Kanazawa, page 4
Mr. Kurokawa, his white hair disheveled, and just long enough in front that he could hide his eyes behind it, scowled. In the three times Emmitt had met him, he always had the impression that the elderly man was being forced to give up the house.
“I just tried calling her again, too,” Kimura said, handing Mrs. Kurokawa several of his business cards that he’d suggested she pass on to acquaintances who might need a real estate agent. “No luck.”
“Maybe she left her phone somewhere or forgot to charge it,” Emmitt said, trying to disguise his concern. “This isn’t like her.”
Despite his worries, he couldn’t help but admire the Meiji-era machiya. From where he sat, he could see three spacious rooms open to each other through sliding, paper-paneled doors, including the large stone-floored room to one side, whose thirty-foot ceiling, crisscrossed with dark, century-old beams the length and thickness of fully grown trees, still made him catch his breath. Most of the rooms had tatami floors, wooden ceilings patterned in squares, and hand-carved transoms with intricate avian, floral, and Buddhist designs. In the adjoining room was a large space in the wall where a family altar would normally stand. Framed Noh masks lined the walls. Compared to the cramped apartment he’d grown up in, and even his in-laws’ modern house, the machiya was a masterpiece of elegance and refinement.
Emmitt leaned toward Kimura to ask if he and Mirai might offer to buy one or two of the Noh masks, and Kimura, despite whispering in reply that they’d be unaffordable, passed along the question more politely than Emmitt could have managed to. Mrs. Kurokawa smiled almost painfully and told him it wouldn’t be possible.
She then told Emmitt about her husband’s work as a Noh actor and teacher. Like Mirai’s father he had been a salaryman, but somehow, he’d found time to pursue theater and had earned numerous accolades. When she asked Emmitt if he knew anything about Noh, he said his interest in it was sparked several years ago when staying at Hōshi Ryokan in Awazu Onsen where an old Noh stage jutted into a pond. He admitted never having seen a Noh play, though he’d read a book of Noh plays and visited Kanazawa’s Noh museum. Both of his parents-in-law, too, he told her, had a deep affection for Noh. They regularly attended two plays in particular, Ama and Yamanba, whenever they were put on. “You must go sometime,” Mrs. Kurokawa said. “Nothing compares to seeing it performed.” Emmitt glanced then at Mr. Kurokawa, but he only continued to look at the Noh masks on the wall. It seemed he hadn’t heard what they were talking about.
Two copies of the lease lay on the table before them. Emmitt’s cell phone sat atop the one he was to sign, and he reached for it to check his messages again.
Half an hour ago Kimura had reminded him that the lease required only one signature, but Emmitt had said he preferred having Mirai look it over a final time. Kimura explained the contract was a duplicate of what he’d sent them last week and gone over with him on the phone. Even so, he had deferred to Emmitt’s concern.
As they waited, Kimura diverted the Kurokawas with stories of his friendship with Emmitt—meeting him for the first time at a Halloween party his language school had thrown; their one attempt at manzai comedy, when Emmitt had played the straight man and Kimura the comic, but no one understood their routine; and how Emmitt had helped him land his current job after recommending him to the agency president, to whom Emmitt was teaching the pronunciation of American song lyrics on his karaoke machine. But by the time Mirai was forty minutes late the mood of the room had dimmed. Kimura sighed, stared at his watch, then turned to Emmitt and frowned.
“I don’t know where she could be.” Emmitt grabbed his phone again. He tried calling once more, but in the end could only leave another message.
“As I explained earlier,” Kimura said, “the contract on the table is exactly what we went over. If you have questions, it’s not too late to ask.”
“I’m sorry for the trouble,” Emmitt said. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to look for my wife outside.”
“Stay inside where it’s warm,” Mrs. Kurokawa protested, gesturing toward the electric heater in front of them. “I’m sure she’ll arrive soon.”
“I’ll just be a minute.” He stood and walked from the room.
Snow had accumulated since late that morning. Emmitt trudged through it to the old wooden gate fronting the property and stood before the narrow street. It was silent here except for the blowing snow flicking the trees.
He telephoned his mother-in-law to ask if Mirai was home, and if not, when she had left.
“We just got home from the doctor and then dinner,” she said. “I have no idea where she is.”
“Could she be with Asuka?”
“No. Mirai was working when Asuka’s friends came to pick her up. She’ll be out late tonight celebrating her job offer.”
He was too distracted to inquire about his father-in-law’s condition and what the doctor had said about his leg. “Did Mirai take the car?”
“No, Otōsan and I needed to use it. Is something wrong?”
“She’s supposed to be at the lease-signing with me. She’s almost an hour late.”
“It looks like she ate this afternoon’s leftovers. I assume she went out after that.”
She’d had plenty of time to get here, Emmitt thought, even if she’d come on foot. “If she gets home before I do, have her call me right away.”
The sky seemed lower somehow, and snow was falling heavily. He was about to walk down the street when he heard someone close the front door of the Kurokawas’.
Kimura jogged toward Emmitt with his arms crossed over his chest. He was wearing his suit jacket but not a coat, and his hair was gathering snow.
“I don’t know if you remember,” Kimura said, “but the Kurokawas live in Kaga now and will feel it’s troublesome to rearrange another meeting, especially if the weather is as bad as this.”
“I know what’s at stake,” he said. “I just wish Mirai would answer her phone.”
“If you two don’t see eye to eye about this place, I need to know. Are you sure you both agree about the house?”
Emmitt thought for a moment how to explain it. “The renovations will stretch us, but we can afford it. The only thing she opposes is me quitting my job. Once we commit ourselves to the machiya, we can get clear of these worries and refocus on our future.”
Kimura looked at Emmitt carefully. “Whatever the case is, you’d better decide. Even if Mirai has doubts, I assume you’ve given the decision the thought it requires.” Kimura patted Emmitt’s shoulder before hurrying back inside. Before he slid open the front door he called out, “The Kurokawas won’t wait forever.”
Emmitt fretted again that something had happened to Mirai. He had already suspected that this was her way of backing out, and he realized everyone in the machiya suspected this as well. Did she not worry, if she now second-guessed the arrangement, that he might sign the contract on his own? Was she leaving the choice to him?
Tromping along the street, he called her again but she didn’t answer.
With his head bent to the wind and snow he returned to the machiya. Echoing inside him were Mirai’s plans to enlarge the connecting four- and six-mat rooms and find antique wooden furnishings, to offer to buy the Kurokawas’ hanging scrolls, and to renovate the storehouse so she might use it one day as an ikebana classroom and gallery. What had happened to her vision for it? Where had her earlier excitement disappeared to?
From behind the latticed front doors, soft light filtered outside. To the left was a long window, also latticed, where two generations ago the family had run a rice business. A chain of delicate cast-iron flowers, their upper halves cupped with snow, hung from the gutter so that rain, or winter’s meltwater, would cascade down. The second-floor roof, made of baked black tiles, was blanketed in a foot of whiteness. A mossy stone lantern stood unlit before the entrance. Beside the front door a clay tanuki animal figurine held a sake bottle in one hand and a promissory note in the other, a turtle-shell hat pushed back on his head, his testicles bulging, his toothy smile flashing at passersby.
Even if Mirai now opposed renting the house, wouldn’t she get used to it over time? Once they’d renovated it, he couldn’t imagine what she wouldn’t like about it.
Re-entering the sitting room, he saw that Kimura and Mrs. Kurokawa had their eyes on her husband. The old man sat cross-legged in the darkness of a connected room, which led past the veranda to the garden and storehouse.
Emmitt saw belatedly the ancient-looking Noh mask on his face. In places the paint had flaked off, but the wood from which it was carved remained pristine.
The face was dark and frighteningly realistic. Although Emmitt couldn’t tell if it was male or female—or even if it was meant to be living or dead—it was clearly that of someone long in years. The penetrating eyes stared outward. The smile, if that’s what it was, revealed small black teeth, thin lips, and fleshy gums, and stretched the lower half of the mask eerily wide.
Two other masks now lay atop the lease he was supposed to sign. When Kimura reached for one, Mr. Kurokawa raised his hand to stop him—a precise and graceful flick of the wrist. The gesture belonged not to the hidden Mr. Kurokawa, but somehow to the wooden mask, whose mouth at its present downward angle seemed to be silently keening. No remonstrance was uttered, but the gesture made clear the prohibition.
Mrs. Kurokawa started to speak. She seemed both eager and reluctant to tell everyone something.
“As your presence here attests, it’s time for us to leave this house. For my husband, it’s difficult to part with. Last Saturday was his final performance at the Nōgakudo, though he will continue to advise the theater and its actors, especially the younger ones.”
Mr. Kurokawa swiveled his head from side to side, ending with a jerk that left his mask angled down, its expression, it seemed to Emmitt, either inconsolable or delighting in his wife’s words.
“My husband feels that letting go of this house, though we haven’t lived in it for several years, is like opening a door to see beyond this life. I assure you that he accepts your and your wife’s tenancy. We feel indebted to you both.”
She placed her hands on the floor and bowed to Emmitt. After a moment’s hesitation he bowed in return.
Kimura handed Emmitt a pen and suggested again that he sign the contract. “We’ve inconvenienced the Kurokawas for more than an hour. They’ve been exceedingly gracious up to now.”
Worried by Mirai’s absence, and disappointed that it fell on him to make this commitment, Emmitt leaned forward to sign the papers. He hovered over the page, ready to sign it one moment, then afraid to do so the next. Finally, he set the pen on the table and straightened up.
He bowed deeply for a second time and kept his head lowered.
“I’m sorry. I can’t do it without my wife here.”
When he looked up, he found Mrs. Kurokawa staring at him, a trace of a smile on her face. Kimura, too, apologized to her and her husband, but she didn’t appear to notice.
Emmitt watched her turn to her husband and say, “He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t do it.”
Her husband’s mask, glowing in the room’s light, seemed to laugh at Emmitt.
Mr. Kurokawa raised himself to his feet and shuffled toward the garden, where he opened the door and stepped outside. Sitting on the edge of the floor there, he stared at the snowy pine tree before him. The house quickly filled with cold.
Kimura led Emmitt by the elbow to the front door. Emmitt tried to apologize once more but Kimura interrupted him.
“I spent hours working on this with you and Mirai, and with the Kurokawas, too. Never in all my years as a real estate agent has someone backed out of an agreement at the last second like this.”
He stopped speaking when Mrs. Kurokawa approached them. In that brief interval, in which panic began to hammer inside him, Emmitt saw his dream for the future disappear.
“It couldn’t be helped,” she said. “A terrible snowstorm like this would keep anyone away. I hope your wife is safe and warm.” She paused. “Although the rental income would have been nice for my family, my husband is, as you can tell, relieved.”
“Please excuse us,” Kimura said to her, and pulled Emmitt into the genkan where, below the step leading into the house, everyone’s shoes but Emmitt’s were neatly lined up. “Look,” he told him. “I hope Mirai is okay. If she’s not, by all means let me know and I’ll pass the word on to the Kurokawas. Otherwise, these negotiations are finished.”
Emmitt stared at him, unable to move or speak. Somehow he managed to slip into his shoes, slide open the machiya’s door, and without a word to anyone, only raising a hand to his shoulder as if he couldn’t commit all the way to saying goodbye, began trudging again through the snow.
He couldn’t bear to turn and look for a last time at the machiya. He had been a pen-stroke away from acquiring it, from being able to live there with Mirai and eventually their own family—a home that was not just a shelter and collection of modern comforts, but also a place to admire and explore for years, a living reminder of a time he would never stop being curious about.
Emmitt had no idea what to expect when he arrived home. He felt torn between even greater worry that something had happened to Mirai and fury at the possibility she had sabotaged the plans they had staked their future on.
“I’M RELIEVED THAT YOU’RE okay,” Emmitt told Mirai when he got home. He trembled as he spoke, a result of the cold outside combined with resentment he’d never felt before. “All this time, I thought you might have gotten into a terrible accident. Or worse.”
She was sitting in the living room with her parents, a blanket around her, watching TV. Her mother was reading the final proof of her literary club’s translation while her father, his leg in a brace, glanced through an outdoor catalogue addressed to Emmitt.
“If you don’t answer your phone when I call, especially when the weather’s bad and we have an important appointment together, do you think I won’t worry? Also, didn’t you have a responsibility to explain your absence so I knew what to say and do at the Kurokawas’? They’re almost eighty, and they came all the way from Kaga in a snowstorm.”
He noticed Mirai’s parents watching her, as if waiting for what she would say. Emmitt derived no joy from seeing the disappointment on their faces.
When her silence continued, he muttered: “I didn’t sign the contract. I guess that’s what you wanted.” When she still said nothing, he added, “I’m your husband. Why would you avoid me?”
Her prolonged silence made him consider walking out and spending the night at a hotel.
“Surely you can’t quit your job now,” his mother-in-law ventured.
He was unprepared for her to interject. Her words reminded him that more than the machiya had been at stake, and his anger rose. He hurried from the room and went upstairs.
From their bedroom he heard what sounded like Mirai’s parents talking to her, but she apparently had nothing to say to them, either.
While showering, he couldn’t keep from thinking about the machiya and the possibility of reversing his decision about a job he was desperate to quit. Having their own house seemed more than ever now a fragile and unreal dream. Until tonight, Emmitt had felt confident that the machiya would change that. He thought it would change their lives.
When he returned to their bedroom, Mirai was lying on the floor, staring at the ceiling. Her eyes were rimmed with red when they hadn’t been downstairs. He looked at her more closely without wanting to give himself away. The redness penetrated the whites of her eyes as well.
Sitting at the foot of the bed, he kicked at his briefcase. He kicked it harder and several essays he needed to grade by Monday morning tumbled out.
“Have you eaten yet? Can I get you something?” Her voice was shaky, and not like her own.
“I’m not hungry.”
Emmitt refused to break the silence that followed. He wanted the awkwardness to compel Mirai to divulge what was on her mind.
“I’m sorry about tonight,” she said. “I told you before I was worried about the money. That it was your dream was the only reason I considered that place.”
He couldn’t believe she’d only been thinking about his dream, and that she’d forgotten her own was once wrapped up in the house, too. “But you left the decision to me. And in the few times you told me you were worried about something, I always reassured you.” In his present mood, he was unable to regurgitate his old arguments. “We had a good plan,” was all he could say.
“What if I don’t agree?” A tremor re-entered her voice. “You never listen when I offer a different point of view, or a different, more conventional plan for us.”
He considered what she said. He couldn’t recall ever having rejected an idea or plan she had shared with him, unless she meant her suggestion they move to Tokyo. He was left with one question he couldn’t answer: Had he pushed her too far over the machiya?
He thought he heard the snow falling—not outside but, as before, somehow in the room between them.
“The old man was a Noh actor,” he said after the silence between them grew long again. “I’d forgotten. Kimura told me about his background when I first heard about the house.”
“Mr. Kurokawa?”
“His father had a rice business but was also an engraver, and his mother came from a long line of Noh actors—back to when the Maeda clan ruled. After hundreds of years, he’s the last of that line.”
Mirai sat up and stared at the wall.
Why was he telling her this? What little relationship they had had to the Kurokawas had ended, but something pulled him back to when he saw Mr. Kurokawa perform. He wished Mirai had seen it; there was no question that he would have signed the lease with her there.
“He put on a mask when I went outside looking for you,” he stammered. “When I came inside, he had it on—an old hag’s face. Somehow he brought it to life.”
She fell back onto the floor and closed her eyes. “I bought a ticket to Tokyo.”
Still thinking of the evening’s meeting, he didn’t grasp what she said right away. “What for?”
“I just tried calling her again, too,” Kimura said, handing Mrs. Kurokawa several of his business cards that he’d suggested she pass on to acquaintances who might need a real estate agent. “No luck.”
“Maybe she left her phone somewhere or forgot to charge it,” Emmitt said, trying to disguise his concern. “This isn’t like her.”
Despite his worries, he couldn’t help but admire the Meiji-era machiya. From where he sat, he could see three spacious rooms open to each other through sliding, paper-paneled doors, including the large stone-floored room to one side, whose thirty-foot ceiling, crisscrossed with dark, century-old beams the length and thickness of fully grown trees, still made him catch his breath. Most of the rooms had tatami floors, wooden ceilings patterned in squares, and hand-carved transoms with intricate avian, floral, and Buddhist designs. In the adjoining room was a large space in the wall where a family altar would normally stand. Framed Noh masks lined the walls. Compared to the cramped apartment he’d grown up in, and even his in-laws’ modern house, the machiya was a masterpiece of elegance and refinement.
Emmitt leaned toward Kimura to ask if he and Mirai might offer to buy one or two of the Noh masks, and Kimura, despite whispering in reply that they’d be unaffordable, passed along the question more politely than Emmitt could have managed to. Mrs. Kurokawa smiled almost painfully and told him it wouldn’t be possible.
She then told Emmitt about her husband’s work as a Noh actor and teacher. Like Mirai’s father he had been a salaryman, but somehow, he’d found time to pursue theater and had earned numerous accolades. When she asked Emmitt if he knew anything about Noh, he said his interest in it was sparked several years ago when staying at Hōshi Ryokan in Awazu Onsen where an old Noh stage jutted into a pond. He admitted never having seen a Noh play, though he’d read a book of Noh plays and visited Kanazawa’s Noh museum. Both of his parents-in-law, too, he told her, had a deep affection for Noh. They regularly attended two plays in particular, Ama and Yamanba, whenever they were put on. “You must go sometime,” Mrs. Kurokawa said. “Nothing compares to seeing it performed.” Emmitt glanced then at Mr. Kurokawa, but he only continued to look at the Noh masks on the wall. It seemed he hadn’t heard what they were talking about.
Two copies of the lease lay on the table before them. Emmitt’s cell phone sat atop the one he was to sign, and he reached for it to check his messages again.
Half an hour ago Kimura had reminded him that the lease required only one signature, but Emmitt had said he preferred having Mirai look it over a final time. Kimura explained the contract was a duplicate of what he’d sent them last week and gone over with him on the phone. Even so, he had deferred to Emmitt’s concern.
As they waited, Kimura diverted the Kurokawas with stories of his friendship with Emmitt—meeting him for the first time at a Halloween party his language school had thrown; their one attempt at manzai comedy, when Emmitt had played the straight man and Kimura the comic, but no one understood their routine; and how Emmitt had helped him land his current job after recommending him to the agency president, to whom Emmitt was teaching the pronunciation of American song lyrics on his karaoke machine. But by the time Mirai was forty minutes late the mood of the room had dimmed. Kimura sighed, stared at his watch, then turned to Emmitt and frowned.
“I don’t know where she could be.” Emmitt grabbed his phone again. He tried calling once more, but in the end could only leave another message.
“As I explained earlier,” Kimura said, “the contract on the table is exactly what we went over. If you have questions, it’s not too late to ask.”
“I’m sorry for the trouble,” Emmitt said. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to look for my wife outside.”
“Stay inside where it’s warm,” Mrs. Kurokawa protested, gesturing toward the electric heater in front of them. “I’m sure she’ll arrive soon.”
“I’ll just be a minute.” He stood and walked from the room.
Snow had accumulated since late that morning. Emmitt trudged through it to the old wooden gate fronting the property and stood before the narrow street. It was silent here except for the blowing snow flicking the trees.
He telephoned his mother-in-law to ask if Mirai was home, and if not, when she had left.
“We just got home from the doctor and then dinner,” she said. “I have no idea where she is.”
“Could she be with Asuka?”
“No. Mirai was working when Asuka’s friends came to pick her up. She’ll be out late tonight celebrating her job offer.”
He was too distracted to inquire about his father-in-law’s condition and what the doctor had said about his leg. “Did Mirai take the car?”
“No, Otōsan and I needed to use it. Is something wrong?”
“She’s supposed to be at the lease-signing with me. She’s almost an hour late.”
“It looks like she ate this afternoon’s leftovers. I assume she went out after that.”
She’d had plenty of time to get here, Emmitt thought, even if she’d come on foot. “If she gets home before I do, have her call me right away.”
The sky seemed lower somehow, and snow was falling heavily. He was about to walk down the street when he heard someone close the front door of the Kurokawas’.
Kimura jogged toward Emmitt with his arms crossed over his chest. He was wearing his suit jacket but not a coat, and his hair was gathering snow.
“I don’t know if you remember,” Kimura said, “but the Kurokawas live in Kaga now and will feel it’s troublesome to rearrange another meeting, especially if the weather is as bad as this.”
“I know what’s at stake,” he said. “I just wish Mirai would answer her phone.”
“If you two don’t see eye to eye about this place, I need to know. Are you sure you both agree about the house?”
Emmitt thought for a moment how to explain it. “The renovations will stretch us, but we can afford it. The only thing she opposes is me quitting my job. Once we commit ourselves to the machiya, we can get clear of these worries and refocus on our future.”
Kimura looked at Emmitt carefully. “Whatever the case is, you’d better decide. Even if Mirai has doubts, I assume you’ve given the decision the thought it requires.” Kimura patted Emmitt’s shoulder before hurrying back inside. Before he slid open the front door he called out, “The Kurokawas won’t wait forever.”
Emmitt fretted again that something had happened to Mirai. He had already suspected that this was her way of backing out, and he realized everyone in the machiya suspected this as well. Did she not worry, if she now second-guessed the arrangement, that he might sign the contract on his own? Was she leaving the choice to him?
Tromping along the street, he called her again but she didn’t answer.
With his head bent to the wind and snow he returned to the machiya. Echoing inside him were Mirai’s plans to enlarge the connecting four- and six-mat rooms and find antique wooden furnishings, to offer to buy the Kurokawas’ hanging scrolls, and to renovate the storehouse so she might use it one day as an ikebana classroom and gallery. What had happened to her vision for it? Where had her earlier excitement disappeared to?
From behind the latticed front doors, soft light filtered outside. To the left was a long window, also latticed, where two generations ago the family had run a rice business. A chain of delicate cast-iron flowers, their upper halves cupped with snow, hung from the gutter so that rain, or winter’s meltwater, would cascade down. The second-floor roof, made of baked black tiles, was blanketed in a foot of whiteness. A mossy stone lantern stood unlit before the entrance. Beside the front door a clay tanuki animal figurine held a sake bottle in one hand and a promissory note in the other, a turtle-shell hat pushed back on his head, his testicles bulging, his toothy smile flashing at passersby.
Even if Mirai now opposed renting the house, wouldn’t she get used to it over time? Once they’d renovated it, he couldn’t imagine what she wouldn’t like about it.
Re-entering the sitting room, he saw that Kimura and Mrs. Kurokawa had their eyes on her husband. The old man sat cross-legged in the darkness of a connected room, which led past the veranda to the garden and storehouse.
Emmitt saw belatedly the ancient-looking Noh mask on his face. In places the paint had flaked off, but the wood from which it was carved remained pristine.
The face was dark and frighteningly realistic. Although Emmitt couldn’t tell if it was male or female—or even if it was meant to be living or dead—it was clearly that of someone long in years. The penetrating eyes stared outward. The smile, if that’s what it was, revealed small black teeth, thin lips, and fleshy gums, and stretched the lower half of the mask eerily wide.
Two other masks now lay atop the lease he was supposed to sign. When Kimura reached for one, Mr. Kurokawa raised his hand to stop him—a precise and graceful flick of the wrist. The gesture belonged not to the hidden Mr. Kurokawa, but somehow to the wooden mask, whose mouth at its present downward angle seemed to be silently keening. No remonstrance was uttered, but the gesture made clear the prohibition.
Mrs. Kurokawa started to speak. She seemed both eager and reluctant to tell everyone something.
“As your presence here attests, it’s time for us to leave this house. For my husband, it’s difficult to part with. Last Saturday was his final performance at the Nōgakudo, though he will continue to advise the theater and its actors, especially the younger ones.”
Mr. Kurokawa swiveled his head from side to side, ending with a jerk that left his mask angled down, its expression, it seemed to Emmitt, either inconsolable or delighting in his wife’s words.
“My husband feels that letting go of this house, though we haven’t lived in it for several years, is like opening a door to see beyond this life. I assure you that he accepts your and your wife’s tenancy. We feel indebted to you both.”
She placed her hands on the floor and bowed to Emmitt. After a moment’s hesitation he bowed in return.
Kimura handed Emmitt a pen and suggested again that he sign the contract. “We’ve inconvenienced the Kurokawas for more than an hour. They’ve been exceedingly gracious up to now.”
Worried by Mirai’s absence, and disappointed that it fell on him to make this commitment, Emmitt leaned forward to sign the papers. He hovered over the page, ready to sign it one moment, then afraid to do so the next. Finally, he set the pen on the table and straightened up.
He bowed deeply for a second time and kept his head lowered.
“I’m sorry. I can’t do it without my wife here.”
When he looked up, he found Mrs. Kurokawa staring at him, a trace of a smile on her face. Kimura, too, apologized to her and her husband, but she didn’t appear to notice.
Emmitt watched her turn to her husband and say, “He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t do it.”
Her husband’s mask, glowing in the room’s light, seemed to laugh at Emmitt.
Mr. Kurokawa raised himself to his feet and shuffled toward the garden, where he opened the door and stepped outside. Sitting on the edge of the floor there, he stared at the snowy pine tree before him. The house quickly filled with cold.
Kimura led Emmitt by the elbow to the front door. Emmitt tried to apologize once more but Kimura interrupted him.
“I spent hours working on this with you and Mirai, and with the Kurokawas, too. Never in all my years as a real estate agent has someone backed out of an agreement at the last second like this.”
He stopped speaking when Mrs. Kurokawa approached them. In that brief interval, in which panic began to hammer inside him, Emmitt saw his dream for the future disappear.
“It couldn’t be helped,” she said. “A terrible snowstorm like this would keep anyone away. I hope your wife is safe and warm.” She paused. “Although the rental income would have been nice for my family, my husband is, as you can tell, relieved.”
“Please excuse us,” Kimura said to her, and pulled Emmitt into the genkan where, below the step leading into the house, everyone’s shoes but Emmitt’s were neatly lined up. “Look,” he told him. “I hope Mirai is okay. If she’s not, by all means let me know and I’ll pass the word on to the Kurokawas. Otherwise, these negotiations are finished.”
Emmitt stared at him, unable to move or speak. Somehow he managed to slip into his shoes, slide open the machiya’s door, and without a word to anyone, only raising a hand to his shoulder as if he couldn’t commit all the way to saying goodbye, began trudging again through the snow.
He couldn’t bear to turn and look for a last time at the machiya. He had been a pen-stroke away from acquiring it, from being able to live there with Mirai and eventually their own family—a home that was not just a shelter and collection of modern comforts, but also a place to admire and explore for years, a living reminder of a time he would never stop being curious about.
Emmitt had no idea what to expect when he arrived home. He felt torn between even greater worry that something had happened to Mirai and fury at the possibility she had sabotaged the plans they had staked their future on.
“I’M RELIEVED THAT YOU’RE okay,” Emmitt told Mirai when he got home. He trembled as he spoke, a result of the cold outside combined with resentment he’d never felt before. “All this time, I thought you might have gotten into a terrible accident. Or worse.”
She was sitting in the living room with her parents, a blanket around her, watching TV. Her mother was reading the final proof of her literary club’s translation while her father, his leg in a brace, glanced through an outdoor catalogue addressed to Emmitt.
“If you don’t answer your phone when I call, especially when the weather’s bad and we have an important appointment together, do you think I won’t worry? Also, didn’t you have a responsibility to explain your absence so I knew what to say and do at the Kurokawas’? They’re almost eighty, and they came all the way from Kaga in a snowstorm.”
He noticed Mirai’s parents watching her, as if waiting for what she would say. Emmitt derived no joy from seeing the disappointment on their faces.
When her silence continued, he muttered: “I didn’t sign the contract. I guess that’s what you wanted.” When she still said nothing, he added, “I’m your husband. Why would you avoid me?”
Her prolonged silence made him consider walking out and spending the night at a hotel.
“Surely you can’t quit your job now,” his mother-in-law ventured.
He was unprepared for her to interject. Her words reminded him that more than the machiya had been at stake, and his anger rose. He hurried from the room and went upstairs.
From their bedroom he heard what sounded like Mirai’s parents talking to her, but she apparently had nothing to say to them, either.
While showering, he couldn’t keep from thinking about the machiya and the possibility of reversing his decision about a job he was desperate to quit. Having their own house seemed more than ever now a fragile and unreal dream. Until tonight, Emmitt had felt confident that the machiya would change that. He thought it would change their lives.
When he returned to their bedroom, Mirai was lying on the floor, staring at the ceiling. Her eyes were rimmed with red when they hadn’t been downstairs. He looked at her more closely without wanting to give himself away. The redness penetrated the whites of her eyes as well.
Sitting at the foot of the bed, he kicked at his briefcase. He kicked it harder and several essays he needed to grade by Monday morning tumbled out.
“Have you eaten yet? Can I get you something?” Her voice was shaky, and not like her own.
“I’m not hungry.”
Emmitt refused to break the silence that followed. He wanted the awkwardness to compel Mirai to divulge what was on her mind.
“I’m sorry about tonight,” she said. “I told you before I was worried about the money. That it was your dream was the only reason I considered that place.”
He couldn’t believe she’d only been thinking about his dream, and that she’d forgotten her own was once wrapped up in the house, too. “But you left the decision to me. And in the few times you told me you were worried about something, I always reassured you.” In his present mood, he was unable to regurgitate his old arguments. “We had a good plan,” was all he could say.
“What if I don’t agree?” A tremor re-entered her voice. “You never listen when I offer a different point of view, or a different, more conventional plan for us.”
He considered what she said. He couldn’t recall ever having rejected an idea or plan she had shared with him, unless she meant her suggestion they move to Tokyo. He was left with one question he couldn’t answer: Had he pushed her too far over the machiya?
He thought he heard the snow falling—not outside but, as before, somehow in the room between them.
“The old man was a Noh actor,” he said after the silence between them grew long again. “I’d forgotten. Kimura told me about his background when I first heard about the house.”
“Mr. Kurokawa?”
“His father had a rice business but was also an engraver, and his mother came from a long line of Noh actors—back to when the Maeda clan ruled. After hundreds of years, he’s the last of that line.”
Mirai sat up and stared at the wall.
Why was he telling her this? What little relationship they had had to the Kurokawas had ended, but something pulled him back to when he saw Mr. Kurokawa perform. He wished Mirai had seen it; there was no question that he would have signed the lease with her there.
“He put on a mask when I went outside looking for you,” he stammered. “When I came inside, he had it on—an old hag’s face. Somehow he brought it to life.”
She fell back onto the floor and closed her eyes. “I bought a ticket to Tokyo.”
Still thinking of the evening’s meeting, he didn’t grasp what she said right away. “What for?”
