The Little House, by Nakajima Kyoko

Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori

(2010, translated 2019)

Darf Publishers

(Novel)

Opening Ms. Nakajima’s book we meet Taki, a retired house servant who has recently enjoyed some success as a writer of helpful household tips for housewives: Granny Taki’s Super Housework Book. Proud as she is of her achievement, she yearns to write something more personal: a memoir of her career as a house servant in the suburbs of Tokyo. Although she is unsure of her publisher’s interest in the book, she begins composing a story of her life, focusing particularly on her long service for the Hirai family, beginning before the second Japanese Invasion of Manchuria and through the Second Sino-Japanese War and what the Japanese referred to as the Greater East Asian War–World War II.  Taki was a country girl, one of five children who all went into household service. At thirteen, she came to Tokyo and worked for a novelist, his wife, and their children. It was there that she was first introduced to an anecdote concerning John Stuart Mill, a maid, a manuscript, a fire, and Thomas Carlyle. Subsequently, she began working for Master Asano, his young wife Tokiko, and their son Kyoichi. Taki was fourteen, her mistress was twenty-two. The mistress was instrumental in helping Taki lose her country accent and learn the Tokyo dialect. Shortly after the birth of his son, Master Asano began drinking; he died in a fall leaving his factory. Not long after this tragedy, Master Hirai, the manager of a toy factory, married the widow Tokiko. It was then that Taki began her service at the little house, a European-style house with a red-tile roof on a hilltop. Though her challenges at the little house were many—young Master Kyoichi suffered from polio as a child, and she managed the household through the deprivations of two wartimes, ninety-year-old Taki considers the little house the only place she ever considered “home.” Though Taki’s voice is deceptively direct, she is acutely aware of the nuances of the people around her. For example, a lack of a certain scent suggests to her that her new master is Ms. Tokiko’s husband in name only. She also detects the seeds of an affair before it even begins. And when a family friend of the Hirais, Miss Mutsuko, quotes a passage from the real-life author Nobuko Yoshiya, Taki is attuned to her intimation, recognizing Class S Series literature, which features the same-sex love shared by teenage girls. In addition to her rising awareness of the various forms love takes, Taki learns about the war’s impact on the tinplate toys of her master’s factory, the artists her young mistress admires, and the manga a young architect brings for Master Kyoichi. Also, she becomes an air raid warden, and she manages to negotiate in the black market in order to keep food on her master’s table. As the war escalates, she must finally return home, where she works first in an airplane factory and later as a camp mother for a group of forty children sent out to the country to avoid the air raids that threaten the major cities. As she states early on, few people remember what life was like in those days, and though her grandson Takeshi is stunned to discover she knows very little of what the history books say about the war, she remembers a Tokyo and a lifestyle that will never be again.

“I only had to hear the Mistress talk of her experiences for me to feel as though they were my own. Her account of the Kabuki actor Uzaemon playing the part of the unfortunate lover Yosaburo in the play Kirare yosa made him sound positively seductive! It was so vivid I almost felt like I’d seen him play the part myself. And she made bathing in the sea on the Shonan coast sound like so much fun that I felt like I’d experienced being in the water. If I ever had the opportunity to do any of the things the Mistress spoke of, those were the things I didn’t want to miss out on.”