Yukiko

It’s raining outside. We cats don’t like rain: sparrows are hiding, there are puddles everywhere, so when you come back inside you have to lick your paws for a long time. I sniff the radiator - the black disc of the heat regulator with the words “Cold - Warm” is turned to the warm side, so I jump on the windowsill. Next to me is Yukiko, she’s rewriting some documents. Each has to be rewritten three

times, so I can hear her thoughts wander to her past when she was still living in Japan.

When I was a little girl, she says, I dreamed of being a writer when I grew up. When your father is the director of the Kagawa Lyceum, this means you have a huge library at home, and I used to devour all the books in it. I remember very difficult lyceum exams, when to relax my brain I began writing poems. I was published by the magazines Reijokai (Young Ladies’ World) and Shôjokurabu (The Girls’ Club). I was very happy. I was learning to write tankas, I wanted to become a famous poet. Or an artist! Or to go to Paris and open my own beauty salon there. I had so many bold dreams - I must have inherited it from my mother: as soon as dainty wrist watches appeared in Japan, she was the first of all women to buy one for herself; when high-heeled shoes came into fashion - she kicked away her slippers and even wore them around the house.

Japan became increasingly isolated from the rest of the world, but we felt no signs of impending war in the safety of our family home. My father died really unexpectedly. After the funeral, I moved to Tokyo, where my brother worked as an insurance agent. Once he brought a friend home, and he, as soon as saying hello, pulled out a notebook, wrote down a few hieroglyphs and showed it to me.

- Can you read it for me? - he asked, smiling slyly.
- Senpo! - sounds like an artist’s pseudonym, or wait, maybe it’s

Chiune?
His face lit up:
- No one has ever managed to read my name like this, Chiune. You are a real gem, Miss Yukiko.

That’s how we got to know each other. Chiune visited us so often that he almost became a family member, another brother listening to my chatter. His attention baffled me, a simple girl: he had already been Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs in Manchuria before arriving in Tokyo.

Unbelievably brave and stubborn: just imagine, he disobeyed his own father! He deliberately failed the medical entrance exams because he wanted to study English. After graduating from Nagoya Lyceum, he entered Waseda University and joined the Christian Baptist Brotherhood to learn English more quickly. As his father refused to give him money, he had to work along with studying.

Once, delivering parcels, he saw an announcement that the State Department was looking for students. They explained to him at the ministry that right now Russian-speaking students were being sought instead of English. And so? The nineteen-year-old goes to Manchuria, enrolls at Harbin University, comes to live with a family of White Russians who have escaped the revolution, and learns the language in a flash. He immediately adopts the Orthodox faith and marries Klaudia Semionova Apollonova, and from now on can be called Pavlov Sergeyevich. He speaks Manchurian, English, Russian, German and French perfectly.

He served in the army. Worked as a Russian language teacher. He gave lectures to students on Soviet politics and the economic situation. He discussed with the Soviet Union about the railway in northern Manchuria. And what happened after that? He “couldn't stand the cruelty towards the local Chinese population and returned to Tokyo”, was it so?

Some stories of his life are still unclear to me - for example, why did he divorce his wife? But it’s not my business anyway.

He spoke to me so clearly and calmly, looking into my eyes with such consideration like no man before him. We knew each other for several months, when one day Chiune, as serious as I had never seen him before, asked:

- Will you marry me? - Why do you want to marry me? - Because I could take you abroad with no

shame.