was every reason to do it as soon as possible. If he didn’t, he would have one fewer reason to refuse to move to Tokyo.
13
EMMITT SAW MIRAI LESS often as spring turned into summer. Her new flower arrangements, based on the magnified photographs of snow crystals, kept her occupied. She left for ikebana school earlier in the morning and returned later in the evening than ever before. Her mind had turned fecund with ideas; her sketches were strewn about her parents’ house.
At the end of May a Japanese cultural center in Melbourne invited her to guest-teach ikebana for two weeks. On her final day, the center would exhibit the work she created as a visiting artist.
She would leave in two months via Tokyo, where she planned to spend several days with Asuka before departing.
Emmitt assumed the opportunity had come through her school in Kanazawa, but she told him it had come instead through the school in Tokyo that once offered her a job.
Emmitt considered joining her in Australia, but it was difficult to justify the expense now, and matching an itinerary to Mirai’s exhibition schedule posed problems.
“Your ikebana has taken off recently,” he said when she was packing for the trip. Two months had gone by, and his hope of accompanying her to Melbourne hadn’t panned out. “It’s impressive, especially because you have to stand out in a crowded field. I know it’s been difficult to make your way forward.”
“I don’t know if it’s been difficult. I’ve been lucky lately to have new ideas.”
Her snow-crystal ikebana had led to similar arrangements based on magnifications of what she’d found on bicycle rides along the sea: sand pebbles, salt crystals, flower petals, wings of different insects. These had led in turn to arrangements on the opposite spectrum: objects in nature of great enormity—mountains, forests, even seas and oceans. She was keen to juxtapose large and small things in nature, and the results had opened up more opportunities to explore.
“Maybe I can travel to Tokyo,” Emmitt said. “Not before you leave, since you’ll be busy as soon as you arrive, but when you come back from Melbourne. I’d like to meet you at the airport if I can.”
“That’s nice of you. But it isn’t necessary.”
“We could stay for as long a week. We wouldn’t have to stay with Asuka, either, though hopefully we could see her when she wasn’t working.”
She smiled while seeming to think about it. “It might be better just to stay with my parents.”
Her suggestion disappointed him. More than that, he was surprised that his wanting to visit Tokyo didn’t excite her. Hadn’t she been after him for months to go there together?
On Friday morning he saw her off at Kanazawa Station. Unlike previous departures that took her away for more than a few days, no anguish appeared on her face, and in fact she seemed in a hurry to be off. He stood before the Shinkansen turnstile and watched her walk up the escalator to the platform.
Two days later a 7.3-magnitude earthquake struck offshore of Chiba and Ibaraki prefectures, three miles beneath the Pacific floor. It jolted Tokyo for nearly a minute, injuring several people. A tsunami warning along the Pacific Coast of Japan was issued but later canceled.
He called Mirai as soon as he heard the news.
Both she and Asuka had felt the quake—Mirai in Asuka’s apartment, and Asuka at her company. One of Asuka’s paintings had fallen off the wall, and an old vase had overturned and shattered. The vase had held a flower arrangement Mirai made that morning.
“But you’re all right?”
“I’m just sad. Whenever Asuka came home, the vase was the first thing she saw. She called it her ‘welcome home’ vase because seeing it reminded her of our family greeting her when she returned from school. The vase had been in our family for years, and my parents encouraged her to take it when she moved.”
She started crying softly into the receiver.
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine. Anyway, I’m leaving tomorrow, so if there are aftershocks I’ll probably be gone before they hit. Can we talk again tonight?”
“Of course.” He couldn’t remember them ever having Skyped twice a day when she was in Tokyo. “Is there something we need to talk about?”
“I just have a feeling it will comfort me.”
He regretted their distance then, perhaps more than ever before.
She hesitated to end the call. “What are you going to do now?” she said.
“I need to make an appointment.”
“An appointment for a job?”
“Not exactly.”
An expectant silence hung between them, which Mirai eventually broke.
“If you don’t want to tell me, I’ll let you go. Let me know when we can talk again.”
He wanted to tell her. But since quitting his job, he had learned not to share plans she was likely to be critical of. He would have done anything to be able to tell her.
“Be careful there,” he said. “I love you.”
EMMITT CALLED KIMURA TO invite him out for his birthday. Kimura thanked Emmitt for thinking of him but said he would be out of town with a client until late that night.
“Is your client helping you celebrate?”
“He will if he buys the property I show him.”
“Another time, then.”
Before their conversation ended, Emmitt mentioned that he had visited Shiramine. “I told you about our plans to go but never followed up.” He asked if Kimura, a skiing enthusiast who had surely tested the slopes in the area before they shut down, had explored Shiramine at any length.
“I never spent the night there, but I’ve relaxed in its onsen several times.”
“I found it magical.”
“Even so, it’s hard to imagine how the town will survive. The annual events it holds don’t attract many tourists. And as for jobs, there’s almost nothing: a small silk factory, a bit of tofu manufacturing, and scattered forestry enterprises and lumberyards, but the population there is too old to make a go at something new. What it has is proximity to Hakusan. For part of the year, anyway, hikers and mountaineers often pass through.”
None of what Kimura had said deterred Emmitt from asking what had been on his mind since learning about the house in Tokyo Avery and Koyo wanted to buy.
“Can you look through your database for a house there you think might suit us?”
Kimura laughed. “What for? You can’t possibly be thinking of moving there with Mirai.”
“I have no plans to leave Kanazawa, nor her parents’ house where we live—not at the moment, anyway.”
“Then why do you want me to look through my database?”
“Because I want to know if there are any houses there I can afford. It’s occurred to me that I might buy a second house before a first one, especially if it won’t cost very much—and I’ve been online and found abandoned houses in other areas that cost no more than a decent suit. Mirai would never agree to live in the mountains, but a place of our own there might make her happy. I’m hoping to find something that might add to our life together.”
“When did this idea come to you?”
“At the end of our trip to Shiramine.”
“And if she doesn’t agree?”
“If I do this, then I want to do it on my own.”
“I get the feeling you haven’t really thought this through.”
“You’re wrong about that. Anyway, the first step is talking to you about it. That’s all I’m doing now, and it’s perfectly harmless.”
Hearing Kimura sigh, Emmitt felt bad for imposing on him.
“Don’t forget, Shiramine winters are harsh. A common sight is eighty-year-old men and women climbing onto their rooftops to clear away snow. It’s too much trouble for most people. But if they don’t, their houses might collapse under the weight.”
Emmitt recalled the sight of ladders leaning against Shiramine houses; doors leading outside from many second floors; and empty lots on various streets that were used for disposing of snow in the heavy winters. Kimura was right that winter cast a year-long shadow in the mountain town.
“But you told me before that a square meter there costs less than a one-cup bottle of sake,” Emmitt said. “How can you lose on a house that costs so little?”
“There are always ways to lose.”
The clicking of computer keys came over the receiver.
“Actually, two or three months ago a Hakusan City realtor emailed me specs for a Shiramine property that an elderly woman who had moved into a care home last year owned. From what I remember, it’s quite big, at least by Kanazawa standards, and in the heart of town. Here, I found the email.” He paused for a moment. “According to the realtor, neither the owner nor her son, who lives in another prefecture and will one day inherit it, have been ready to talk about a price, which is why it’s not openly for sale. But it seems they’re keen to get rid of it. The house is too much for them to deal with, and her other children don’t want it, either. The realtor was sure they’d sell it for a negligible amount.”
