The Little House

Chapter 1 The House with a Red Tile Roof There’s something I must make clear right off the bat: this is not a housekeeping guide. I am not giving any more housework tips. I want to make sure we have that straight from the start. Having at long last retired from the Watanabe household, I now live alone in the Ibaraki countryside. I manage to get by, and feel quite blessed in my old age. My nephew and his family live nearby and we sometimes have dinner together. I have some savings from my many years of hard work, and I have my nephew invest in stocks on my behalf so that I might pay for an old people’s home when my body gives out. I live frugally on my meagre pension, and making do is steeped in my bones, so I’m better off than most young people today. So this isn’t about making money, either. I suppose you could say the turning point in my life came two years ago when Master Watanabe’s daughter enthusiastically introduced me to her publisher employer, and they produced Granny Taki’s Super Housework Book. Youngsters nowadays appear to know nothing about how to select and prepare vegetables, or how to clean the house. I suppose nobody ever taught them, and the fact they have to turn to someone like me for guidance shows just how much the times have changed. I was stunned to learn at the time that an author doesn’t actually need to write anything in order to complete a book these days. I find it deplorable how everything nowadays is mass-produced with no thought for quality, although admittedly, I have this to thank for my own book. And after all it was a pretty good book, even if I do say so myself. It sold well, and I was able to buy more shares with my earnings from it. But everything I know about housework is in that book, and I don’t feel like talking about it anymore. There’s no need for more books saying the same thing: one is enough. That in itself is a lesson in economy. Today, a young woman introducing herself as an editor from the publisher came to my house to discuss the next book. I’ve been talking about my idea for the next book for some time, and she was clearly aware of this. ‘Naturally, we’re not thinking housecleaning tips anymore,’ she said. ‘So instead, we’d like you to talk about Tokyo in the old days, things that only you know about—your sense of the four seasons, your favourite dishes, social niceties. That sort of thing.’ Well, it’s not such a bad idea and I can see where she’s coming from. It’s just not quite what I’ve got in mind. People probably think that all the likes of me can talk about are the best ways to clean limescale deposits from the sink. I used to be the same. Now I’m in my nineties though, and nearing the end of my life, I realize there are more important things I want to write about. There’s not a single person left who remembers what things were like when I was a housemaid. As for when the word ‘housemaid’ disappeared from use in Japan, no doubt there are scholars looking into it, but if my memory serves, I believe it was still around in the sixties. I recall when my nephew was in high school, he told me about some character in a novel popular at the time—Little Red Riding Hood, I think it was, or maybe it was Little Black Riding Hood—who got upset at being called a ‘home help’ and demanded to be properly addressed as a ‘maid’. He said it reminded him of me. I think that was the last time I heard it, though. These days, my nephew tells me, people use something called a ‘housecleaning service’. It sounds so humdrum. When I went into service in the early Showa period, there was a shortage of maids for company workers’ households in the well-to-do Yamanote area of the city, so I was always properly addressed as ‘Miss Taki’ and apparently thought quite highly of. It must have been the same in any good family in Tokyo. At that time, the common wisdom was: ‘A family that can’t keep a good maid is not a good family.’ It so happened that I never married and remained a maid all my life, but the job was effectively domestic training for young women pre-marriage. An apprenticeship for brides, although not exactly on a par with women’s colleges today, nor was it the mindless job akin to slave labour it’s often made out to be. I can’t say it wasn’t ever difficult, but it was after all a job, and whoever heard of a job that’s all fun and no hardship? On the other hand, I can’t say categorically that I was never looked down on during the course of my work. As for whether or not I was ever ogled by the master of the first house I served in, well, between you and I, there was some of that. But with him being a famous author I can’t possibly disclose what went on, so that side of things will go with me to my grave. There were times when he’d furtively touch my leg or bottom as I went about the dusting, or give me pocket money behind his wife’s back, then summon me to give him a massage. But, well, it was what it was. Indeed it was. It was the spring of 1930 when I finished elementary school and went to Tokyo. Of my five siblings, the eldest four had all already gone into service somewhere or other, so I thought it only natural that I would too. My next sister up, Tami, was sent to the house of a local big shot where she had a really hard time of it and was wretched. Listening to Tami talk tearfully when she came home on her days off, her skin chapped and chilblains on her hands and feet, I realized how tough it was for her, but what choice did a country girl have back then? I was more fortunate than Tami in being able to go to Tokyo. In those days, though, a daughter sent from a rural community to the capital in order to reduce the number of mouths to feed was at the mercy of the recruiter and might find herself sold off to a whorehouse by an unscrupulous agent. Geisha houses would even come to the village to buy the fairest-skinned, most popular girls. By the age of seven, girls either went to primary school or were sold off. But I was no beauty, so there was no chance of that happening to me, and thanks to my aunt’s good connections my destination was decided in advance. Having been assured that I was being sent to a very good family, I could rest easy on that score. Yet a girl of twelve or thirteen can never really be ready. That’s still true now, however much the times have changed. One good thing was that my first experience of a train journey was surprisingly enjoyable. Once on the train, my aunt lectured me earnestly on the skills required of a maid: getting up earlier than everyone else in the household; going to bed later than everyone else; how important it was to use your head, not just do as you were told; not talking longer than necessary with tradesmen; not neglecting other jobs just because you liked cooking best; not confusing childcare with playing… the typical sort of sermon, but thanks to my cheerful nature I couldn’t help thinking, ‘Childcare sounds like a lot of fun!’ and I didn’t feel particularly dragged down by it. ‘Look, in Tokyo, right, youse can’t be at yer leisure. You gotta do everytin quick, lickety split. An’ the first tin youse gotta do is lose that bumpkin way of talkin’. Youse gotta learn to speak Tokyo right off. Gottit?’ ‘Yeah, gottit.’ ‘Okay, so hows about startin’ right aways? Stop speakin’ local and talk proper. Gottit?’ ‘Gottit.’ ‘Gottit ain’t proper.’ ‘But youse said it first. Howja ’spec me to speak proper if youse don’t?’ ‘I did?’ She looked at me in surprise. After a moment, she said without a trace of an accent, ‘When I’m with people from home, I slip back into our way of talking without even realizing it. You’ve got to be on your guard, you know.’ I didn’t know how to speak standard Japanese, so although I felt like chatting I kept quiet, while my aunt, as if realizing there was no point lecturing me in dialect, closed her eyes and fell asleep. Unrefined country lass that I was, you can imagine my astonishment upon arriving in Tokyo. I’ll never forget the scene that met my eyes as I alighted from the train at Ueno. The station was swarming with people, and endless tracks stretched out one after another. Of course, this was Tokyo, there was nowhere in Japan you couldn’t go to from here, I thought with a sigh. Train whistles shrilled incessantly and sooty smoke belched from the freight trains coming and going. It was like being caught in a strange dream. We took another train to Otsuka, where we alighted at a shop-lined street thronged with people on their way to work, a sea of bicycles, laden packhorses, gleaming black cars, and streetcars coming and going. It seemed impossible to walk in this teeming mass without bumping into something. I still remember how dizzy I felt. As my aunt pulled me through Otsuka Sakashita-machi dodging the streetcars, on our right I caught sight of the magnificent Gokokuji Temple, then slap in the middle of the greenery in Kubomachi was the newly built University of Science and Humanities. It was all so imposing and dignified! On the corner was the brown, Western-style building of the Otsuka women’s lodgings. As I gazed at it, a woman with her hair in a fashionable bob emerged carrying a small handbag under her arm, her heels clacking as she walked. Everything in the imperial capital of Tokyo was so utterly different from the rural village where I was born and grew up. In those days, it really was a beautiful city. It’s quite laughable how young people these days, upon hearing that I’d been sent from the far north to serve as a maid in Tokyo, tend to narrow their eyes pityingly and say sagely, ‘That must have been really tough for you.’ Master Konaka, the novelist, lived in an elegant, traditional-style residence right in the heart of the city. He already had two older maids, Miss Masa and Miss Ine. Miss Masa was in charge of the cooking and cleaning, while Miss Ine looked after Master Konaka and his wife, ran errands and did the laundry. I was given the task of childcare and assisting Misses Masa and Ine. And boy, they kept me so busy my head span. The following year, Master Konaka told me his friend’s daughter needed help with her child, and so I was sent to be her maid. The house was small compared with Master Konaka’s large mansion, but my most cherished memories are all of the time I spent with the lady of the house and her son. When I told the young woman editor that I wanted her to tape what I was saying, for a moment she looked as though she had no idea what I was talking about, but then said, ‘Oh, right, yes of course. Once we’ve decided on the concept.’ Concept? Young people these days use so many English words that people my age have trouble understanding what they’re saying. I was beginning to feel that this editor and I weren’t going to get along too well. I wasn’t sure what to write about, so I wanted to talk about things and record it all on tape first, but here she was insisting that she would only record it once I’d decided what to write. We weren’t going to get anywhere like this. ‘So, what you want to write is something along the lines of your personal history, is that it?’ the young woman said. Personal history? What on earth did she mean by that? Literally speaking, I suppose you could call it my personal history, but that’s not what I want to write. What does it even mean? History is a word that goes with Japan or England, or the Meiji or Edo period, that’s the sort of thing that you can write a history of. ‘If that’s what you want, I’m afraid we won’t be able to publish that,’ she went on irritably. ‘In which case, I could introduce you to someone from vanity publishing services, if you like.’ That was a rather disagreeable way of putting it. I was beginning to feel that if it was a matter of vanity, I didn’t need to have them publish it after all.