The Little House

Chapter 1: The House with a Red Tile Roof-3

The Master was at work and young Master Kyoichi was supposed to be taking his afternoon nap, so I thought a visitor must have turned up unexpectedly and hurried through to see. However, I could only hear the Mistress’s voice. I peeped around the half-open door and saw her seated comfortably before the lit stove.

I had never before seen the Mistress indulging herself, taking tea alone when nobody else was at home, but perhaps now she had that house she was finally able to relax and be herself. She had poured tea for one in a Koransha blue-and-white porcelain teacup with gold edging. It was apparently part of a gift set from her aunt on the occasion of her first marriage and had been stored away without being used for quite some time, but I had heard her say a number of times how much it suited this house.

‘Oh my goodness, no! The house is ours, but the land it’s built on is leased,’ she said, looking down bashfully despite being alone.

It appeared she was practicing answers to hypothetical questions, such as what to say if someone commented, My, I never imagined you would be able to build such a splendidly elegant new house! I’m really very envious, you know.

The imaginary conversation apparently continued, Even if the land is leased, the house is your own, isn’t it? for she now answered, ‘Well, that’s true, but we scrimped and saved, economizing on everything. You’d never be able to build a house otherwise,’ waving her hand before her face in modest denial.

‘And we borrowed money from the bank, you know. A mortgage is a must, it really is. On top of that we’ve juggled this and that to make ends meet. It doesn’t make all that much difference financially whether you rent or buy, and once you pay the mortgage off, the property’s yours, so it’s cheap at the price.’

Having said this, the Mistress frowned and made quite a scary face. Perhaps the conversation continued, Oh yes, that’s a good way to do it, it’s cheaper than I thought, for she didn’t seem at all pleased.

‘Well, that’s true, but we scrimped and saved, economizing on everything. You’d never be able to build a house otherwise,’ she said, repeating the same line as before, and this time added rather boastfully, ‘It’s just a regular suburban house but my husband insisted on having a porch, so it is on the large side.’

Then she went on, ‘My husband said at the marriage negotiations that he was planning to build a house, you know. That was three years ago, and I didn’t really believe him.’

Oh, it was a promise he made when you married? What a good husband he is! As if in response to such a comment, the Mistress smiled sweetly and brought her teacup up to her face. She looked delighted by the sweet scent of Lipton’s tickling her nose.

Then she abruptly shifted in her chair and I was about to go in, but what she did next was so graceful that I continued to watch, unable to bring myself to disturb her.

Reflected in the glass of a display cabinet was a twenty-five-year-old woman in her prime, her hair in fashionable waves painstakingly created with a curling iron and gathered demurely at the back of her head. Checking her reflection, she patted her curls and smiled to herself. You could say it was a rather youthful hairstyle for the mother of a child who would soon be starting at elementary school, but the Master was apparently very taken with her youth and didn’t want her clothes and hair to become too housewifely.

I don’t think anyone could deny her former husband, the drunkard, was more handsome than Master Hirai. After all, the Master was over ten years her senior, middle-aged, short and bespectacled, with thinning hair. He was on his first marriage, and certainly seemed more interested in work than women.

But the Mistress knew very well that having a man as handsome as the heartthrob actor Kazuo Hasegawa at her side did not make a woman happy, and surely had no illusions about her second marriage.

Given her painful experience first time round, she clearly considered the most important aspect of the marriage to be that there was sufficient money and that she would be able to afford some amount of luxury. I myself never married but, well, I can understand this.

When I close my eyes, I can vividly recall that suburban house with its triangular red roof. Going through the gate, along the path and up three stone steps brought you to the porch that the Master was so proud of.

You slid open the east-facing front door to enter the cool and spacious entrance hall, from which a wood-floored corridor led straight ahead, dividing the house north and south in a layout that was fashionable at the time.

There were three rooms on the sunny south side of the house. Next to the entrance hall was the Western-style reception room-c*m-study the Mistress was so fond of, with bookshelves, a display cabinet, a solidly built desk, and a fine dining table and chairs purchased in Yokohama. The ceiling was crossed with black beams, like the rafters in a mountain lodge, from which hung an electric light bulb encased in a pretty lampshade.

Next to that was the tatami-floored living room, and beyond that the couple’s bedroom. Those two rooms were separated from the southside garden by an enclosed veranda generally referred to as the sunroom, which broadened out by the bedroom where a coffee table and two chairs with armrests had been placed so they could sit looking out over the garden.

On the northern side of the central corridor were the rooms that required a water supply: the kitchen, bathroom and lavatory. The maid’s room where I lived was on this north side. It was beneath the stairs leading up to the first floor, located to the right of the entrance hall. Upstairs there were two rooms, one of which would one day be young Master Kyoichi’s bedroom.

This layout encompassed everything they needed, but it really wasn’t big for a house built at that time. But houses don’t need to be large to be good. Something I learned from that house is that functionality is what matters. At the time, the usual size for a master bedroom was eight tatami mats, so theirs was on the small side at only six, and the upstairs rooms were just six and four respectively. Had they rented a house, they could certainly have found somewhere a little bigger.

Instead, pretty touches like the stained glass in the front door and round window in the reception room that Mistress Tokiko had coveted were all incorporated, and she seemed truly satisfied with the design.

She would often say that some of the girls she’d been at school with now lived in a much higher class of residential development and others were renting somewhat grander houses than hers, but if you look above yourself there’s no end to it. She was just happy to own a house that suited her.

I was reluctant to interrupt her when she looked so content having tea on her own, but having just come back from running errands I could hardly stay silent.

‘Well, I wonder. Things will be hard from now, I suppose,’ she said.

I didn’t know what was going to be hard, but perhaps she felt she should at least show some humility when people praised her. Continuing her imaginary conversation, she put her right hand to her mouth, then gently put her left hand alongside it, tilted her head to the right, narrowed her eyes to a bowstring, and laughed. Seizing my chance, I quickly returned to the tradesman’s entrance and called out breezily, ‘I’m back now.’

‘What did my sister say?’ the Mistress said, turning to me unperturbed as I went into the reception room. ‘Oh my, another gift?’

That day I had taken some cakes to her elder sister in Azabu, to thank her for the gift she’d sent to congratulate them on moving into the new house.

‘She instructed me to tell you they’d just happened to receive the same gift from different people, and it would be such a pity to waste it. She’ll be sure to visit soon, but just now it’s such an important time for young Master Masato, what with his exams coming up, so she’ll come once they’re over.’

Mistress Tokiko frowned with displeasure upon hearing this. The Mistress in Azabu, or Mistress Azabu as I called her, was obsessed with her son Masato’s exams for entrance into middle school and had started sending him to cram school from year five of elementary with a view to getting him into a prestigious seven-year secondary school. Every Sunday, she would drag him by the scruff of his neck to the mock examinations held at the Aoyama Kaikan cultural centre.

Mistress Tokiko was sick to death of hearing about how this year it was the real thing, and he would at least be made to take exams for the most selective schools, be they city or prefectural schools. ‘If she waits that long,’ she said in vexation, ‘Our newly-built house won’t be new anymore, will it?’

She turned off the stove, picked up the pot and teacup, and took them through to the kitchen. I followed her, still holding the paper-wrapped package, and muttered half to myself, ‘Yes, and what’s more…’

The Mistress frowned. ‘There’s more?’

‘No, no, it’s nothing.’

‘What? Tell me!’

‘Um, but…’

‘What is it? Did my sister say something bad?’

‘Yes, well…’

I was fairly bursting with indignation and wanted to talk about it, but I was afraid the Mistress would fly into a rage and couldn’t bring myself to say it. Mistress Azabu often said things that rubbed people up the wrong way.

‘What did she say?’

‘Are you sure you don’t mind me telling you?’

‘Yes, it’s fine. I’m prepared.’

‘She said she couldn’t understand why you would want to build your own home even after Tokyo burned to the ground following the big earthquake. It should be clear that houses and property are not things to own, that’s what she said.’

‘Oh my.’ The Mistress’s nose flared with anger.

‘Even after the Takarazuka Theatre in Kobe burned down last month, she said too.’

‘Dear me!’

‘All she can think of is Master Masato, you know. While she was at it, she even dragged Master Kyoichi into it.’

‘Oh dear, what did she say?’

‘She was going on about how if you’re going to spend money, better to spend it on your child than on a house. Since there’s also the matter of his father, if you don’t get Master Kyoichi studying hard soon, it’ll be nigh-on impossible to get him into a decent middle school. I swear I was getting quite vexed.’

‘Oh, school, school! Really, these mothers fixated on their children’s examinations are just too much,’ she said, not bothering to hide her irritation. ‘Well, I suppose there’s a touch of jealousy there.’

‘There’s no doubt of that,’ I concurred vigorously, noting her tone of defiance. ‘Being siblings, there’s surely some rivalry. It’s best not to say anything, you know.’

I was furious at the snide comment about her first marriage. Her first husband had had his faults, it’s true, but this was hardly the time to bring up the past. Since she had remarried, the national economy had been rapidly picking up, exports were brisk, and at last she seemed able to put those days of poverty behind her.

At any rate, the company Master Hirai worked for was prospering. The year he married Mistress Tokiko, he resigned from his previous employment and took a position as sales manager of a toy manufacturer. From what I heard, he had consequently received an astonishing increase in salary.