5

Nagano, January 1969

A maze of filing cabinets and metal desks created a warren of office workers in the business offices of Cosmos Pachinko. In the thicket of furniture, Risa Iwamura, the head filing clerk, was not very noticeable. By any conventional measure, Risa was, in fact, appealing in her face and form. However, she possessed a distant manner, preventing ease or intimacy with those around her. It was as if the young woman were turning down her lights to minimize any possibility of attraction or notice. She dressed soberly in white blouses and inexpensive black poly skirts requiring little maintenance; she wore the black leather shoes of an old woman. In the winter, one of her two gray wool cardigans graced her thin shoulders like a cape—her only ornament, an inexpensive silvertone wristwatch, which she consulted often, though she never seemed to have anywhere to go. When she performed her tasks, Risa needed little guidance; she anticipated the needs of her employers faultlessly and executed the tasks without any reminders.

For nearly seven years, Noa had been living in Nagano, passing as a Japanese called Nobuo Ban. He had worked assiduously for the owner of Cosmos Pachinko and had settled into a small, invisible life. He was a valued employee, and the owner left him alone. The only thing that the owner brought up every January when he gave Noa his bonus and New Year’s lecture was marriage: A man of his age and position should have his own home and children. Noa had been the head of the business offices ever since Takano, the man who had hired him, had moved to Nagoya to run the multiple Cosmos businesses there. Nevertheless, Noa continued to live in the pachinko parlor dorms and took his meals regularly in the pachinko staff cafeteria. Although he had already paid Hansu back for the Waseda tuition and board, Noa still sent money to his mother each month. He spent almost nothing on himself beyond what was absolutely necessary.

After this year’s New Year’s lecture, Noa thought deeply about his boss’s advice. He had been aware of Risa. Although she never spoke of it, everyone knew that she came from a middle-class family with a sad scandal.

When Risa was fourteen or so, her father, a beloved doctor at the local clinic, had dispensed improper medication to two patients during the flu season, resulting in their deaths. Shortly thereafter, the doctor took his own life, rendering his family both destitute and tainted. Risa was effectively unmarriageable, since a suicide in a family could indicate mental illness in her blood; even worse, her father was perceived to have done something so shameful that he felt that he needed to die. The relatives did not come to the funeral, and they no longer called on Risa and her mother. Risa’s mother never recovered from the shock and no longer left the house even to run errands. After Risa completed secondary school, Takano, a former patient of Risa’s father, hired her to do clerical work.

Noa had noticed her beautiful handwriting on the files even before he noticed her. It was possible that he was in love with the way she wrote the number two—her parallel lines expressing a kind of free movement inside the invisible box that contained the ideograph’s strokes. If Risa wrote even an ordinary description on an invoice, Noa would pause to read it again, not because of what it said, but because he could detect that there was a kind of dancing spirit in the hand that wrote such elegant letters.

When Noa asked her to dinner one winter evening, she replied, in shock, “Maji?” Among the file clerks, Nobuo Ban was a fascinating topic of discussion, but after so many years, with so little change in his behavior, the interested girls had long since given up. It took two dinners, perhaps even less time than that, for Risa to fall in love with Noa, and the two intensely private young people married that winter.

On their wedding night, Risa was frightened.

“Will it hurt?”

“You can tell me to stop. I’d rather hurt myself than hurt you, my wife.”

Neither had realized the loneliness each had lived with for such a long time until the loneliness was interrupted by genuine affection.

When Risa got pregnant, she quit her job and stayed home and raised her family with as much competence as she had run the file rooms of a successful pachinko business. First, she had twin girls; then a year later, Risa gave birth to a boy; then a year after that, another girl.

Every month, Noa traveled for work for two days, but otherwise he kept to a kind of reliable schedule that made it possible to work six days a week for Cosmos and raise his family attentively. Curiously, he did not drink or go out to clubs, even to entertain the police or to be entertained by pachinko machine salesmen. Noa was honest, precise, and could handle any level of business complication from taxes to machine licenses. Moreover, he was not greedy. The owner of Cosmos respected that Noa avoided mizu shobai. Naturally, Risa was grateful; it was easy to lose the affections of a husband to an ambitious bar hostess.

Like all Japanese mothers, Risa volunteered at the children’s schools and did everything else she could to make sure that her four children were well and safe. Having so many little constituents kept her from having to involve herself with those outside her family. If her father’s death had expelled her from the tribe of ordinary middle-class people, she had effectively reproduced her own tribe.

  

The marriage was a stable one, and eight years passed quickly. The couple did not quarrel. Noa did not love Risa in the way he had his college girlfriend, but that was a good thing, he thought. Never again, he swore, would he be that vulnerable to another person. Noa remained careful around his new family. Though he valued his wife and children as a kind of second chance, in no way did he see his current life as a rebirth. Noa carried the story of his life as a Korean like a dark, heavy rock within him. Not a day passed when he didn’t fear being discovered. The only thing he continued to do from before was to read his English-language novels. After marrying, he no longer ate at the employees’ cafeteria. Now he allowed himself lunch at an inexpensive restaurant where he ate alone. Over lunch, for thirty minutes a day, he reread Dickens, Trollope, or Goethe, and he remembered who he was inside.

It was spring when the twin girls turned seven, and the family went to Matsumoto Castle for a Sunday picnic. Risa had planned the outing to cheer up her mother, who seemed to be retreating further into herself. The children were overjoyed, since they would get ice cream on the way home.

The doctor’s widow, Iwamura-san, had never been a competent woman; in fact, she was often helpless. She had remained childishly pretty—soft, pale cheeks, naturally red lips, and dyed black hair. She wore simple beige smocks and cardigans, closed only on the top button. Her expression was perpetually one of a small child who had been disappointed by her birthday present. That said, she was hardly ignorant. She had been a doctor’s wife, and though his death had destroyed her cherished social ambitions, she had not relinquished her wishes for her only child. It was bad enough that her daughter worked in pachinko, but now she had married a man who worked in the sordid business, cementing her caste in life. On her initial meeting with Nobuo Ban, she had guessed that there was something unusual about his past, since he had no family. No doubt, he was foreign. She felt suspicious of his character; however, there was also something so sad beneath his fine manners that reminded her of her dear husband, that the widow felt compelled to overlook his background as long as no one ever found out.

  

A sparse crowd was forming in front of Matsumoto-jo. A famous docent, popular with the locals, was about to lecture about Japan’s oldest existing castle. The old man with wispy white eyebrows and a slight hunch had brought an easel with him and was setting up his poster-sized photographs and visual aids. Noa’s third child, who had barely eaten anything except for half a rice ball, bolted from his seat and darted toward the guide. Risa was packing up the empty bento boxes and asked Noa to stand near Koichi, a tiny six-year-old boy with a remarkably well-shaped face and head. He had no fear of strangers and would talk to anyone. Once, at the market, he told the greengrocer that his mother had burned the eggplant the week before. Adults enjoyed talking with Koichi.

“Sumimasen, sumimasen!” the boy shouted, pushing his little body through the group listening carefully to the guide’s introduction to the castle’s history.

The crowd parted to let the boy stand in the front. The guide smiled at Koichi and continued.

The boy’s mouth was open a little, and he listened intently while his father stood in the back.

The guide turned to the next image on the easel. In the old black-and-white photograph, the castle leaned dramatically as if the edifice might collapse. The crowd gasped politely at the famous image. Tourists and children who had never seen it before looked at the image closely.

“When this magnificent castle started to list this much, everyone remembered Tada Kasuke’s curse!” The guide widened his heavy-lidded eyes for emphasis.

The adults from the region nodded in recognition. There wasn’t a soul in Nagano who didn’t know about the seventeenth-century Matsumoto headman who’d led the Jokyo Uprising against unfair taxes and was executed with twenty-seven others, including his two young sons.

“What is a curse?” Koichi asked.

Noa frowned, because the child had been reminded repeatedly that he must not blurt out questions whenever he wished.

“A curse?” the guide said, then paused silently for dramatic effect.

“A curse is a terrible, terrible thing. And a curse with moral power is the worst! Tada Kasuke was unfairly persecuted when he was just trying to save all the good people of Nagano from the exploitation of those who lived in this castle! At his death, Tada Kasuke uttered a curse against the greedy Mizuno clan!” The guide grew visibly impassioned by his own speech.

Koichi wanted to ask another question, but his twin sisters, who were now standing by him, pinched the little bit of flesh around his right elbow. Koichi had to learn not to talk so much, they thought; policing him was a family effort.

“Almost two hundred years after Tada Kasuke’s death, the ruling clan tried everything in their power to appease the spirit of the martyr to lift the curse. It must have worked, because the castle structure is straight again!” The guide raised both arms dramatically and gestured toward the building behind him. The crowd laughed.

Koichi stared at the poster-sized image of the listing castle. “How? How do you reverse a curse?” Koichi asked, unable to control himself.

His sister Ume stepped on his foot, but Koichi did not care.

“To appease the spirits, the ruling clan proclaimed that Tada Kasuke was a martyr and gave him an afterlife name. They had a statue built. Ultimately, the truth must be acknowledged!”

Koichi opened his mouth again, but this time Noa walked over and picked up his son gently and carried him back to his mother, who was seated with her mother on a bench. Even though he was in kindergarten, Koichi still loved to be picked up. The crowd smiled.

“Papa, that was so interesting, nee?”

“Hai,” Noa replied. When he held the boy, he always recalled Mozasu, who would fall asleep easily in his arms, his round head resting on Noa’s shoulder.

“Can I put a curse on someone?” Koichi asked.

“What? Who do you want to put a curse on?”

“Umeko. She stepped on my foot on purpose.”

“That’s not very nice, but it doesn’t warrant a curse, nee?”

“But I can reverse a curse if I want.”

“Oh, it isn’t so easy to do so, Koichi-chan. And what would you do if someone put a curse on you?”

“Soo nee.” Koichi sobered at the thought of this, then broke into a smile when he saw his mother, whom he loved more than anyone. Risa was knitting a sweater as she chatted with her mother. The picnic bags rested at her feet.

The Ban family walked around the castle grounds, and when the children grew bored, Noa took them to eat ice cream, as he had promised.