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

  They bought tickets to go inside the statue, entering through a door set below the god's left knee. The interior was cold and shadowy. An iron staircase angled up to a platform where through hinged openings in the Buddha's back they looked out at the view: a cloud of incense rising from a stone altar below, the hills of Kamakura beyond. Her mother had stood here, Barbara thought, gazing out at this same scene. She looked down at her hands wrapped around the railing. Her mother could have touched the same part of the cold iron bar. She felt a yearning so fierce it made her dizzy.

  They left the shrine and walked down a street lined with maple trees. The trees were in full autumn color, vibrant shades of red and orange.

  “I think we have been in the Buddha's womb,” Michi said.

  “It's amazing, you should say that. I just realized I'm trying to make some connection with my mother that's almost physical—as though by putting myself in her place I'd have her in some way.”

  “Ah.” Michi stopped walking and looked at her. “This is very interesting.”

  “My mother always wanted a daughter like her, someone adventurous but conventional. A suit-and-pearls kind of woman who takes flying lessons. Once she said if it hadn't been for this straw-colored hair”—she grabbed a handful of it—“she'd think there'd been some mix-up at the hospital.”

  “Your mother does not know you, I think.”

  “No, not at all.”

  “If she did she would appreciate you very much.”

  “Thank you.” Barbara looked down into Michi's earnest face, her tired, intelligent eyes.

  On the return train to Tokyo, Barbara and Michi sat side by side on a bench seat. Michi had looked tired by then, her face pale, her eyelids swollen. It was a long ride, and Michi fell asleep as the train swayed through the darkness. Barbara remembered their reflections in the window across the aisle, herself looking straight ahead, Michi with her eyes closed and her head drooping toward Barbara's shoulder.

  The funeral was held at a Buddhist temple in the nearby village of Kokubunji. Barbara sat near the back of the incense-filled room with the students as the priest droned through the sutras. The casket was on a raised platform behind the altar; on the altar, between banners bearing Japanese characters she could not read, was a large framed picture of Michi-san.

  The photograph must have been taken a few years ago; there was no trace of grey in her hair. She was wearing the same style glasses, however, cat-eyed frames upturned at the sides. Her face, too, was cat-shaped, broader at the forehead and cheekbones, narrowing at the chin. She had full lips and narrow, rather mischievous eyes. Her head was tilted to the side in that way she'd had when about to speak.

  A sob rose into Barbara's throat. She thought of the night she'd arrived in Japan, like a nightmarish rebirth, dropped into a world where she understood nothing: the voices in the airport, the calligraphic neon signs blinking against the night sky. There was a greeting committee, cool-faced women whose names she could not fix on. The ride from the airport seemed endless; the woman beside her was silent as they drove through the dark. Finally they were at Sango-kan, and Michi was at the door, holding out her hand. “How tired you must be,” she had said, and led her upstairs.

  The priest's voice had stopped. People were rising from their seats. Barbara's head spun as she stood up. Was she supposed to go too? Maybe it was like the Catholic church where only initiates were allowed to approach the altar. If this were someone else's funeral Michi-san would have whispered what to do.

  Hiroko stepped into the aisle, then Junko. Barbara followed. Her legs were shaky but the dizziness had passed. At the altar, they sprinkled incense onto a smoldering burner, then climbed the steps of the platform to the casket. Michi-san's face was small and dark, a shocking contrast to the photograph. Her eyebrows were heavier than Barbara remembered and her forehead higher. She saw the cat-eyed glasses lying in the casket, carefully folded beside her shoulder.

  Outside she stood with Sumi, Junko, and Hiroko. Rich McCann, the middle-aged Fulbright professor who taught a course on American foreign policy at the college, was headed toward a taxi. He motioned toward Barbara and pointed toward the opened door. Barbara shook her head, mouthed No, thank you.

  “Will you go to the crematory, Sensei?” Junko whispered to her.

  No one had mentioned a crematorium; she felt another wave of vertigo. “I'm not feeling well,” she said.

  The students whispered among themselves. “We will take you back to Sango-kan,” Junko said.

  “No, no, you go on.”

  Barbara noticed Miss Fujizawa beside her car talking to two elderly women and a younger man. The man stood slightly apart from the others, his features composed, almost stern. He had on a black turtleneck shirt and a loose jacket, instead of the usual businessman's suit. When he looked at Barbara, his eyes widened and he bowed, as though they had been introduced, then he turned away.

  “Are those people relatives of Nakamoto sensei's?” Barbara whispered to Sumi.

  “The woman Miss Fujizawa is talking to owns a small restaurant at Takanodai. The blind woman is her sister-in-law. I think they and Nakamoto sensei are old friends.” Barbara glanced at the women; one of them was holding a cane. Her head was tilted upwards and to one side; she couldn't see her eyes.

  “Who's the man?” Barbara asked.

  “The son of one of them,” Sumi said. “I have heard that he was Nakamoto sensei's student at one time.”

  As Barbara made her way through the crowd, she felt the man looking at her; she did not meet his gaze.

  She set off down a street where she'd never been before, woods on one side, houses on the other. She had to get away, into the city.

  Above walls she could see wooden houses, tiled roofs, windows glinting in the late afternoon light. There was the odor of smoke, fires being stoked for the bath, leaves burning. Michi's body would be on the way to the crematorium.

  She walked more quickly, almost running, past a public bath, a small shop selling tofu. At the stationer's she stopped. Inside there were handmade blank books for sale, double sheets of rice paper stitched together and covered with crinkly paper. She chose one with a red cover, paid, and went on down the street. In the distance a train stopped, spilled out passengers, then glided on. As she got closer she saw the station sign: “Musashi Koganei.” She'd walked all the way to the next stop beyond Kokubungi going toward Tokyo.

  She bought a ticket for Shinjuku, in downtown Tokyo. Michi had taken her to a sushi restaurant there. On the train, it was comforting to be packed in with all the other bodies. She hung to the overhead strap and closed her eyes, swaying with the train, until she heard her stop called.

  It was getting dark, the neon signs were already on. She headed toward the restaurant and entertainment district, and found it right away, the small sushi restaurant next to the Go Go Coffee Shop.

  She and Michi had sat at the far end of the sushi bar. Barbara took a seat there and ordered the same thing they'd had that night: tuna, mackerel, octopus. She looked around—no one she knew— and asked for a beer.

  She took the journal from her pocketbook. A man sat down beside her; she turned her back to him and put the journal on her lap.

  “Dear Michi,” she wrote, “There are so many things I wish I'd asked you. Were you married? People never called you Miss or Mrs., only Sensei or san.

  “I don't know where you grew up, where you went to school, where you learned to speak English so well. What it was like for you, during the war? I knew your essence—or something of it—yet so few particulars. That is what I regret most of all.”

  4

  The tansu was just as Barbara had left it that morning before class, one drawer open, several papers and bottles on the floor. Relieved, she wrapped the papers around the bottles and returned the wine to the drawers. She noticed that the dates on the outside of each paper—the only symbols in English—all looked recent. The brushstrokes were dark; not even the oldest dates were faded. Michi must have d
ated the wines for her, so she wouldn't get the years confused. She imagined Michi in the small room where she'd kept the tansu, dipping her brush into the flat ink container. What had she been thinking? Had she tried to predict Barbara's reaction, or considered the dilemma about translation? Michi had often urged her to study Japanese, but surely she didn't want her to wait the years it would take to learn all these kanji.

  Perhaps she could locate a translator through a language school. She ran a hand lightly over a row of wines. She would figure out what to do.

  Meanwhile, she would clean her apartment, make it a suitable place for the tansu.

  She began in the kitchen, washing and drying stacks of dishes. The radio was tuned to the English language channel. President Johnson had announced a resumption of the bombing of North Vietnam after a thirty-seven day truce. She changed the dial to a Japanese station, the sounds of a plucked shamisen and a flute.

  In the Western-style room, she swept and dusted around the albatross of a bed—still where she'd left it, angled across the floor— then sat down at her desk, piled high with papers and magazines. She unearthed several drafts of her incomplete dissertation: “Mausoleum of Hope and Desire: The Metaphysics of Time in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury.” In another pile were pictures of herself and Michi at Kamakura.

  There was the fleeting view they'd had of Mt. Fuji, a blurry snapshot taken through the train window. She flipped through several other photographs to the one of herself and Michi in front of the great Buddha.

  Michi stood erect, her head turned slightly to one side. She was smiling, her eyes almost shut behind her glasses; the smile accented her pointed chin and high cheekbones. There was such a natural sweetness and wisdom in her face. Barbara, more than a head taller, stood with her hands in the pockets of her unbuttoned camel hair coat, one strand of blonde hair lifted by the breeze. In the background was the colossal Buddha, looking serenely down at them.

  Barbara took the photograph to her bedroom and put it on the tansu; she'd get a frame for it tomorrow.

  She picked up dirty clothes from the six-mat room and put a blue pottery bowl on the tokonoma. The floor of her bedroom closet was covered with clothes. When she started pulling them out, Michi's package of laundry, still in its brown paper wrapping, tumbled to the floor.

  She untied the string and folded back the paper. On top of a stack of sheets and towels were two wide ribbons, one red, one yellow, their broad ends cut like swallowtails. She set the ribbons aside, and unfolded a small cotton kimono, then a tiny nightgown embroidered with plum blossoms. These were child's things. There must be some mistake; the man had delivered the wrong package.

  But beneath the clothes were some striped kitchen towels that she recognized, and an indigo and white cloth that had been on Michi's table.

  Barbara slowly refolded the laundry, with the clothes and ribbons on top. She carried the bundle to Miss Ota's apartment.

  Miss Ota was so long answering her knock, Barbara almost gave up.

  “Excuse me,” Miss Ota said when she opened the door. I was attempting to secure a recalcitrant latch on my valise. Tomorrow I am journeying to my niece in Yonago for a brief visit.”

  “I'm sorry to disturb you. . . .”

  Miss Ota glanced down at the things in Barbara's arms.

  “I just opened Nakamoto-san's laundry, and I was just wondering . . . There are some child's clothes. . . .”

  “Yes, I see,” Miss Ota said. “Please come in.”

  Barbara followed her into the apartment.

  “Dozo,” Miss Ota said, motioning her to sit at the kotatsu. The table was covered with handwritten pages, some in Japanese, some in English. “My magnum opus,” Miss Ota said, gathering the sheets and putting them on a large rolltop desk in the corner of the room. “Now that I am retired, I attend to it exclusively.”

  “Is it on James?” Barbara slid her legs beneath the kotatsu.

  “Oh yes, the influence of James on our twentieth-century Japanese writers. The Figure in the Tatami is its title.”

  “Like James“ figure in the carpet?”

  “Exactly,” Miss Ota said, beaming down at her. “I will prepare some tea,” she said and bustled off to the kitchen.

  The room was crowded with furniture and knicknacks. An English-style étagère stood near an ancestor shrine. A row of glassed-in bookcases contained English novels in sets: Dickens, Thackery, Trollope. Henry James occupied two shelves. On top of one of the bookcases was a cluster of china figurines, English lords and ladies in periwigs.

  Miss Ota returned carrying a rose-patterned tea service and china cups on a silver tray. She poured out the tea, offered cream, and opened the sugar bowl. “One lump or two?” she asked, picking up a cube of sugar with a pair of small silver tongs.

  “Oh, no lumps thank you.” Miss Ota looked disappointed, so she said, “One, please.”

  Miss Ota dropped a cube of sugar into Barbara's cup, two into her own.

  “How are you finding your students?”

  “They're wonderful. So bright and interested.”

  “Kodaira girls are not like many Japanese collegians, who go to school for vacation. We have very serious scholars here.”

  “Yes, I can see that. Miss Ota, I'd . . .”

  “Now you must have something to eat, so I will not be required to dine in the company of only Mr. James.”

  Miss Ota went off to the kitchen again, returning with a tray for Barbara, on it several covered bowls. “Please,” she said, gesturing toward the tray.

  “Chawan mushi!” Barbara exclaimed, opening the smallest bowl. It was her favorite Japanese dish; Michi had often made it for her. She picked up the spoon beside it and began eating the custard, delicately flavored with bits of shitake mushrooms and spinach.

  Miss Ota brought out a bowl of the custard for herself.

  “I've taken your dinner!”

  “This is all I am wanting. We say chawan mushi is the most beneficial food for old people and children, excellent for the digestion.”

  Barbara drank her miso soup, ate the baked eggplant and fish, and soon was scraping up the last grains of rice with her chopsticks.

  “I am glad to see you eat so heartily,” Miss Ota said with a smile. When I return from Yonago, you must come join me often for dinner. The companionship is fine for me. Also, I think you must miss Nakamoto sensei.”

  “Very much,” Barbara said; she felt a tightening in her chest.

  After a slight pause, Miss Ota said. “Naturally you are curious about things you have found in her laundry. Nakamoto sensei had a daughter, yes?”

  “She did? Are you saying she had a daughter?”

  “She did have, yes.” Miss Ota nodded.

  Barbara stared down at the clothes. Michi-san had been too old to have a daughter who wore ribbons. “An adopted daughter?”

  “Oh no.” Miss Ota patted her belly. “Natural child, biological.”

  “But, then—she must have been young,” Barbara said, meaning Michi-san, when the daughter was born.

  “Yes—about your age, I should say, perhaps a bit younger. But she is no longer living.”

  “The daughter?”

  Miss Ota nodded.

  “She—expired?”

  “She was never entirely well. It was some form of cancer which finally took her, last year, in early summer. She had been in hospital for quite some time.”

  “Michi-san never mentioned her,” Barbara said.

  There was a silence. Miss Ota put the lid back on her custard dish and carefully arranged her spoon beside it.

  “Michi-san was married, then?”

  “Of course,” Miss Ota said primly.

  “I mean of course . . . but did he die too?”

  “Yes, many years ago. They were only married the shortest possible time, I believe.”

  There was a knock at the door: Mrs. Ueda, come to announce that the bath was ready.

  Miss Ota began talking to her in Japanes
e. “Ah so desuka?” Mrs. Ueda said several times, then turned to Barbara. “I understand you have some clothing which may have belonged to Nakamoto-san's daughter. May I please have a look?”

  Barbara reluctantly held out the package of laundry. Mrs. Ueda unfolded the paper and thumbed through the clothes. She carefully extracted the kimono and holding it over one arm, ran her fingers lightly across the embroidery. “I well remember Nakamoto-san making such needlework as this for Ume. I can confirm that these items have belonged to her.” She looked at Barbara. Her black eyes were fierce. “This package arrived at your apartment by coincidence, did it not?”