Kanazawa, page 7
“I never said when I’d be back. And you didn’t ask me to come back by a specific date. My school is fine with me being away.”
“Otōsan thinks you’re avoiding me after what happened with the house. But there’s no need for that.”
She looked away and didn’t reply. Not long ago he would have pressed her for an answer, but in her silence, he was aware she’d already given him one.
The headlights of a passing car briefly illuminated where he sat. Mirai asked where he was.
“I’m by the river.”
She came closer to the screen, narrowing her eyes. “You’re shivering. You should go home and talk to me from there.”
He hadn’t realized it, but she was right: He was trembling. “Remind Avery that I wrote him a month ago but he never replied.”
“Oh, I forgot to tell you,” she said, her mood lifting. “I printed out your CV before coming to Tokyo. Today I sent copies to three universities in the city. Koyo said Avery might want to see it, too, so I’ll give him one at dinner tomorrow.”
Her subterfuge caught him off guard. It took him a moment to grasp what she had done. “Why the hell didn’t you ask me first?”
“I thought since I’m here and have extra time . . .”
“People don’t inquire about jobs they don’t want, you realize.”
“What’s wrong with having more options?”
Cursing under his breath, Emmitt wandered to a tall, twisting pine tree and two red-and-black torii. A light burned inside a smaller structure behind them, spilling over a pair of stone foxes.
“What sort of cover letters did you include? And how did you sign them?”
“I didn’t send any.”
Anger prevented him from saying anything right away. “Don’t ever go behind my back like that again. Do you understand?”
“I won’t. But no, I don’t really understand why you’re so angry.”
“You’ve broken my trust, that’s why.”
Shaking his head in disbelief, he told himself not to care about what she’d done. After all, what did it matter? It was better she’d done it in Tokyo than in Kanazawa, where people knew who he was.
“By the way,” she said softly, “Koyo said she could probably get me a job at her ikebana school.”
“You already have a job at an ikebana school. And a very flexible one, too, considering how quickly you left and how long you’ve been away.”
Mirai didn’t say anything.
“You seem to enjoy being in Tokyo more than here.”
“It feels good helping my sister. I won’t always have that opportunity.”
Emmitt walked to a wall on which wooden prayer blocks hung, their inscriptions unreadable in the dark. He ran his fingers over them. They knocked against each other hollowly.
“What have you been doing since we last talked?” she said.
He explained that he’d been working his usual hours at the university and at home. He’d also been looking online for houses—those for sale and those listed on a database of long-empty dwellings that the city had taken possession of. He wanted to contact Kimura, awkward though it would be, for any new leads. After he told her this, he wondered if she had been asking something else.
“Have you heard from him?” she said.
“No. After what happened, I wasn’t expecting to right away.”
A hesitation entered her voice. “It seems impossible we’ll find a suitable old house to live in.”
He stifled a desire to raise how she’d handled the Kurokawas’ machiya and instead took a solicitous tone. “We need to be patient.”
“But there are few machiya in the city center, and those that exist are too small or unaffordable. And I’m not the only one with that opinion. Kimura says the same thing, doesn’t he?”
“In the city center, yes. But we have other options.”
“If we’re going to consider other options,” she said after checking herself once, “I want to add Tokyo to the list.”
He nearly told her that she could consider moving there by herself, which meant she would have to get used to living apart. But that was the last thing he wanted, and he had no desire to hurt her with anything so ill-considered. He couldn’t help being angry, however. Her change of outlook made him feel that, after five years of marriage and eight of being together, he didn’t know her as well as he’d thought. Part of him felt that she’d secretly wanted to move to Tokyo all this time.
Looking past the two torii at the entrance, where the snowy peaks of the faraway mountains appeared ghostly pale in the darkness, he added, “What accounts for this sudden change in you, anyway?”
Her eyes settled into a tired gaze—not at the screen of her phone, but off to the side, to somewhere he couldn’t see. “I think it would be good for us to take some time off.”
Her words unnerved him. “From house-hunting, you mean . . .”
She reached for a glass outside the screen and drank from it, then set it down and looked at it for a long moment.
He repeated his question.
“Well, yes,” she said. Her laughter sounded unnatural.
“For a moment I thought . . .”
Where his words trailed off, she sighed.
“I’m putting it in your hands, Emmitt.”
“What do you mean?”
“Exactly what I said.”
It was either an extreme act of generosity to entrust him with finding a house, or she was telling him to do things her way and give it up. He felt vaguely like she had issued a warning.
He asked again when she was coming home.
“I don’t know. And I’m sorry, but I’d better go. I want to prepare dinner for Asuka.”
As Emmitt stood above the Sai, gazing at what appeared to be more snow clouds rolling in from the mountains, the shortness of their talk dismayed him. The longer she stayed away, the shorter their conversations seemed to last.
WHEN HE RETURNED HOME, his father-in-law was in the living room, dressed in his pajamas and with his hair combed back as if he’d recently taken a bath. Sitting on the sofa, he held an old dishrag and bottle of cleaner. A stack of framed drawings lay before him along with a collection of Noh plays he sometimes read.
“I see you found inspiration while I was out,” Emmitt said, sitting beside him.
“I wouldn’t call it that. Though these bring back a time when I was creative.”
“What were you reading?”
His father-in-law glanced at the coffee table. “Nothing in particular. But as I was reading it, I recalled you telling me about Mr. Kurokawa. Okāsan and I agreed that we must have seen him perform before. If he’s the actor we remember, he was as skilled as any we’d ever seen.”
Noticing the drawing kit on the floor, still unopened, Emmitt shook his head. Someone—he assumed it was his father-in-law—had pulled it out from beneath the coffee table while he was out.
“Cleaning those pictures doesn’t make you want to draw again?”
His father-in-law looked across the room as if considering this for the first time. After a moment, he resumed wiping the glass frames. “Maybe it’s because I’m thinking of climbing Hakusan when my leg recovers. I told you about my friend—and Okāsan’s, too—who died before reaching his potential as a sculptor. By then I’d like to have drawn something that would have earned his admiration.”
Emmitt’s thoughts lingered on the mention of Mirai’s mother. Although it made sense, he didn’t realize that the man who had died on Hakusan had also been her friend. He watched his father-in-law wipe the frame down again.
“Where did all these pictures come from?”
“They were in a box beneath Mirai’s and Asuka’s baby clothes. For some reason Okāsan decided to go through their old things tonight.”
Emmitt imagined she was eager for them to have children. Either that, or she envisioned her daughters having their own houses soon and space in which to store their old belongings.
Emmitt craned his neck to see into the kitchen, but she wasn’t there.
“She’s in the bath,” his father-in-law said. “She took two books in with her, so she may be a long time.”
“It’s too bad what happened with the translation.”
His father-in-law shrugged. “She’s making more out of it than necessary. While you were out, she learned that her literary club received a grant for a second translation. It’s another of Kyōka’s works, though I’m not sure which one.”
“I wonder if she’ll ask me to help again.”
His father-in-law smiled. “She knows you can’t deny her a second time.”
The news excited Emmitt more than he expected it to. It wasn’t merely for her sake that he wanted to assist with the translation, or even proofread for her someone else’s work. Now that he was free of his teaching obligations, he could see more clearly that becoming involved with such a project might lead him deeper into Kanazawa’s past, to see it as Kyōka wanted his readers to see it—uncorrupted, like his writing, by Western influences that had become prevalent during his time.
Emmitt observed aloud, “You’re not drinking tonight.”
“I’ve been drawing all day. I guess that threw me off my normal routine.”
“You drew today?” Emmitt hoped it was the start of something new.
“If you want a bit of sake, I suppose I could have some, too.”
“Maybe tomorrow. I should try to get through more grading tonight. Thankfully, it’s nearly the last I have to do.”
His father-in-law lifted a picture from the table, spritzed it with cleaner, and wiped it circularly from the center to its edges. He repeated this, and where some speck of matter clung, he wiped it again with the rag.
Emmitt peered at the drawing as his father-in-law held it to the light. “A woman on a cliff?”
Returning it to his lap, his father-in-law squinted at it.
“Okāsan and I went to Noto a few weeks after getting married and stayed at an inn. One day we walked to a promontory and she stood there with the sea wind buffeting her hair. I watched her a long time then insisted we return to our room. I spent all evening drawing her.”
He had drawn his wife in a short summer dress, and though Emmitt might have mistaken her face for that of either of their daughters, her figure reminded him of Mirai’s. He glanced from her to the penciled trees, the rocky ground, the sea with its mid-shore outcroppings, and the sky. These, too, were carefully drawn, if less bold in tone than his mother-in-law’s image. Their edges were rounded, almost blurred, yet the drawing as a whole seemed sharply detailed.
Emmitt, too, had photographed Mirai on their own trip to Noto after getting married. Though normally she was camera-shy, she had allowed him to take dozens of shots of her as they drove up the coast, exploring empty bays and picturesque fishing villages, and also at different ryokan where they stayed. Two of these photos now hung on their bedroom wall, and two stood framed on his desk. He couldn’t help noticing that his best photographs paled beside his father-in-law’s least sophisticated drawings.
His father-in-law lifted the picture again, tilting it in the light. “I remember when I finished it, Okāsan didn’t like it. I suppose that’s why it ended boxed up and forgotten until tonight.”
“Why did you stop making art?” It wasn’t the first time Emmitt had asked this, but he felt he’d never received a truthful answer.
“My model stopped cooperating.”
Emmitt had heard this before from Mirai, never from her father. “You could have continued without her cooperation.”
His father-in-law smiled a little sadly. “Work also took me away for long periods. And that tends to crush your spirit after a while.”
Hearing this excuse again disappointed Emmitt. No doubt it had been a factor, but he was convinced there were others, too. Yet the answer resonated with him more now than when his father-in-law had said this before.
“And why did you wait until now to start again?”
“I didn’t ‘wait until now.’ I remember clearly the last time I tried—just before my fiftieth birthday. I awoke and the first thought I had, like something calling out from a fading dream, was that I could no longer put off what my younger self had always permitted. I immediately understood the importance of that revelation. But although the truth was obvious—that drawing was what I’d always most wanted to do—I turned away from it. I knew I risked losing it forever if I let myself put it off even longer. I’m only now drawing because sometimes I feel this is my last chance. But perhaps it’s too late.” He had been talking quickly, and he paused to catch his breath.
“But you’ve come back to it,” Emmitt said.
“I’ve only made a few drawings.”
“But isn’t what you’re doing now worth anything?”
His father-in-law shook his head. “Obviously, what I’m doing now doesn’t define me like it once did. Back then, I thought the present moment was the only one that mattered, and that led me to be consumed with each drawing I made. The idea that our lives are spread across time meant nothing to me. When you’re young and bogged down, pulled constantly in multiple directions, reaching that sort of understanding is difficult. At my age, though, I’ve finally learned this.” He paused to replace the picture atop the stack before him. “This is one reason I no longer oppose you quitting your job, though I don’t consider it good news, either. I’m confident that you’ll figure things out over time.”
Emmitt couldn’t remember what his father-in-law had done before retiring, only that his company had been near the sea. He might have managed a dozen employees before rising to section chief his last few years. Emmitt looked around the living room for some sign of his work life but couldn’t find any. It was as if no one wished to be reminded of whatever had sustained them over the years. Emmitt thought of the university work he brought home every night, and how anyone could guess what he did by walking into his room.
Emmitt’s eyes fell back on the stack of pictures. “What about these others?”
“More of the same. I once tried to hang them around the house, but Okāsan pulled them down. I shouldn’t have bothered framing them.”
“If Mirai and I ever get our own house,” Emmitt said, “maybe we could display some there.”
His father-in-law laughed. “Mirai won’t want these. And Okāsan would refuse to visit if she had to see them on your walls.”
Together they re-boxed the pictures, separating each with pieces of cloth.
“Youth leaves us too quickly,” he said, gazing at a drawing. “Years sneak up, leaving us with less than what we think we’ll always have.”
At thirty-six, Emmitt had felt sometimes that his youth was already behind him. He realized that his father-in-law, who was nearly twice his age, must feel this loss more deeply.
His father-in-law placed the drawing with the others inside the box. “Help me set this back in the closet, will you?”
Emmitt lifted the box and followed his father-in-law to the end of the hallway, where he opened the closet and pointed to the back of it.
Emmitt’s mother-in-law opened the bedroom door and looked out at them.
She had already bathed, and her face without makeup revealed shallow wrinkles around her eyes, an occasional age spot, and sparser eyebrows than she wore in public. He was surprised to see her in a nightshirt in which the outline of her breasts was visible, and he thought she didn’t look old so much as weary. “What are you doing in there?” she said.
“We were just discussing how much I’d have to pay to buy all his drawings,” Emmitt said. “One day they may have great value.”
“Baka wa sugu ni kane wo nakusu.”
Recognizing the Japanese idiom about fools and their money, which was the same as in English, he laughed.
“It’s getting late, Otōsan.” She held the door open for him.
“Good night,” Emmitt said.
“Good night,” they both said as she shut the door.
Emmitt climbed upstairs to grade his final batch of essays for the term. As he pulled them from his briefcase, however, he noticed again the books his mother-in-law had put there. Having read enough of Red on White for now, he set it aside.
He was about to do the same with the other books when he picked up an older collection of translated Kyōka stories and started reading.
6
AS MIRAI DESCENDED THE escalator from the Shinkansen platform, Emmitt approached the turnstile. Amidst scores of passengers scanning the exits and checking their phones, he took her suitcase as she passed through.
“It’s strange to see you like this,” she said. As if to address his perplexed look she added, “This is the longest we’ve been apart since getting married.”
They were standing and talking in the busiest part of the station, and he preferred not to linger. “Do you want to eat something before we go back?”
“I want you to take me home.”
He wrapped an arm around her and she hugged him.
He felt himself holding something back from her; he wasn’t sure if it was from frustration at her overlong absence or only something that was slow to make itself clear to him.
For a moment it seemed like he was meeting someone other than his wife.
They steered her luggage to the taxi stand before the station. A cold wind swirled around them as a taxi pulled up and they climbed inside.
On the short ride home she told him she’d received a job offer that morning.
“Doing what?” he said, taken aback.
“Assisting at Koyo’s ikebana school.”
He wondered what she had in mind by sharing the news with him this way. Had she wanted to test his reaction?
“Yesterday Koyo introduced me to the school’s owner. After the woman watched me complete two arrangements, she said my skill and my ability to explain what I was doing impressed her. She offered me a job on the spot.”
“Were you applying for a position or did she make the offer when she saw you working?”
“A little of both, I guess.”
When he regained his composure he said, “You kept busier in Tokyo than I imagined.”
