Contents
Title Page
Spring Garden
About the Publisher
About the Authors
Copyright
THE WOMAN was looking at something over her first-floor balcony, her hands gripping the railing, her neck craned forward.
From the ground floor, Taro watched the woman. She did not move. The sunlight that reflected off her black-framed glasses meant that Taro couldn’t tell which direction she was looking, but she was faced straight ahead, towards the concrete wall and, beyond it, the house of Mrs Saeki, who owned the flats.
It was a block of flats shaped like an L flipped and rotated so that the short section was hanging down. Taro’s flat was in the short section. The woman on the balcony was at the far end of the long section, the flat farthest away from his. He had happened to catch sight of her as he went to shut the small window looking out onto the courtyard—although courtyard was really too grand a word for that space, three metres wide with weeds growing in the gaps between the paving stones, and to top it all, a sign that read no entry. With the arrival of spring, the concrete wall separating the flats from Mrs Saeki’s house had suddenly become thick with ivy. The two trees growing immediately behind the wall, a maple and a plum, had been left untended, and their branches now stretched over it. Behind the trees was the two-storey wooden house belonging to Mrs Saeki which, to go by its appearance, must have been pretty old. As usual, there were no signs of anyone at home.
The woman hadn’t moved an inch. From where Taro stood, he could see only the concrete wall and the roof of Mrs Saeki’s house, but he assumed that from the first floor the woman could probably see down to the ground level of the house and its garden. Still, what could have been so fascinating about a view like that? The most striking thing about the house’s red corrugated iron roof and its dark brown wooden walls was the extent of their wear and tear. It was now a year since Mrs Saeki, who’d been living on her own, had moved into a care home for seniors. She’d looked spritely enough whenever Taro saw her sweeping the front of her house, but apparently she was about to turn eighty-six. All this Taro had learnt from the estate agent.
Beyond the roof of Mrs Saeki’s house, Taro could see the sky. It had been perfectly clear when he woke up, but now there were a few clouds—bright white lumps, the sort that usually appeared in midsummer, although it was only May. Looking at the tops of the clouds that bulged right up and towered above the rest, he thought about how they actually had to be several kilometres above the earth. The contrast between them and the deep blue of the sky was so strong it hurt his eyes.
Taro imagined himself standing on a cloud. This was something he did often. After walking for miles, he would reach the cloud’s edge. Grasping the edge, he would look down at the city thousands of metres below. He could see the narrow little roads intertwined, the roofs of houses clustered together. Cars the size of insects zipped along the streets. Small aeroplanes cut across the space between the city and the cloud. For some reason, in this vision of Taro’s, the planes alone were cartoon drawings, nothing else. Behind their glass-fronted noses, the cockpits were empty. The planes made no sound. In fact, it wasn’t just the planes that were silent—there was no noise of any kind anywhere. As Taro stood up slowly, he bumped his head up against the top of the sky. There was nobody else around.
Taro had been picturing this exact same sequence of events ever since he was a child. After it ran its course this time, he looked towards the balcony at the far end of the first floor and noticed that, all of a sudden, the scene contained a white square. Looking more closely, he saw that the woman had propped a piece of drawing paper—no, it was a sketchpad—on top of the railing. Was she drawing the trees, or what? The balcony was south-facing, and the building did not have much in the way of eaves. It was two o’clock in the afternoon. Surely too bright for sketching.
From time to time, the woman would lean her body forward to get a better view of whatever she was drawing, and Taro would get a glimpse of her face. She had shortish hair in no particular style—a fringed bob, at a stretch. Taro had seen her around after she moved into the block in February, and he guessed she was in her thirties, about the same age as he was, maybe younger. She was short, and seemingly always dressed in a T-shirt and jogging bottoms. All of a sudden, the woman lifted her neck, and her head turned in Taro’s direction. Taro realized then that it wasn’t Mrs Saeki’s house that the woman was looking at. It was the one next to it, on the side of Taro’s flat: the sky-blue house.
Right then, the sharp whistle of a bird pierced the air, and there was a rustle of leaves. In the next instant, Taro’s and the woman’s eyes met. Before he had time to look away, she had disappeared, taking her sketchpad with her. He heard the door to her balcony sliding shut. She didn’t come out again.
When Taro came home from work on Wednesday, one of the first-floor tenants was standing at the top of the stairs outside his flat. It wasn’t the woman on the balcony, but the woman from the flat next to hers. Taro guessed she was older than his mother; the woman had lived in the building for a good while.
The block of flats Taro lived in had the name View Palace Saeki III, and it was made up of eight flats: four on the ground floor, four on the first. Instead of having room numbers, the flats were identified by animals of the Chinese zodiac. So, starting with Taro’s flat in the short section, the flats on the ground floor had the names Pig, Dog, Rooster, Monkey, and on the first floor, Sheep, Horse, Snake, Dragon. It was common these days for people not to put their names on the nameplates on their doors, or on their letterboxes either, so the flat names were all there was to go on. Since this woman lived in the Snake Flat, Taro thought of her as Mrs Snake. She was a friendly sort who would always strike up conversation with him whenever they ran into each other.
It was Mrs Snake who was standing at the top of the stairs, looking down to the ground floor. She calculated her timing carefully, descending just as Taro got to his door. Mrs Snake always had her hair swept up, and wore clothes of unusual cuts that could have been fashioned out of old kimonos. Today she was wearing a pair of loose-fitting, drop-crotch trousers made of fabric with a turtle pattern, together with a black shirt.
“You haven’t lost your key by any chance, have you?”
“My key?” Without thinking, Taro glanced down at the key to his flat that he was holding.
“This one,” Mrs Snake said, showing him a key with a mushroom-shaped key ring.
Taro recognized it immediately.
“It was lying on the ground here this morning. But you’ve got yours, don’t you?”
“Actually, that’s the key to my office. At work, I mean. I thought I had forgotten it at home. Thanks very much.”
“Oh, now that’s a relief! I was worried what you’d think about an old woman like me suddenly turning up with your key in my hand! I didn’t want you to think I’d taken it, you know. It really was just lying right here, on the ground.”
“Of course. Thank you very much.”
Mrs Snake stepped towards Taro with the key, and Taro took it from her. She really was very short. She looked up at him with an almost childlike expectancy.
“So you were unable to get into work today, then?”
“Oh, no, it’s not just me at the office. There are other employees at the company too.”
“Ah, I see, I see. That makes sense. How stupid I am, really! I do apologize.”
“No, no, not at all.”
Standing there, Taro remembered the dried sardines he had in his bag. The fish, marinated in soy sauce and mirin and then dried, were a regional speciality a colleague had brought back for him from a business trip, but Taro wasn’t a fan of dried fish of any kind.
He pulled out th
e packet and asked Mrs Snake, “Can I offer you this? It doesn’t quite qualify as a thank-you present or anything, but still.”
The sardines, as it turned out, were a favourite of Mrs Snake’s, and she seemed genuinely delighted with the gift. So much so, in fact, that Taro felt a bit embarrassed. “Thank you so much, thank you really so much!” she said over and over, as she climbed up the stairs.
Inside his flat, Taro studied the key that Mrs Snake had returned to him. He’d bought the mushroom key ring from a vending machine. There were several different kinds of mushroom key rings dispensed at random, and all came in little plastic capsules. This one was shimeji. He recalled that he’d had another key ring too—in the shape of a king oyster mushroom. Taro tended to lose things, so he’d attached the mushroom key rings to his keys to make them easier to find. Maybe the king oyster mushroom key ring had got pulled off, but there was no loose metal ring or anything. He thought to himself how it might be a good idea to attach some kind of a bell to his keys so he would hear it ring when they fell.
Taro slipped the ready-made meal of chargrilled beef and rice that he’d bought in a convenience store into the microwave, and opened a can of beer. Then stepping onto the balcony to fetch the towel drying there, he looked towards the Dragon Flat at the far end of the second floor. He could see that lights were on. It was three days since he’d seen the woman on the balcony, and he hadn’t caught a glimpse of her since.
The dried sardines had been a gift from his colleague Numazu, who’d brought them back from Okayama, where he’d gone on business on Tuesday. He had taken off the Monday before to have a long weekend visiting his in-laws in Kushiro, in the east of Hokkaido, from where he’d brought back salmon jerky. Numazu had recently got married, and as his wife was an only child, he’d taken her surname as his own. It was an unusual surname that Numazu was quite fond of, and he immediately ordered a set of business cards with his new name. This was rather different from married colleagues of theirs who still used their maiden names at work. Taro hadn’t got used to calling Numazu by his new name yet.
At lunch, Numazu struck up a conversation with Taro. He was totally happy about his name change, he said, but he hadn’t considered the fact that adopting his wife’s surname meant he would have to be buried in her family grave. He had always expected that he’d end up buried alongside his family in the port town in Shizuoka Prefecture where he’d grown up (there was a city in Shizuoka actually called Numazu, but the town that Numazu came from was not it). His family’s plot was on the grounds of a temple surrounded by sloping mandarin fields that spent much of the year bathed in brilliant sunlight, so when Numazu saw his wife’s family grave—in the middle of a forest that would no doubt be freezing in winter—he felt sad. “If I was a woman, I wonder if I’d find it any easier to accept being buried with the family I’d married into,” Numazu said. “I can’t shake the feeling that it might be pretty uncomfortable, surrounded by the remains of people I don’t know.”
Taro thought about this, then he said, “Things are more flexible these days. You have options about where you can get buried. Like, there are forest graveyards now, where each person has a tree instead of a gravestone, and stuff like that. In my family, we divided up my father’s remains and scattered some of them.”
“In that case, I want to be buried in the garden of the house where I grew up. The dog I had when I was a kid is buried there. Cheetah was his name. I’d like to be buried next to Cheetah.”
Numazu then went on to tell Taro about Cheetah, a mongrel with cheetah-like black spots around his eyes that his brother had found and brought home. Cheetah loved chicken bones and would follow Numazu all the way to school. When Cheetah got older, he had problems with his hips, and couldn’t be taken for walks, but still lived to a ripe old age. He’d also got much bigger than anyone imagined, and digging the hole to bury him in had been no mean feat. As Numazu rattled off this eleven-year life history in the space of five minutes, he began to tear up.
“You know,” Taro said, changing the subject, “if you can make out the shape of the bones when a person is buried, it’s classified as illegal disposal of a body. You have to grind the bones up into powder before you bury them, or scatter them.”
“Did you?”
“It was a real struggle, actually. The bones were so hard.”
“I would have thought they’d be very brittle after they came out of the oven.”
Taro’s father had had good, strong bones and hardly a filling in his teeth. A while back, the government had launched the 80-20 Campaign, encouraging people to live into their eighties with twenty of their real teeth intact. Taro’s father had seemed like he was on target for it, but he died just before turning sixty. That was almost ten years ago. That meant it was almost ten years that Taro had been living in Tokyo.
To pulverize what was left of his father’s bones, Taro had used a mortar and pestle about the size of a sugar bowl. When he moved to Tokyo from his parents’ home in Osaka, he brought the mortar and pestle with him, and it was still in his flat now. Throughout the three years he’d been living with his wife—they’d divorced three years ago—the mortar and pestle had been stored in the cupboard where plates and bowls were kept. “Don’t you think you should find a better place for something as precious as that?” his wife had said to him several times. “I’m going to end up using it for food one of these days.” The mortar and pestle never got moved. Taro was a disorganized person, and he worried that if he moved it, he’d forget where it was. He also worried that if it wasn’t somewhere visible, he would forget that his father was dead. Sometimes he got the feeling that he’d already forgotten—about his father’s death, and about his existence too.
“I wonder what I should do,” Numazu had gone on. “If I wait till I’m dead to think about that stuff, it’ll be too late. Kushiro is so cold. It’s really wild and beautiful, but it’s bloody cold. I really can’t stand the cold.”
Taro was about to say that he wouldn’t feel the cold when he was dead, but it suddenly struck him that Numazu wasn’t actually wanting a conversation. He was just voicing the thoughts passing through his mind, and not looking for an answer. There were two other people in the office at that point, and they were without a doubt listening to what was being said, but neither of them uttered a word.
Taro tossed the salmon jerky from Numazu onto the shelves which had originally been for books but which now held dishes. Then, he peered around the cups and glasses on the third shelf to be sure that the mortar and pestle was still there. He’d bought it in a houseware store two days after his father died. He’d come to realize that it was a mistake to grind up his father’s remains with such a thing. The mortar was lined with narrow grooves, a little too perfect for ashes to get stuck in. Taro was loath to rinse them away, though, so to this day those little furrows, like scratches made with a comb, still had some fine white powder in them. He couldn’t see it, but he knew it must be there.
His father’s cremated remains had been divided between the family grave in his hometown and the Buddhist altar in his mother’s home. Some, which Taro had taken with him and ground up finely, had been scattered off a cape in Ehime Prefecture where his father had often gone fishing.
Carried by the wind, washed away by the waves, those finely ground ashes had soon disappeared. They had been the particles of the same bones whose powder was now stuck inside the mortar. What parts of his father were they? Taro wondered. Had those hard, white pieces of bone he’d put into the mortar really started off in his father’s body? It was crazy to think that those same bones that he’d ground up in there had once been sitting around, walking about. One time, in primary school, Taro had split his forehead open on a metal pole and his classmates had all come up to him, one after another, to stare at the wound. They said you could see bone. Taro himself, though, had never got to see it. He still felt sore about that now.
The beer was too cold. Taro’s refrigerator, which he’d bought second-hand, had
been making funny noises recently.
On Friday morning, as Taro was about to leave for work, the woman from the Dragon Flat happened to be passing in front of the door to his flat. With her eyes fixed ahead of her, she didn’t notice him. She continued walking in the opposite direction to the station. Taro paused for a moment. He couldn’t have said what exactly he was thinking about or why, but he found himself following
The woman walked at a leisurely pace. She passed the house next to their block of flats, a building that looked like an enormous vault surrounded by exposed concrete walls, then took a right at the corner. Taro waited until she was out of sight, then approached the corner himself. The vault seemed to have a kind of courtyard within its walls, and the only windows onto the street were extremely small. He’d once caught sight of a Range Rover coming out of the garage door, now firmly shut, but had never seen any of the people who lived there. He stopped at the corner and peered in the direction the woman had gone.
She had stopped in front of the sky-blue house, which was next to the concrete vault, and was stretching her short body as tall as it would go in an attempt to see over the wall. With her neck craned, she moved her head from side to side, then set off walking again, her eyes still focused on the sky-blue house. She was wearing a creased T-shirt and jogging bottoms, with a beanie that he guessed was to cover unkempt hair. It was not the sort of look you would go for if you were expecting to be seen by anyone. In fact, the combination of the hat and her black-framed glasses made her look pretty suspicious. She turned right again, round past the white wall.
The sky-blue house was certainly an eye-catching structure. It looked like the sort of grand, Western-style mansions that had sprung up in certain areas of Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The horizontal wooden planks were painted a vivid sky blue, and the roof, tiled in terracotta, was a flattish pyramid, with a decoration at the top shaped like the tip of an arrow.
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