There, in the courtyard overgrown with weeds, was the Dragon Woman, in a sweatshirt and jeans, at the corner of the concrete wall that separated the courtyard from Mrs Saeki’s house, the sky-blue house and the vault. She’d stacked two cement blocks, which she was using to give herself a lift as she tried to scramble up the wall. But the dense, overgrown ivy covering the wall and the maple branches poking over the top weren’t making it easy. Her feet searched around in vain for a foothold.
“Hey!” Taro called out from his balcony.
The Dragon Woman turned around.
“I don’t think you’re supposed to be there.”
The woman stared blankly at Taro for a few seconds, then suddenly shot him a friendly smile.
“You’re absolutely right!”
She came over to stand next to his balcony.
“I wonder, then, could I possibly trouble you for a favour?”
Here we go, thought Taro to himself. This is where the trouble begins. These kinds of favours that people asked were never good news. They were phrased like polite questions, but he was never really being given an option.
“I just really want to take a look at that house. There’s something I want to check out.”
The Dragon Woman stretched her finger towards the sky-blue house that lay beyond the ivy-covered wall. Taro didn’t say anything, and looked in the direction she was pointing.
“I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind me getting up on your balcony railing. I think the best view of all would be from the flat above yours, but the person in there has already moved out. I’m not up to anything bad, I promise. I’m not planning a break-in, and I’m not going to take sneaky photos or anything like that. It’s just that I, well, I really like it. The house, I mean.”
The house. Taro turned to look at it now. The light blue walls, the terracotta tiled roof. He could hear a bird chirping, but could see no sign of it.
“It’s private property, you know.”
“I’m really not up to anything underhanded, I promise. It’s just such a wonderful building. I’m an artist, I mean, that’s my job, and there’s something I want to check out. For my drawings.”
“For your drawings.”
“I promise I won’t cause you any trouble.”
“Okay,” Taro said. He found these kinds of conversations a real pain. He could see that giving in to the woman now would most likely lead to greater trouble in the future, but his tendency was to do anything he could to avert the bother that lay immediately in front of him. As it happened, that personality trait was one of the reasons his ex-wife had given for wanting a divorce.
The Dragon Woman thanked him, then brought over the two blocks she’d been using before, placed them at the foot of his balcony, and began to climb up. Making it clear he wanted nothing to do with the whole thing, Taro went back inside his flat and stood a step away from the balcony. He’d thought the Dragon Woman was about the same age as he was, a little over thirty, but close up in broad daylight, her face looked tired and somehow lacking youth, and he suddenly wondered if she was a fair bit older. It was the sort of face that made it impossible to judge her age with any accuracy, though. He could have heard she was forty and accepted it as the truth as readily as he would if he heard she was still in high school. On that unmade-up face, her black-framed glasses stood out even more.
“That window is where the landing is, on the stairs.”
The Dragon Woman was sitting on the railing of his balcony and was pointing again in the direction of the sky-blue house. There was a small stained-glass window, with a design of two red dragonflies, exactly halfway between the ground and first floors. Taro had the feeling he’d seen that window lit up from the inside quite recently, but he didn’t have a clear memory of when it had been. The Dragon Woman got herself to the corner of the railing, placed her hands against the wall, then carefully stood up. From that position, she pointed to somewhere beyond where the sky-blue house met the concrete vault house. Taro stepped out once more onto the balcony and peered in that direction, but it was too dim to see anything clearly.
“That window down there must be the bathroom window. But you can’t see as well from here as I thought. Sorry for the imposition,” the Dragon Woman said, then clambered down from the railing and set her feet on Taro’s balcony.
“Well, hello!” Taro heard a voice say from above. He looked up to see Mrs Snake leaning over the top of her balcony towards them. She smiled meaningfully and bowed, then stayed put, looking down at them. When Taro bowed back in her direction, she disappeared from the balcony edge.
The Dragon Woman’s face registered no particular emotion. She brushed away the dust on her hands and knees, then, taking off her trainers and holding them in one hand, entered Taro’s flat without the least hesitation. “Is it okay to go out through the front door?” she asked.
Then she added, “The high school I went to was next to a police station, and if one of the policemen ever saw a girl and a boy alone together in one of the classrooms, they’d call up the staff of the school right away. Can you believe that? I think they must have had overactive imaginations.”
Taro had no idea why she would come out with that kind of thing in this situation, but he didn’t want there to be silence between them, so he said, “How old do you think Mrs Snake is?”
“Mrs Snake?”
“The woman in the Snake Flat.”
“Ah, I get it!”
The Dragon Woman told Taro both Mrs Snake’s age and her real name, and also that Mrs Snake was a Scorpio. Taro found the name unexpected, somehow, and felt that Mrs Snake suited her much better. Hearing her age, Taro determined right away that she had been born in the same year as his father. It was the year that the Second World War had ended, so come the summer, the number of years that had elapsed since then would pop up here and there in the media. Since Taro’s father had died of a subarachnoid haemorrhage, those figures that appeared in the media each year had been the age he would have been if he’d still been alive. Taro’s mother was exactly ten years younger than that, but she’d soon overtake the age his father had reached. His father’s birthday was February, which meant, if she were a Scorpio, Mrs Snake had been born nine months after him. But his father’s age would now never go beyond fifty-nine. During his father’s life, Taro had just assumed that his father would go on to become elderly, but now he couldn’t imagine his father as a typical old man at all. A vision of the mortar and pestle in his kitchen cabinet came to mind. Now, that was the closest thing to his father that he had, at least here in Tokyo, and yet his father hadn’t even known of its existence.
“In that case, my flat should have been on the ground floor. My surname’s Nishi, and my kanji looks a lot like the kanji for the Rooster. It would have been easy to remember me that way, right?”
“Hmm.”
“This flat has a different layout from the others. I was thinking this is how it might be. Is the bathroom on this side?”
Carrying her trainers, Nishi walked slowly towards the front door, looking around her as she went. Taro ended up following behind.
“I think the floor area itself is the same.”
Taro’s Pig Flat in the protruding section of the building was longer and narrower than the flats in the block’s main section, but all of the flats were the same in that they had kitchens of ten square metres, tatami rooms of just over thirteen square metres, and a separate bath and toilet.
“This layout feels more spacious somehow, though. A kitchen facing this way seems like it’d be easier to use, too.”
“Really?”
“I think so.”
Apparently satisfied with her investigation of the flat, Nishi stood in the entranceway and slipped on her shoes. Then she said, “Can I buy you dinner as a thank you for this?”
Nishi and Taro walked to a restaurant on the other side of the level crossing, one station away from the station where Taro caught his train every day. It was a small station and express
trains didn’t stop there, only local trains, so Taro had never had reason to set foot there before.
Nishi told him that the restaurant’s deep-fried foods were a speciality. It was hard to say which was better, she said—the octopus or the chicken. They ordered a plate of each, and two beers.
Sitting opposite Nishi, Taro realized that although the paleness of the skin on her face suggested she rarely went outside, she was surprisingly muscular. The arms and neck emerging from her T-shirt were well toned, and looked like they’d be firm to the touch.
When he asked if she’d used to play some kind of sport when she was younger, she answered, unexpectedly, yes, she’d played baseball. It was only when she was in primary school, though, she said, and she’d never actually taken part in games, just practised. Nishi polished off her first beer before the food had arrived, and ordered another straight away.
Then she brought out a bag made of fabric with a beetle pattern, and removed a book from it.
“This book is that house,” she said.
It was a large, thin book with the title Spring Garden. Each page contained four to six photographs, much like a family album. They were mostly black-and-white.
“See? It is, right?”
Nishi opened the book to a page with a photo of the house’s exterior. It was one of just a handful of colour shots. With its sky-blue wooden walls, terracotta roof tiles, and the pointed decoration at the very top, there was no doubting it was that house. The photograph had been taken from the garden, and it was the first time that Taro saw the ground floor of the house on that side. There was a large sunroom, with sliding glass doors to the outside.
“Whoa,” Taro said, peering at the photograph across the table, “the interior is all Japanese style.”
Most of the ground floor was taken up by large tatami rooms, linked by sliding Japanese-style doors. A woman was sitting on one of the large wicker chairs in the sunroom, smiling broadly. She was young, with short hair. The photograph next to it showed a slender, long-haired man in a white shirt, standing in front of a Japanese dresser in one of the ground-floor rooms. The dresser was an impressive multi-compartment affair with embossed black iron fixtures, the kind that you saw in antique shops.
“Yes. It’s got a totally different feel from the outside, hasn’t it? See the design on those wooden panels above the sliding doors? It’s elephants. I’m not sure if they were aiming for an Indian look or what.”
The wooden panels she was speaking of were above the lintel to the doors separating the two tatami rooms. The short-haired woman had grabbed onto that lintel and was swinging from it, laughing. There was a photograph of the dragonfly stained-glass panel that Taro could see from his window, too. Just as Nishi had said before, it was positioned on the landing, midway up the stairs. In the picture, the slender, long-haired man was standing on the landing, peering into an old twin-lens reflex camera.
Both the room leading to the first-floor balcony and the one with the Western-style sash windows had tatami floors. Beneath one of the sash windows was a writing desk. The woman was standing in front of it, holding a cushion as if she were about to throw it at the camera.
“It was built in 1964, the same year as the Tokyo Olympics. It’s totally got that look of the sort of house ‘a person of culture’ around that time would have built, but it seems a bit lacking in taste now, the way they’ve crammed so many different elements in.”
“I know what you mean.”
Of the ten or so colour photos, there was one of the garden as seen from the sunroom: to the left, back by the wall, was the crepe myrtle; to its right, the tree that looked like a wild cherry; and further right, the plum. All of that was just the same as Taro had observed from the road the other day, but in front of the plum in the photograph was a stately pine tree. Beneath it, stones had been arranged to create the effect of a stream, and there was also a small stone lantern. The centre pages featured two large photographs with a very similar composition, showing almost the entirety of the garden. The photo on the right showed the woman standing on the lawn, and in the photo on the left, the slender, long-haired man was standing in exactly the same spot. In both the photos, it was spring. The branches of the plum tree, even sparser then than they were now, were covered in lustrous green leaves, and the tree to its left, still relatively low to the ground, was covered in flowers that looked like cherry blossoms, though in brighter pink. The crepe myrtle was also a bit shorter than it was now. Its leaves had begun to come out, but it wasn’t yet in bud. There were a few small white flowers dotting the ground as well.
On the last page of the book was a single colour photograph, about eight-by-twelve centimetres, surrounded by a thick border of white. It showed the bathroom. The walls and the floor were covered in tiny tiles in varying shades of green. The effect was like a mosaic, perhaps of trees, or waves. There was no one in the photo, neither the woman nor the man, and the bathtub was empty. The light filtering through the small window gently lit up the green space.
“Isn’t the bathroom just great? That’s my favourite photo in the whole book. There’s something about those lime-green tiles.”
Then Nishi began to tell Taro the story of how she’d come to know about the house. While browsing estate sites online in search of a place to live, she’d got hooked on photos of the many grand mansion-style houses in Setagaya. So when she came upon the photo of this house, with its unusual sky-blue exterior, she’d recognized it immediately. Nishi then searched online for the book of photos and, from the various volumes on offer second-hand, selected the one listed as new and clicked buy now, even though it cost a bit more than the others. Three days later, Spring Garden arrived in the post. It had been published two decades earlier, but the book was in almost pristine condition. Apart from a few light scratches on the front cover, there was no damage, and it hadn’t faded at all. It was as though it had been sleeping all those years in some kind of warehouse. In fact, it looked like it could have been published yesterday. And yet, it was a photograph collection documenting the everyday life of a married couple living in that particular house twenty years ago: the husband, a thirty-five-year-old director of TV commercials, and the wife, a twenty-seven-year-old actress in a small theatre company.
It was clear that the house had undergone change since the book was published, but it didn’t matter. Nishi saved each of the images of the sky-blue house from the site onto her smartphone, so that she could look at the snaps of the structure and its floor plan whenever she felt like it: The ground floor was the front entrance with its stained glass, the forty-square-metre living room, the sunroom, the kitchen fitted out in plain wood, and the bathroom, while the first floor had the two Western-style rooms of ten square metres, a slightly larger tatami room of thirteen square metres and the balcony. Then, of course, there was the garden with the crepe myrtle, the plum and the Hall crabapple.
As enamoured of the house as she was, Nishi wasn’t able to move into it. A three-bedroom house of that size was too big for a single person, and the rent was a staggering 300,000 yen per month. But there was a flat for rent directly behind it that otherwise fulfilled her requirements exactly, and it was good to have something close by like that to bring a bit of excitement to your day-to-day. In fact, Nishi said, she had believed since childhood that she had luck on her side.
If she loved the house so much, though, Taro asked, had she not even requested that the estate agent show it to her? And had she not considered the possibility of living there with someone else and sharing the rent? Nishi said that was out of the question: she found it impossible to relax when there was something moving in her space. She also explained that her conscience, which was unbending in certain areas, wouldn’t allow her to bother an estate agent when she had no intention of renting the house. What was more, she certainly didn’t look like the sort of person who could afford it. One time in the past, when she’d gone to look at a place that was just slightly above her price range, the landlady told her that i
t was clearly not the sort of place for a person like her, Nishi told Taro, then cackled.
So that was how Nishi had come to live on the first floor of View Palace Saeki III, a thirty-one-year-old building, fifteen minutes’ walk to the train station. The lease was for two years, and when told about the owner’s plans to demolish the building, she replied that she didn’t mind. She moved in at the start of February.
Nishi had been living in Tokyo for twenty years now, and that had been her fourth move within the city.
When she was younger, she’d lived in an enormous housing estate in Nagoya, close to the industrial belt by the coast. On the northern side of the estate were the municipally run low-income housing blocks, and on the southern side were those run by public corporations. Nishi lived with her parents and younger brother in a block in the middle of the twelve municipal towers, a flat on the third floor of a four-storey building. Outside the window stood rows of four-storey buildings identical to hers. When she went over to the flats of friends at the local school, which had been built at the same time as the estate, each and every one of them was laid out in the same way. She felt a vague yearning for the sorts of houses she saw on TV or in comics, with flights of stairs or hallways in them. Or maybe it wasn’t exactly a yearning—maybe it was more that she was fascinated by them. She wanted to know what it would feel like to live in a house that had stairs in it, and hallways, and wondered too about the kinds of people who would live in those kinds of houses. She even went through a phase of collecting estate agency flyers, and she and her friends would sketch floor plans of their ideal houses and compare their ideas. Sometimes they would decide which room they would have for their own and which would belong to the other members of the family, and then have imaginary conversations based on those scenarios, like a slightly more grown-up version of playing house.
Spring Garden Page 3