Optic Nerve by Maria Gainza

Author:Maria Gainza
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781948226172
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2019-01-20T16:00:00+00:00

Twenty years after her students’ sudden departure, Amalia visited Tokyo. When she got up to her hotel room, she took out an old Filofax and dialed a number. Miuki answered and said she was pleased to hear from Amalia, though her voice was subdued. She had no plans that evening and agreed to meet in a bar in Shinjuku. Amalia arrived late after struggling to find a taxi, and it then took her some time to locate Miuki; the bar was deafeningly loud and mirrored pillars created a confusion of duplicated red-felt tablecloths, waiters, and bottles of whiskey. Finally she spotted her at the bar. Going over, first pawing the air in front of her face to check it wasn’t another trick of the eye, she found a woman well into her thirties, her allure faded; wrinkles fanned out at the corners of her eyes when she looked up, smiling. A walking stick with a tortoiseshell handle was resting against the adjacent stool. Miuki ordered them two beers and proceeded to talk nonstop, in surprisingly good Spanish.

Her mother was orphaned in World War II and then raised in a Catholic convent, she told Amalia. Her good looks and natural reserve had opened the door to a good marriage: in aspirational 1960s Japan, Catholic convents were considered a reliable source of decent wives. Her husband, however, was only interested in business. And when Miuki was born physically defective, he distanced himself even more. In fact, the Buenos Aires episode was a good illustration of how the marriage functioned: mother and daughter would be sent ahead somewhere to prepare the way, but in the interim the father would be given a different posting, and the women called back with no explanations.

Miuki’s mother died in a freak car accident soon after the return from Buenos Aires, and Miuki won a place at university to study history. She found the new environment difficult to adapt to. Her mother had dedicated herself totally to Miuki’s upbringing; all her life had been about polishing her, in some attempt to help her avoid experiencing pain. The result was the temperament of a delicate hothouse flower, and when her university peers refused to make exceptions for her, she found life extremely difficult to navigate. She fainted on the library steps one day, and a passing medical student came to her aid. He graduated shortly after, and a year later they were married. She gave up her studies to accompany him to the town of Matsumoto, where he had found work in the municipal hospital. Two years later they divorced. Miuki’s exquisite manners became a source of vexation for her husband. She was so much more refined than his colleagues’ wives, who never accepted her as one of them. “They polished you too much, Miuki,” he’d say during their fights. “They spoiled you.”

Miuki went back to Tokyo. Her father suffered from diabetes, and had gone blind; he needed someone at his side. “What else was I going to do?” she said to Amalia in the bar.

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