The Little House

Chapter 1: The House with a Red Tile Roof-2

For a maid, the most important thing is not only being good at cleaning and cooking and the like. You have to be really quite clever. Come to think of it, it was none other than Master Konaka who said that about me.

‘You’ve got a good head on you, Taki. You’re really quite clever. It isn’t like being good at studying and able to become a scholar, but it is really important, you know. At least it is for those of you who work for other people.’

It’s almost sixty years since Master Konaka passed away. My oldest, fondest memory of him is not from when I first went to meet him, but from my very first day there, when I went to clean his study.

‘No need to clean in here.’

The study was a Japanese-style room with a low, imposing reading desk, and south-facing shoji that opened onto a garden with a goldfish pond. Around the desk were higgledy-piggledly piles of very difficult-looking books, some of them in English.

The desk was covered in sheets of spoiled manuscript paper, although they can’t all have been mistakes, for Master Konaka then told me, ‘If you inadvertently burn those thinking they’re just wastepaper, I’ll be in a right pickle. You know there was once one such maid in England, who tossed an extremely important manuscript the master had received from a friend into the fire and burned it,’ he said, looking at me mischievously over the top of his glasses.

I must have felt really disconcerted at this. How thoughtless of a maid to burn an important manuscript without realizing it!

But maybe Master Konaka could see in my thirteen-year-old eyes how I felt, for he then said, ‘The maid’s master and his friend were both scholars, so you could say the two of them were rivals, so to speak. The friend had spent several decades completing his work. The maid’s master, on the other hand, had not yet reached the stage of producing anything worth publishing. Maybe he was envious of his friend. What if his friend’s essay was reduced to ashes in an instant? The friend would have to rewrite that massive tome. Or he might have to give up on publishing the work altogether. Meanwhile, the master himself could get a step ahead of his friend. Hadn’t such a fancy crossed his mind, even just for a moment?’

At the time, I didn’t have a clue what Master Konaka was getting at. However, it was a story he seemed quite taken with, and I had occasion to hear it again a great many times after that.

And every time he related how the maid of the scholar called Mill or Gill or whatever burned the manuscript of his friend, the scholar who had a name that sounded like curry rice—Carlyle or Carris or something—he would conclude his account by wondering, ‘But is it really possible that he never, even for one moment, wished his friend’s manuscript would just disappear?’ At any rate, thanks to Master Car-thingy’s manuscript being lost, Master Mill was apparently able to publish his own work ahead of his dear friend.

Some years later, when I’d learned the ropes of a maid’s job, it finally hit me what Master Konaka had been trying to tell me. That’s why even now, the story of the maid who for the sake of her master threw his friend’s manuscript into the fire is still clear in my mind.

The English maid hadn’t inadvertently thrown an important manuscript into the fire. Wanting her master to succeed, she’d taken it upon herself to burn his rival’s manuscript, then took the rap for it. This story left a profound impression on me as a parable demonstrating the lengths a maid is expected to go to for the sake of her master.

What with this and that, I shall never forget my short term of service at Master Konaka’s, but more profoundly memorable for me are my days of service in the pleasant household of company worker Mr. Hirai, whose modest house was quite unlike Master Konaka’s luxurious mansion.

***

Properly speaking, I didn’t go straight from Master Konaka’s house into service with the Hirais, but first served in the Asano household.

The first time I met Mistress Tokiko was on a hot summer’s afternoon in the coolness of a wet street sprinkled with water by local housewives.

I was just arriving for my interview, accompanied by her mother (the Mistress Suga, who was attired in a silk gauze kimono secured with a linen obi and carrying a parasol), when the young Mistress came dashing out of an alleyway between rental houses intended for company workers, wearing a dress with blue polka dots on a white background. She was carrying young Master Kyoichi, then around a year and a half old, but from the sprightly way in which she’d come dashing out, she looked less like his mother than a neighbourhood lass who had playfully swept the boy up in her arms. She was so youthful I almost addressed her as Miss.

Her mother looked amused. She had employed me on behalf of her daughter, and now told her, ‘See, at last you’ll be released from ironing your husband’s shirts.’

Chuckling at this witticism, the young woman turned to look at me. The first words she uttered to me were, ‘Taki and Tokiko… our names are quite similar, aren’t they?’

I had the feeling I was seeing a true urban young lady for the first time. Master Konaka had a daughter too, but she looked so much like him that the impression she gave was more of a middle-aged man than the young lady of the house. Mistress Tokiko, by contrast, was a beautiful, bright-eyed young bride.

Having entered the ranks of those with a maid for the first time, she threw herself into teaching me in minute detail tasks like how to cook and speak properly. In that respect she had the humility of a young mistress, and since my former employers had trained me in everything from childcare to cooking, I even felt she was modest enough to depend on me. Compared to Master Konaka’s portly wife with her middle-aged spread, I found her utterly charming and so I too threw myself into my work.

At the time, she had just turned twenty-two years of age, and I was eight years her junior at fourteen. It was the beginning of a really very rich time together.

Mistress Tokiko was the one who taught me how to suppress my regional dialect and speak in a Tokyo accent, who first took me to eat Western-style food in a restaurant in Ginza, and who generously gave me the meisen silk hand-me-downs she wore during her childhood, telling me I should alter them to fit me.

She was cheerful and always behaved as though she was happy, but her first marriage wasn’t exactly a bed of roses.

Her first husband had apparently worked for a decent company, but by the time I was taken on he’d already been laid off as a result of the recession. He was then doing some kind of clerical work for a factory managed by a relative, a sort of temporary job on a daily wage, which must have been demoralizing, for he drank away all his wages and rarely came home, despite having a child.

When I think about it, though, perhaps the reason he didn’t come home was precisely because he had a child. I’ve heard there are men who tend to steer clear of a woman once she has given birth. I can’t for the life of me understand why anyone would neglect such a beautiful wife and angelic son, but being a man of small calibre with an attractive wife who had an idealized vision of married life, he probably felt guilty for not making her happy and couldn’t bring himself to face her.

The Mistress was not one to nobly sigh over a tray of food gone cold, declaring that she couldn’t be bothered to prepare food for someone who never came home, but in private there were times when she couldn’t stop the tears. I was probably the only one who knew that.

Nevertheless, this first marriage turned out to be very short due to the husband’s untimely death in an accident. One rainy night, the very same year I started working for them, he slipped and lost his footing on the outside staircase of the factory.

I swore to myself that I would keep my mouth shut as long as I live so that no one would ever know, but secretly I was glad he was dead.

The husband was only the third son and the head branch of the family already had sufficient male children, so the Mistress took Master Kyoichi and returned to her own family. I went with them.

And so, when the Mistress married for the second time, it was as though I too was marrying into the family. It was towards the end of 1932 when, with son and maid in tow, the Mistress joined the Hirai family.

I’m now living in a one bedroom flat my nephew rented for me. The municipal housing I’d spent many years in was pulled down the month before last. Most of the residents there had been single elderly people, and we were given priority on this low-rent place, for which I’m grateful.

On the other hand, it’s one of these new-fangled, all-electric places and even when all you want is to run a bath, you have to press so many buttons it’s like you’re issuing orders to the electrical system, which is really quite exasperating.

My nephew’s second son very kindly came over to set it up for me so I can get by, but it’s a nuisance having to call them up whenever I can’t work it out.

Homes these days are very different to the way they used to be, and I don’t understand them anymore. I don’t feel attached to things and don’t mind where I live, but if I may be permitted to give my opinion, between you and me there was just one house where I was resolved to remain until the end. You may consider it strange and even impudent of me to wish to live out my days in the small servant’s room I was allocated in the house Mr. Hirai built in 1935, but that’s how I felt. Master Konaka’s mansion was right in the middle of Tokyo, but the Hirais’ small residence was in the suburbs. New houses were being built at a remarkable pace in the major developments that were happening along the private railways.

In any case, Mr. Hirai had apparently told Mistress Tokiko at the marriage negotiations that he intended to build a house right away, a Western-style house with a red tile roof, and she was fond of telling me that this had been the clincher for her in accepting his proposal.

Three years after she married for the second time, the two-storey house topped with red tiles was built. This photo from the day it was finished shows the Master and Mistress, young Master Kyoichi, and myself. The Master and Mistress are seated with the child on the Master’s lap, and I am standing behind the Mistress to her right. Nobody today would think I was a maid, they would probably assume we were a family of four. There aren’t any plants in the garden yet so the porch shows up dazzlingly white, even for a black and white photograph.

But for some reason, I can’t remember much about the day we moved in, or about the day the photo was taken. My first clear memory of the house is a scene on a winter’s day soon after we started living there. I had just come back from running errands, and as I entered through the tradesmen’s door I heard a voice coming from the direction of the drawing room.