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

  “Maybe not.” She headed for the outside door; he trotted along beside her.

  “I hope you are polishing your lines,” he said. She was to play Queen Titania to his King Oberon. “Shall we have some practice at lunch?”

  “I'm afraid I have to meet someone.”

  “Oh this is too bad. Always you are engaged.”

  She pushed open the door. “I'll see you anon, Mr. Doi.”

  The snow was slanting down, blowing against her face as she headed toward the back of the campus. She passed the buildings and the athletic field, a blank white rectangle bordered on three sides by snow-laden bamboo. From the distance floated the sound of someone playing the koto, dolorous strands of sound that usually made her homesick. Today, it seemed the essence of the mystery that she had entered.

  The branches of the plum trees were layered with flowers and snow, just as Sumi had said. She held up one branch and shook loose the snow. Some flowers were frozen in the bud, and those that had opened were tattered and yellow. She ducked beneath the heavy branches and looked up at the matted whiteness. Michi-san had told her she liked to lie on the ground in the early spring looking at the blossoms against the blue sky. “Seeing the plum flowers always gives me hope,” she had said.

  To be speaking of hope implied a struggle with despair. She thought of the note Michi had written before she died, and the paper in her briefcase, the squeezed-in section with the character that could mean heaven. Was it a suicide note? She sucked in so hard the cold air burned her lungs. Standing absolutely still, she listened to the snow, aware for the first time of the faint noise it made as it fell, barely audible, as though something were concealed beneath the quiet surface.

  The restaurant where Barbara met the students was a place she'd often gone with Michi-san, on the second floor of a building near Kokubungi station. They sat at a Western-style table near the window. She and Michi had preferred the tatami section in the back of the restaurant. She put the briefcase beside her on the floor, touching her leg. There hadn't been time to stop by Sango-kan after all; the papers were still on the floor. She felt a flicker of anxiety. At least she'd locked the apartment this morning. They probably wouldn't go in. She always worried too much; you die a thousand deaths, her mother was fond of saying to her.

  The waitress appeared; they all ordered miso soup and tempura. As they drank their soup, Barbara looked at the students, thinking of Michi-san introducing her to people the day after her arrival. “We all look alike to you, don't we?” she'd said with a sympathetic smile. Barbara had said no, but it had been true. Now she couldn't imagine confusing these girls. Junko, with her fine blue-black hair, elegant features, and daily practice of calligraphy, might have been a lady in the eleventh-century Heian court. Hiroko, an intense, bespectacled graduate student, was a self-proclaimed Marxist who kept trying to draw Barbara into conversations about communist China and Vietnam. Sumi, energetic and rosy-cheeked, with dimples at the corners of her mouth, was from the Japan Alps, the snow country Kawabata had written about in his most famous novel. She wanted to become a linguist, and was helping Miss Yamaguchi compile a lexicon of American slang.

  The tempura came, fried prawns, sweet potato, lotus root. Once she had watched Michi make tempura, skillfully dipping battered chrysanthemum leaves into the sputtering oil. She had been wearing a white apron that fell to her ankles.

  “Did Nakamoto sensei ever cook tempura for you?” Barbara asked. She'd occasionally seen the girls going into Michi's apartment.

  They nodded enthusiastically. “Very excellent cooker,” Junko added.

  “I've been thinking about her,” Barbara said. “Her death was so sudden—do you know if she'd been feeling unwell, before she died?”

  The girls looked at one another.

  “The reason I'm asking is—she left me something—a tansu chest.”

  “Ah so desuka?” they said, not quite in unison.

  “There was a note with the chest saying it should it be given to me—she must have had some premonition of her death. Do you know if she'd recently been to the doctor?”

  The girls had a heated discussion in Japanese, then Sumi said, “I was the person to find her when I went in to tidy up as usual that morning of her death.”

  “How terrible,” Barbara said. She thought how it might have been: Michi on her futon, her eyes open, staring at nothing.

  “There was an empty bottle of sleeping medication at her side,” Sumi said.

  “You mean—you think . . .”

  Sumi nodded.

  Hiroko exploded something in Japanese, then said, “Every bottle has a last pill to be swallowed. We should not make so dramatic a speculation.”

  “But she left Jefferson sensei the note before death,” Junko said.

  “Only about the tansu, ne?” Hiroko said, looking at Barbara.

  Barbara nodded.

  “I think she must have had pain in heart,” Hiroko said. “This has happened to my grandfather, exactly.”

  Junko put down her chopsticks and leaned toward Barbara. “Let me tell you a thing Nakamoto sensei spoke to me one time. I was consulting with her about a certain trouble, and she said how passions do not weaken as one grows older. She said this had been a surprising thing to her. It was surprising for me to hear her say, because Japanese sensei and student are at some distance. It is not like talking with you, or other American teacher. I was almost shocked really, by her speaking this way. This remark of hers I think was personal, spoken from the heart. It is my feeling she had a secret grief.”

  Barbara felt a chill along her arms. The paper in her briefcase might answer that question. Maybe she should show it to them.

  “I take a strong disagreement to my friend Junko,” Hiroko said. “Passion does not always refer to romance. Nakamoto sensei had passion for the cause of peace. Recently for example she has written an editorial letter regarding the Japan-Korea treaty. And several times we have spoken together about the Vietnam war.”

  “She never talked to me about the war,” Barbara said.

  There was a silence. In the air hung the unspoken response: Because you are an American.

  “Hiroko is not correct, I think,” Junko said. “I had confided to Nakamoto sensei about my personal difficulty, and this erupted her own personal grief.”

  “This is romantic theory,” Hiroko said, digging into her rice with chopsticks. “Heart illness is cause for Nakamoto sensei's death, I am sure. She did not leave note of explanation. If it is suicide as Junko said, she would have left letter of apology or explanation. We Japanese never take our life without leaving such a letter.”

  “Never?” Barbara said.

  “Usually never. This is our tradition.”

  Hiroko and Sumi began arguing in Japanese.

  Barbara looked out the window at people streaming back and forth through the snow. Well-meaning as the girls were, they wouldn't make good confidantes. Any speculation she made about Michi's death, and certainly a revelation about the papers, would eventually become part of campus gossip. After final exams and the student festival maybe she'd find a translator in Tokyo, though the thought of an anonymous person reading Michi's papers was somehow troubling. It was impossible to know what to do. The only person who could tell her was gone.

  3

  The day she learned of Michi-san's death, Barbara had been in downtown Tokyo, searching for a birthday present for her mother. She was back at Sango-kan, eating dinner, when the laundry man came to her door. He gave Barbara her laundry, then held out another brown paper package. “Nakamoto sensei, no answer.” He gestured with his head toward Michi-san's apartment.

  Miss Ota came out of her apartment and spoke to the man in Japanese. “Ah so desuka,” he said with a great inhalation of breath. Miss Ota paid him, and he ran down the stairs.

  When Miss Ota walked across the hall toward her, Barbara was surprised: she had expected her to slip back into her apartment in her slightly disheveled state. Usually so proper in a Br
itish sort of way—she'd done her graduate work on Henry James at Cambridge, where she'd adopted her habits of dressing in tweeds and drinking English tea—tonight Miss Ota wore a cotton kimono, which she held together at the waist over a long flannel gown. Her white hair, normally worn in a neat bun at the back of her neck, hung limply to her shoulders.

  “I'm afraid to say that Nakamoto sensei is no longer living,” Miss Ota said.

  Barbara's first thought, along with a splinter of fear, was that there had been some lapse in communication.

  “Nakamoto Michi-san is not here?” she said.

  Miss Ota shook her head.

  “Michi-san is not living here?”

  “No, no.” Miss Ota raised her hands.

  “She is sick?”

  “I regret to say . . . she has expired.”

  “Died?”

  “I am afraid so, yes.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  “She went last night, during her sleep,” Miss Ota said. “The exact cause is unknown.”

  Miss Ota's face seemed to waver, and the whole hall went dim. “But—I just saw her. . . .” Barbara hugged the laundry and looked around her, at the dark hall.

  “I am sorry for your sorrow,” Miss Ota said. “She took good care of you, desu ne? Very sad, very very sad.” Miss Ota pulled her kimono tightly around her and hurried back across the hall.

  Barbara stared at the closed door of Michi's apartment. It seemed impossible. She had been with Michi-san yesterday afternoon, walking back from the main building with her.

  She ran into her apartment and looked out the window in the direction of Michi's apartment, which protruded from the back of Sango-kan in an ell. All the windows were dark.

  Barbara got into bed without undressing and lay curled up, shivering, still holding the crinkling package of laundry. Michi had seemed fine yesterday. They'd had a normal conversation on the way back from the classroom building: Barbara's literature class, the rare January weather, the plum trees. Michi said the plums would blossom soon. At the place where the path narrowed Barbara had walked behind her, Michi's small erect figure striding along in front, the muscular calves of her legs bisected by the seams of her old-fashioned stockings. They hadn't spoken again until they reached Sango-kan.

  Michi had seemed a little distracted as they took off their shoes and put them in the cubby holes. “Excuse me,” she said, “I must speak to Mrs. Ueda.” It was the last time Barbara would ever see her. “Thank you again for the New Year's dinner,” she could have called after her. “You've always been so kind to me.” But she had said nothing. There was only silence, and the whisk of Michi's slippers as she moved away from her down the hall.

  Barbara sat up and turned on her light. She looked around at the bare walls, the sliding rice paper door of her closet half open. Her chest ached terribly. She looked at her watch: 10:30. It was early morning in North Carolina.

  She tiptoed downstairs and dialed the long distance operator from the telephone on the hall shelf. As she waited to be connected, Barbara imagined her mother at the kitchen table drinking coffee from her Limoges cup. She would be in her navy blue bathrobe and slippers and yawning over the newspaper. But when her mother came on the line, she sounded wide awake.

  “Barbara! How are you, dear? I was just working on the lead for my column—did I tell you I'm doing a column for the Raleigh Times?”

  “Yes you did, that's great.”

  “Jonathan says they want me to write some reminiscences about Asia, the kind of thing Flora Lewis used to do.”

  “Michi-san died,” Barbara said.

  “What? Who?”

  “Michi-san. She's the one who's taken such good care of me.”

  “Oh, Bobbie, what a shame. What did she die of ?”

  “I have no idea, I just found out. It's a terrible shock—she seemed so healthy.”

  “You never can tell, I guess.” There was a long pause. “That's too bad, dear. I'm really sorry.”

  “I hate it here,” Barbara burst out. “I wish you could come visit.”

  “You're just upset about your friend. You'll be fine. What did you say her name was?”

  “Michi, Michi Nakamoto.”

  “Do you have something to wear to the funeral?”

  “Oh, Mother . . .”

  “All I'm saying, Bobbie, is that sometimes it helps to get your mind on practical matters. That's what saw me through the divorce and all your father's shenanigans.”

  “I have to go now,” Barbara said. She hung up the phone and walked slowly up the steps, her legs so heavy she could hardly lift them.

  She got back into bed, lying on her stomach with the package of laundry wedged between her shoulder and the wall; it had a solid, comforting bulk. When she'd been homesick one of those first nights last fall, Michi invited her to her apartment to watch a Gunsmoke rerunon television. She had sat beside Michi at the low table drinking plum wine as Matt Dillon and Chester conferred in Miss Kitty's saloon, the movements of their lips out of sync with the bursts of Japanese. Barbara could almost taste the strong sweet wine. She'd drunk cup after cup, letting it ease the tightness in her chest.

  One night Barbara showed Michi pictures of her mother when she was in Japan working as a foreign correspondent. Michi had spread the pictures out on the table and they looked at the images of the tall blond woman in front of pagodas, temples, and a huge statue of Buddha. Her mother's hair was arranged in a tight mound on the top of her head in a way that always made Barbara think of a hat. “You resemble her,” Michi said.

  “The same color hair,” Barbara replied, with a hollow laugh. “That's about it.”

  Michi arranged the photographs in a stack, then laid them out on the table one at a time as she named the places: the Great Buddha at Kamakura, the Heian Shrine in Kyoto, the deer park at Nara. There was a picture of her mother looking back over her shoulder as she climbed toward a temple Michi thought might be at Hakone. And of the last, a photograph of Barbara's mother and a Japanese woman standing in front of a large building with a curved tile roof, she said, “This one you cannot see.”

  “Why not?”

  “This was the Shintenza Kabuki Theatre in Hiroshima.”

  “Hiroshima!”

  “Yes. It was never rebuilt. I wonder how your mother happened to be in Hiroshima. Americans were generally not allowed at that time, as it was the military center.”

  Barbara bent closer to the photograph. It had been taken from a distance, to include the whole building. The figures of her mother and the woman in kimono were tiny. “Couldn't this be some other Kabuki theatre?”

  “No. The Shintenza was quite well known all over Japan. Has your mother written something about Hiroshima?”

  “I don't know, I'll have to ask her. It's strange, she never talked about that, only Pearl Harbor. . . .”

  Barbara's face went hot. “I'm sorry.” She cleared her throat, and looked back down at the table. “It's my first memory—that day. I was only two. My mother was washing dishes by the kitchen window and heard someone yelling in the street.” Barbara paused, censoring what her mother later told her she'd heard: We'll lick those yellow bellies in six months. “She started crying—I ran across the room and pulled on her dress, but she ignored me. It was one of those moments that seems stuck in time; do you know what I mean?” Barbara glanced up; Michi nodded. “When she finally looked at me, her face was blank, as if she couldn't remember who I was. She must have been thinking about people and places she knew in Japan—the time of her life, she always called it.”

  Michi was gazing at her intently. Her eyes seemed unfriendly, almost hard.

  “All this must seem ridiculous,” Barbara said.

  “Not at all,” Michi murmured, lowering her eyes. She began to reorder the photographs, lifting each one by its edges, aligning them exactly, one on top of the other, then tapping the edge of the stack lightly on the table. “You must forgive me,” she said, placing the pictures before Barbara, “I am
quite tired.”

  Barbara jumped up. “I'm sorry,” she said again. She should never have mentioned Pearl Harbor.

  At the door Michi smiled and patted her arm. “I would like to guide you to these sites of your mother some day.”

  Michi wouldn't be guiding her to any more sites. She turned onto her back. Without Michi-san she couldn't make it here. She reached for the laundry and pulled it on top of her, crushing it against her chest.

  At least they had gotten to Kamakura. She let the huge bronze statue of the Kamakura Buddha fill her mind: his calm face, his sleepy hypnotic eyes. Michi had stood close beside her as they looked up at him. “He seems to be leaning toward us,” Barbara said.

  “Yes.” Michi opened her guidebook to a picture of the Buddha taken from the hill behind. His back and shoulders were rounded, his head bent slightly forward. “I find this the most poignant view of him,” Michi said, “humbly bearing all our troubles.”