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Excerpt

Excerpt

Inheritance from Mother

“So how much do we get back from Golden?”

Mitsuki was on the telephone with her older sister, Natsuki, who asked the question. “Golden” was the private, exclusive nursing home where their mother had been living. Its full name was “Golden Years,” but everyone always called it “Golden.”

On this late-fall night the window by the desk was closed, but instinctively Mitsuki lowered her voice in reply. “Around seventeen million yen, I believe.”

“What? You mean they keep a whole ten million yen even though she was there such a short time?”

“Yes, it looks that way.”

Golden charged an initial deposit of twenty-seven million yen, far more than their mother’s dwindling savings would cover. They had managed to scrape up money for the deposit and the anticipated high monthly fees by selling the 2,400 square feet of land in Chitose Funabashi, Tokyo, where the family home had been.

Their mother had actually lived in Golden just four and a half months, but her room had been kept on the books throughout her three-and-a-half-month stay in the hospital with pneumonia, making a total of eight months.

Once she saw that her mother was certain to die, Mitsuki had taken to opening the nursing home pamphlet and studying the page with the refund scale.

Inheritance from Mother
by by Minae Mizumura

  • Genres: Fiction
  • paperback: 464 pages
  • Publisher: Other Press
  • ISBN-10: 159051985X
  • ISBN-13: 9781590519851