Spring Garden

by Tomoka Shibasaki

  On the white wall that encircled the house, the plasterer’s trowel marks formed a pattern resembling scales. From the narrow road, only the first floor of the house was visible. On the left was the balcony, and on the right were two smallish sash windows that opened vertically. All of the window frames were painted the same colour as the terracotta roof.

  The black metal entrance gates were fabricated to look like brambles, and through them Taro could see that the stained-glass window next to the front door also had a plant motif. Some kind of iris or sweet flag, in ultramarine, green and yellow. From his flat, Taro could see the part of the house on the exact opposite side of this entranceway. There was a small stained-glass window there too, with a design of red dragonflies.

  The house made Taro think of the ijinkan in Kobe, the foreigners’ mansions he’d once visited on a school trip, though in comparison, this house seemed somehow lacking in harmony. The first impression was one of taste and refinement, but the more he looked at it, the more the roof, the walls, the stained glass, the concrete wall, the gates and the windows began to seem like they’d all been gathered together from different places randomly.

  To the left of the gates was a glass nameplate engraved with morio. Taro was under the impression that the house had been uninhabited for at least a year. When had this Morio family moved in? he wondered. A kiddie bike and a tricycle had been left by the front door. Outside the gates and to the left, parked in one of the house’s two allotted spaces, was a smallish car in a shade of blue very similar to that of the house.

  The garden took up about a third of the grounds of the house. It was positioned on the side facing away from his block of flats, so Taro couldn’t see it from his balcony. Inside the garden, by the corner in the road, there was a large crepe myrtle tree. Even Taro could recognize it by its smooth trunk, with its patches of bark peeling off in places. A little distance away were two deciduous trees, one medium-sized and one small. Taro had passed the house only occasionally, but he somehow remembered that the crepe myrtle flowered purple, that the medium-sized tree was a white plum, and the small one appeared to be some kind of wild cherry.

  When he got to the crepe myrtle, Taro stopped again, and peered around the corner where the woman had disappeared. She was already beginning to turn right by the next corner, thirty metres off. Right, right, right—in other words, she was headed back to their block of flats.

  The block where Taro lived was bounded on all sides by streets so narrow that only one car could get through at a time. Looked at from above, the block was divided like a grid into four equal squares. If their block of flats was in the upper left space, then the upper right space was entirely taken up by the concrete vault, the bottom right was the Western-style sky-blue house, and the bottom left was the old wooden house belonging to Mrs Saeki.

  The woman had walked a complete circle around that grid. After watching her vanish round the corner, Taro too turned right by the crepe myrtle. When he looked up at the sky-blue house, he saw that both the window that opened onto the balcony and the sash windows had their white blinds down. There was no laundry hanging on the balcony, or any drying racks either.

  At the next corner, by the gate to Mrs Saeki’s house, Taro checked once more to be sure of the woman’s movements. He caught sight of her disappearing inside their block of flats, as he predicted. A small white van with the words day service printed on the side was parked in front of Mrs Saeki’s house. Was she returning from the care home, or had something happened to her? He stood in that spot for a while but saw no one going in or coming out, and couldn’t hear anything, so he set off walking again, not turning the corner back to the flats but heading straight, in the direction of the train station.

  The next time Taro saw the woman was on Saturday, just after sundown. A slight rain was falling. The man from the Dog Flat, next to Taro’s, had moved out that day, and the moving company had been there since the early morning. The flats were built of wood and offered little protection from sound, so Taro had found himself unable to take a nap while the movers were knocking around. It was just when things had finally fallen quiet, and Taro was beginning to doze off, that his intercom buzzer rang.

  He could hear voices coming through the kitchen window that faced onto the outside corridor, but he picked up the phone to the intercom anyway, and heard a female voice say,

  “Hello, it’s me from the first floor.”

  Mrs Snake.

  Opening the door, Taro saw that it was not just Mrs Snake, but also the Dragon Woman, standing behind her.

  “Good evening!” Mrs Snake said brightly, with a big smile. Taro found himself recoiling. As usual, the Dragon Woman wore black-framed glasses and was without make-up, but today her hair was properly combed. And unlike her usual attire, the white shirt, blue cardigan and navy trousers she had on more or less constituted a matching outfit.

  “This is just a little something to say thanks for the sardines,” Mrs Snake said, and presented Taro with a small box wrapped in floral-patterned paper. The Dragon Woman just nodded and smiled. Looking at the two women standing there, around the same height, Taro was reminded of something, but was unsure what. Then it came to him: an old story of the stone statues of Jizō the Boddisatva that visited the house of an elderly couple who had shown them kindness, returning the favour.

  Mrs Snake looked between Taro and the Dragon Woman in turn. “You know, there’s only four of us left in this block! Let’s not be strangers now!”

  It was back in March that Taro had heard via the estate agent that Mrs Saeki had passed control of View Palace Saeki III, which had been there for thirty-one years, to her son, who had decided to demolish the building, so all residents with renewable leases were being asked to leave when their leases expired. With its cream-coloured exterior, the building didn’t look as old or dishevelled as its years might have suggested, and the plumbing and utilities all worked fine, so it seemed to Taro like a waste. He even felt a bit sorry for the building, being knocked down like that when it was younger than he himself was.

  Taro had moved in to the block three years ago, and had renewed his two-year lease last July, which meant he was able to stay on in his flat until July of next year.

  Not all the tenants had limited-period renewable contracts like he did. Those with regular, indefinite contracts were receiving a fair sum of money as compensation for their forced eviction, and perhaps because of that, those in the Horse, Sheep and Rooster Flats had all moved out by the first week of May. The person in the Dog Flat, a grumpy-looking man with steel-rimmed glasses, had been living in the building for over ten years. When Taro had bumped into him in the corridor not long ago, the man had told him he was thinking about digging in his heels to get them to raise the compensation, but now he was gone, and without even saying goodbye. The remaining flat, the Monkey Flat, was occupied by a young couple. Neither of them ever acknowledged Taro when they saw him, and the only thing he heard of them through the walls were their arguments.

  “Oh, well, in that case, I have another packet of dried fish if you’d like.”

  Taro went to fetch the salmon jerky from the kitchen, but when he came back with the packet in his hand, he realized he didn’t know whether he should give it to Mrs Snake or the Dragon Woman.

  “Oh, I got some last week, so you take this one,” Mrs Snake said to the Dragon Woman.

  “Oh, thank you so much! I just love salmon jerky. It goes so well with saké, don’t you think?”

  The Dragon Woman’s oddly animated voice went sinking into the concrete underfoot, damp with moisture from the sticky air.

  “If there’s anything at all I can be of help to you with, you must let me know, okay? I really mean it. Don’t be shy. Promise?”

  Mrs Snake went on repeating things like this, the Dragon Woman carried on smiling wordlessly, and then the two of them disappeared upstairs.

  When Taro opened up the box from Mrs Snake, he found a selection of individually wrapped filter coffee s
achets. They would be perfect for the office, Taro thought, and he decided to take them in the following week.

  It was fifteen minutes’ walk from Taro’s flat to the closest train station. He regretted not choosing somewhere a bit closer, but his divorce had meant he’d had to leave his previous place in a hurry, and his search had been rushed as a result. To add to that, it had been midsummer and so hot he’d been loath to spend too much time looking. The first flat he went to see roughly met his requirements, and the rent was cheap, so he decided why not, and didn’t look further. The lease was for only two years, after all, so by his thinking, once things settled down a bit in his life, he could easily move on again. But it was Taro’s nature to avoid doing anything that was a bother, and he liked the Pig Flat in View Palace Saeki III well enough since it meant saving on money and effort, so when his lease expired he renewed it. Avoiding bother was Taro’s governing principle. It wasn’t that he was a stick-in-the-mud. It was just that, rather than putting himself out in order to get the more pleasing or interesting things he stood to gain, he always opted for the least bothersome option. Bother still seemed to find its way into his life, however.

  The streets of Setagaya Ward, where he lived, were not easy to navigate. Taro had heard the story that GPS was originally invented to help people find their way around Setagaya, though he doubted it. But certainly, there was almost nowhere in the ward that formed a neat grid like the town where Taro had lived until the age of twenty-five, and there were a lot of one-way streets and dead ends. Nor was there a straight route from his flat to the station. Whichever way he took meant some circuitousness. He had three different routes he used alternately, which he’d figured out by studying the map app on his phone, and which all seemed to take about the same amount of time. When going to work, he selected one of the three routes, depending on which caught his fancy on that day.

  On the third of those routes, Taro would pass a very narrow alley that ran between two houses, narrow enough that a person could touch both houses if they stretched out their arms. He’d seen someone with a Shiba go through the alley once, and decided to take the path himself. The alley was paved with concrete slabs that sloped in a V in the middle, which he knew had to be covering a culvert. He’d become interested in this kind of stuff after seeing a TV programme that traced the course of an old river that had been filled in. In this very area, in fact, there were a number of tree-lined walkways that he knew had been created by rivers having been filled in. There were other small paths that, from the snaking course you could trace on a map, were very easy to imagine as having once been streams. When Taro emerged from that narrow alley, though, the V-shaped concrete slabs also came to an end. Consulting the map, he could find no indication that there ever had been a river in that area, and concluded that the water he heard running beneath must have been sewage. But then, a few days later, a little way from the alley, he happened upon a road going off at an odd angle from an intersection. He returned on his day off to check it out and found another alley extending diagonally from that point. It curved gently, and was dotted along both sides with old single-storey houses. The somewhat dingy alley led to a house with bags of rubbish and piles of futon in front of it. Directly across was a primary school. Crouching down, Taro could hear the sound of running water from the gutter at the side of the alley. These gutters, too, he’d become aware of from late-night TV.

  Once, when he’d left the TV on past midnight, he happened to catch a programme about a person whose job was checking for leaks in underground water pipes. Using a device something like a stethoscope that he applied to the asphalt, the man listened to the sounds that could give him clues where there might be leaks. He would make his way around the residential streets in the dead of night. The footage of him filmed from behind, as he quietly went about his work while everyone was asleep, had something immensely dignified about it.

  Sometimes Taro wished that he had that kind of job. He wanted to do the sort of work that drew upon a rare skill developed through experience, and that required the passion of a real artisan—a profession that wasn’t much known about, but that was indispensable in sustaining people’s daily lives.

  Until his divorce, Taro had been a hairdresser, managing one of the branches of a hair salon owned by his wife’s father. His father-in-law was a good-natured man and, saying that Taro’s relationship with his daughter didn’t affect his evaluation of Taro’s work skills, had offered Taro a job in a branch in the neighbouring prefecture. But Taro’s back pain had been getting worse, and he had grown sick of the whole lifestyle that was a part of hair salons anyway, so he was keen to be done with it. When he went home to attend the Buddhist ceremony marking the sixth anniversary of his father’s death, he learnt from an old high school classmate that the Tokyo company his younger brother had started was hiring, and decided to apply.

  He was now in his third year at the company, a five-person business that managed PR for other firms, and created display booths and promotional banners and signs. The job had been a total change for him, but as the manager of a hair salon, his duties had included dealing with advertising and promotion, so he wasn’t a complete novice with that, and it felt fresh and exciting to have meetings with clients here and there rather than being stuck in the same space all day. So long as he did the tasks that had been assigned to him, he’d get his salary at the end of the month—which was less than before, but still. Compared to the years he’d spent staring at endless pages of monthly sales targets and customer counts while worrying about how to deal with employees and whether he was pleasing his boss, which was to say, his father-in-law, mostly going without days off, this was a piece of cake.

  A little while back, during a meeting with a client who owned an imported food store and was opening a new branch, Taro discovered that the client had once lived near View Palace Saeki III.

  “There’s a lot of celebrities living in that area, aren’t there?” the client said.

  “Yes, I guess so,” Taro replied.

  The client mentioned a few names: an elderly stage actor who was now in suspense films on TV, an enka singer caught up in a debt scandal, and so on. Taro tried to seem interested.

  Not long after, while taking the second of his three routes to the station, Taro discovered a house with the nameplate of one of the celebrities mentioned by the client. The actor had been the lead in a superhero series, though it was before the time when Taro had watched it. The actor’s house was a three-storey affair with a façade of white tiles, its left side in the form of a half-cylinder. Looking up, Taro saw that one of its windows, curved to fit the cylindrical wall, was open, but for some reason, the house still didn’t look at all like a sort of place people actually lived in. If the man himself came out at this very moment, Taro thought, I’d probably just think, well, there he is. Back when Taro was a kid, though, it would have been a different matter. He felt sure that seeing someone from TV walking around his neighbourhood, dressed totally differently from how he looked on screen, would have had a huge effect on him—he imagined it wouldn’t have been joy he felt so much as confusion. Taro had liked superhero programmes when he was young, but he’d been the sort of child who’d got the most pleasure from the silly parts. He’d once made a kid at nursery cry by telling him that superheroes were just made up.

  Taro had been brought up in Osaka, and to him back then, the places he saw on TV programmes seemed very far away, with no relation to the place he lived. Even the street scenes that popped up in the background looked nothing like the streets he knew, with its reclaimed land surrounded by factories. The way people spoke on TV was completely different as well—they spoke Tokyo Japanese, not Osaka dialect. For that reason, he’d been able to laugh at the programmes in safety. What would it have been like if the world from TV had actually existed in the place he’d grown up in? He’d probably have been unable to tell which version was real, and been too freaked out to leave the house. He wondered now how kids who grew up in a place like this
were able to tell the difference between the two worlds.

  Maybe, Taro thought to himself, maybe the person who’d moved into that sky-blue house was a celebrity too. That would mean the Dragon Woman was either a diehard fan, or else she was just a snoop. Either way, Taro thought, that would be a pretty boring solution to the mystery.

  In the middle of the night, Taro was woken by the sound of a crow cawing. Wanting to keep on sleeping, he didn’t open his eyes. He could hear the scratching of the crow’s feet, too, and figured it must have been walking across the roof of Mrs Saeki’s house. It was then he realized he needed to take his rubbish out. Funny as it was, it seemed like the crows were better at remembering the day for rubbish collection than he was. Taro had always thought crows couldn’t see in the dark, though. Had they suddenly developed nocturnal vision? Were they all going around in search of that owl that had dyed the crow’s wings black and fled? Wait a minute, where had he heard that story? A vague image of his classroom in nursery school floated into Taro’s mind, and then he fell back into sleep.

  He woke after ten o’clock, too late to take the rubbish out. He ate the bun with burdock that his boss had given him as a thank you for the coffee sachets he’d brought into work, then lay sprawled out on the tatami. Taro would always be overtaken by the urge to lie back and doze off after he’d eaten something. He’d been the same since he was a kid, and his parents had often warned him that he’d turn into a cow if he wasn’t careful. As it happened, not only was Taro a Taurus, but the upper part of his head did jut out a bit at the sides, and at some point in childhood, he had genuinely believed he might become a cow. His horns, though, were yet to appear.

  From time to time, Taro heard a cawing sound from the direction of Mrs Saeki’s house. When crows were around making a commotion, he never heard any other bird calls. By the looks of things, it was a nice day outside. Taro could see a small section of sky through the screen door to the balcony. Viewed through the fine mesh of the screen, it looked like an image on a bad-quality monitor. Then Taro heard a noise. At first he thought it was just the wind, or another crow, or else a cat, but then he distinctly heard the scraping of stone or concrete. He stood up and walked towards the balcony, and as he got closer, he could see a human figure.