Plum Wine: A Novel (Library of American Fiction) Read online

  Circling the room, Barbara touched the walls, which were cold and smooth except for one crooked nail.

  The tatami still showed the imprint of the table legs. She and Michi had spent many evenings there, often with a cup of plum wine: “a night hat,” Michi had called it.

  “Why did you come to Japan, Barbara-san?” Michi had asked her.

  “My mother,” she'd said, going on to explain about her having been a foreign correspondent here in the 1930s, before the war, and how her mother had been talking about Japan for as long as Barbara could remember. That was why she'd taken Mrs. Nakano's graduate seminar, modern Japanese literature in translation, and one day impulsively asked if there might be an opening at her college. And she'd been at loose ends, she told her, a love affair over, her dissertation stalled.

  Michi's Ph.D. had been in history—rare for a woman in Japan— but Barbara didn't know her area of specialization, or why she'd chosen history. She wished, as she had many times since Michi's death, that she'd asked her more questions. She looked around the empty room. It was too late now.

  She closed Michi's door gently behind her. In her six-mat room, the tansu looked bereft, marooned sideways in the middle of the room. There wasn't space for another chest in here. She walked into the tiny tatami bedroom, just off the sitting room. The ugly metal bed filled most of the space. Not only was the bed too large, but lying in it she felt too large herself, like Alice in Wonderland at her tallest crammed inside the white rabbit's house. If she got rid of the bed she could sleep on a futon; Carol's was still in the closet. Then the tansu would fit here too.

  The bed was on casters. She pushed it through the door, across the tatami six-mat room and into the Western-style room. She'd ask the workmen to come get it later. What a laugh they'd have; they had delivered a series of beds the first few weeks she was here, each one longer than the last, until one was found to accommodate her size.

  Barbara settled the wine chest against the south wall of the bedroom so that it would be near her head when she slept. She had adopted the Japanese superstition that only the dead sleep facing north. She thought of Michi stretched out in her coffin, then quickly pushed back the image. Michi was ashes now, anyway. How could ashes face north? It was like one of those impossible zen koan riddles.

  Outside it was growing dark. The snow was coming down steadily now, a blur of white flakes.

  Barbara drew the curtains and sat beside the tansu. The wines were arranged in reverse chronological order, right to left, like a Japanese text. There were no wines for the years 1943–1948; the gap was filled with crumpled paper. The oldest wine in the bottom drawer was dated 1930. Michi-san had been in her early forties when she died; she would have been quite a young girl in 1930, too young to make wine.

  She slid open the top drawer again and took out the 1965 wine, made from last summer's plums. She untied the cord and broke the seal with her fingernail, then removed the heavy rice paper from the bottle.

  She caught her breath. The inside of the page was covered with close vertical columns of Japanese characters. The calligraphy was meticulous but delicate, written with a brush rather than a pen. Most of the characters were intricate kanji, the literary ideograms that took Japanese schoolchildren years to learn. Barbara didn't know any kanji or either of the other alphabets; even the simplest character on this page—there was a backwards C with a deep undercurl at the top—meant nothing to her. It was like looking at a page of unfamiliar music and not being able to hear the melody.

  She lifted out the next bottle, 1964, and unwrapped it. This paper too was covered with writing. It was thrilling. “This is my history,” Michi said with a bitter laugh the night she'd shown her the tansu. She'd told Barbara of her failure to publish in her academic field, which was almost exclusively the domain of male professors. Barbara had thought she been referring to the wines; making wine was a woman's work.

  Barbara chose a bottle at random from the middle drawer. She fumbled with the knotted string, slipped it over the bottle; in her haste to undo the seal, she made a small tear in the paper. It could be blank. But as she unrolled it she saw more columns of Japanese characters and at the bottom, an ink drawing of plum blossoms. Tears sprang to her eyes. She ran her hand slowly across the surface of the chest, her inheritance. Michi had left this to her.

  Vivid with excitement, she walked through the apartment, to the kitchen where Michi had showed her how to “tame” her stove— twin burners that were difficult to light—through the Western-style room that now seemed eccentric rather than cold, with its funny, mismatched furniture, into the six-mat tatami room. The whole place seemed altered by Michi's gift, filled with her presence.

  The fox-woman scroll hanging in the shadowy alcove should go in the bedroom too. When Michi had first seen the painting—a woman in kimono with flowing hair and the head of a fox—she exclaimed, “Where have you found this?” Barbara explained that it was given to her mother by a Japanese man who said she must be a fox in human form, she was so bewitching with her long blond hair.

  “This is an interesting coincidence,” Michi said. “My mother claimed an ability to comprehend the language of foxes. There are many stories of fox women in Japan. I think this one illustrates the fox woman leaving her child.”

  Barbara took down the scroll and pulled out the nail; using her thick Japanese tourist guide as a hammer, she hung the fox woman in the bedroom beside the window.

  It was still not quite dark, early for bed, but she wanted to be in the futon she'd made up, under the electric blanket.

  She undressed and slid into the futon. The camphor fragrance of the chest filled the room, a subtle incense. Why would Michi have given the tansu to her, the one person on the campus who couldn't read Japanese?

  Barbara glanced up at the fox woman. Her image was clearer than it had been in the recessed tokonoma. She seemed alive, glancing back over her shoulder for a last glimpse of her half-human, half-fox child, as she headed down a path lined with willow trees.

  The fox's profile was delicately feminine, with just a suggestion of sharp incisors inside the slightly opened mouth. She could be speaking, saying goodbye. Maybe it was this angle and this light, but her face and figure had a pathos Barbara hadn't noticed before.

  It was strange, she thought, how the placement of objects affected them. It was true for people too. She herself had never felt accurately placed, had never taken root anywhere. Being so alien here—blond, too tall, illiterate—had made her newly aware of how alien she'd felt for most of her life. Growing up, she'd been a Catholic in a town full of Baptists, a lanky girl in ballet slippers, always on the edge of things. She used to blame it on the South, with its elaborate manners and speech—not unlike Japan, in those ways.

  She pulled the electric blanket up to her chin. In the dusk she could just make out the shapes of the window and the scroll beside it. She thought of the folktales Michi had told her, about figures leaving their paintings and scrolls going suddenly blank. A flock of sparrows were said to have flown from a screen once; a horse in a well-known painting regularly went out at night to eat grass. Her scroll was now a luminous rectangle in the dim light. It looked vacant, as though the fox woman had continued down the path and out of sight.

  2

  Snow continued falling during the night, sifting down onto curved tile roofs and the groves of cryptomeria. By the time Barbara walked from Sango-kan to the classroom buildings, the snow had made a curving white river of the path through the woods. The dark branches of trees against the snow reminded her of ink brushstrokes on soft white paper. Her mind lingered on Michi's calligraphy, the papers curled from being wrapped around the wine. The calligraphy seemed something she might have dreamed, and the snow an extension of that dream. She paused at the courtyard between the classroom buildings. Snow melted as it fell into the pond; there was a wrinkling of ice around the lotus pads. At the water's edge stood a reproduction of the Venus de Milo—a gift from Kodaira's sister college in Americ
a. The snow had remolded her head and shoulders; with the marble-colored flakes swirling around her, Venus looked as if she were still in the process of being created.

  Barbara's first class was nineteenth-century American literature, the last session before exams. She launched into her review, reading from notes she'd typed up earlier. Rie, the only student not taking notes, stared at her with an expression of amusement-tinged disdain. Wrapped around Rie's head was a grimy protest bandage, a souvenir from last month's demonstration against the U.S. submarine at Yokosuka.

  Barbara glanced out the window at the white roof of Sango-kan, just visible above the snow-covered trees. There was time to dash back between classes. She felt an almost physical craving to examine Michi's papers.

  After class she escaped before Rie could corner her and ran to her apartment, crunching through the snow. Her bedroom floor was covered with papers she'd taken out of the chest this morning, each one weighted down by its bottle. She sat down in the midst of them and spread the 1965 paper flat on the tatami. The page was alive with kangi that looked like tiny maps. The brushwork was graceful and confident; the writing had an air of significance. It was strange that Michi hadn't left the papers to a family member or a colleague. She must have family somewhere; perhaps there had been an estrangement.

  The section at the top of the page looked squeezed in, as if an afterthought. It could be a note to her, an explanation. There was one simple character—a graceful sort of T, with outward flourishes at the bottom and a bar across the middle—that was used twice. She went to the Western-style room for her Japanese kangi and kana book and looked through it. The character had several different meanings depending on its context—weather, astronomy, heaven, paradise, the Milky Way.

  Maybe she could catch Mrs. Nakano before the next class, and ask her to read the urgent-looking section. She carefully rolled up the paper and put it into an empty briefcase where it wouldn't get crushed.

  Mrs. Nakano was in the faculty lounge, drinking tea with Miss Yamaguchi, the linguist, and Mrs. Ueda, an elegant, middle-aged woman who always wore a turban-shaped hat in public to cover her thin hair. Barbara stood at the edge of the room, pretending interest in the notices posted on the bulletin board, all of them in Japanese except the exam schedule. She couldn't show Mrs. Nakano the paper with the other women there. Even if she showed it to her in private, she would likely tell her colleagues. Mrs. Ueda had been Michi's closest friend; she might be offended that Barbara had the papers. What would any of them think?

  She was late for her conversation class. Sumi, Junko, Hiroko, Rie, and several other advanced students were seated around the oval table chattering in English. Barbara took her seat beside Junko and set the briefcase on the floor between her feet.

  They began with a conjugation review: it is snowing, it has snowed, perhaps it will snow again.

  Shigeko, an aristocratic-looking girl whose hobby was writing haiku and tanka, raised her hand. “Snow is finest at night, I think, when it may shine against the black heaven. But it gives me melancholy too, somewhat a ghostly feeling.”

  “I am the same,” Rie said. “Snow is lyrical—very Japanese.”

  Barbara took a deep breath. “We have snow in America too,” she said. “Even in the South. In fact, the weather in North Carolina is very much like Tokyo's.”

  “But is not the same,” Rie insisted. “We have the beautiful tile roofs, the temples, the exquisite rocks in the garden where snow may gather. Poetry of snow you do not have, I think.”

  “Here on our campus the plum trees have blossomed early this year,” Sumi said. “And now they are covered with snow. This is wonderful Japanese experience. We have poems describing this image.”

  “There's a poem like that in English, too,” Barbara said. “By A. E. Housman. Only it's about cherry blossoms, not plum.”

  “Jefferson sensei can understand poetry of snow,” Junko said. “She is Japanese in this way.”

  The others—all but Rie—murmured agreement.

  Rie adjusted her protest bandage, then raised her hand. “Japanese poetry contains references a foreigner cannot easily grasp. In the haiku which says, ‘The camellia falls, spilling yesterday's rain,’ Buson had on his mind a beheaded samurai.”

  “This is often the case in Western poetry as well,” Barbara said. “T. S. Eliot's ‘The Wasteland’ is full of allusions many readers don't understand—yet they can still be moved by the poem. Thank you, Rie.”

  Rie's hand shot up again. “Here at Kodaira College, we have snow-viewing parties. This is very poetic.” She folded her arms across her chest.

  “It sounds lovely.” Barbara paused, looked at her watch. Still half of the class to go. She'd left the papers strewn on the tatami. What if Miss Fujizawa sent the workmen while she was out? She felt a lurch in her stomach. “I'm going to dismiss you early today, so you can go practice at the language lab. The final tapes are due Friday—fifteen minutes, talking about anything.”

  As the students were leaving, Junko asked Barbara if she would join her, Hiroko, and Sumi for lunch in Kokubungi. Barbara hesitated, but the girls looked eager. They were her best friends here, closer in age than any of the faculty. They agreed on one o'clock; she could stop by her apartment on the way.

  Rie was waiting for her outside the door. “Jefferson sensei, I cannot write my final paper in American literature.”

  “Why not?” Barbara said, keeping her voice level.

  “Original sin is a foreign concept to we Japanese. I cannot understand Mr. Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter. I am in despair.”

  Barbara gazed at her silently, a stocky, broad-faced girl, with bangs that hung to her eyes; she seemed suddenly on the verge of tears.

  “I have an idea,” Barbara said. “Why don't you write about what you don't understand?”

  “You want me to write what I do not know?”

  “Yes, why original sin is strange to you. What is the Japanese idea of sin? Compare the Japanese and Western ideas of sin or evil. In Japanese thinking, what are the consequences of doing something really terrible—in this world, or in the afterlife?”

  “Ah.” Rie ducked a bow. “Perhaps I can do this.”

  Finally, Barbara thought. She walked briskly down the hall toward the door. Miss Fujizawa called to her from her office. “Miss Jefferson, could you please stop in?”

  “Oh—Miss Fujizawa. I just sent the girls to the language lab— we're out early.”

  Miss Fujizawa waved her to a chair. “My apologies for having troubled you so greatly yesterday, Miss Jefferson. Please keep the wines for reasons of sentiment. However, perhaps you would like to store them in boxes, to free the tansu for your other uses.”

  “You're very kind,” Barbara said. “Thank you so much, Miss Fujizawa.” Relief surged through her. “I don't really need storage boxes, at least for now. I want to keep the tansu intact as a kind of . . . memorial.”

  “I see.” Miss Fujizawa frowned. Barbara shifted her gaze to the desk, to the incongruous sight of Whitman's chocolates there.

  “Speaking of memorials,” Miss Fujizawa said, “we are planning the memorial service for Professor Nakamoto on the forty-ninth day after her death. Normally, such a ceremony is held at the deceased person's home, or temple. However, as she had no survivors to advise us . . .”

  “I was wondering about that,” Barbara said. “No survivors at all?”

  “Not that I am aware. Therefore, we colleagues have decided to conduct the memorial on our campus.” Miss Fujizawa's enormous bosom rose and fell with a noisy sigh; Barbara couldn't tell if she was feeling grieved or inconvenienced. “The end of the year holiday will be postponed so that her colleagues will be present to speak their tributes. Would you care to offer some words about her?”

  “I'd be honored. Maybe I could talk about her experience as a female professor of history? That's one thing she mentioned—though I'd have to ask Mrs. Ueda.”

  “I think it most appropriate that you make some personal state
ment about what she did for you. There will be others speaking about her larger contributions. Thank you for dropping in, Miss Jefferson,” she said, rising. “I hope your students are progressing to your satisfaction.”

  “Oh yes, thank you, they are progressing wonderfully.” She stood and bowed her way into the hall.

  “Ah, Miss Jefferson!” Just emerging from his office was Mr. Doi, a bald, round-faced man who was Kodaira's Shakespeare scholar, and one of Miss Fujizawa's confederates. He liked to “tease” Barbara, as he put it, ever since she'd assured him that she felt qualified to take on the English Club's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the college festival. The event was to take place February 3, only a few days from now.

  “You are not looking so cheerful,” he said. “I hope this will not be the winter of your discontent.”

  Richard III. An easy one. “Indeed not. “Twill be glorious summer by this sun of Japan.”

  “Very good, very good, Miss Jefferson,” he said, laughing. “It seems I will never catch you.”