At around the age of fifteen, Nishi’s family moved to Shizuoka Prefecture, not far from Tokyo. The estate this time had only four tower blocks, but their new flat was on the third floor of a four-storey building that was strikingly similar to their previous one—right down to the layout of the rooms—so there wasn’t any need to rethink the positioning of the furniture. The surroundings weren’t much different either. There were factories and warehouses lining the coast, and highways circling the town. Nishi bicycled to school alongside wide dusty roads with lorries coming and going beside her.
Her first encounter with Spring Garden took place in the classroom at lunchtime, in her final year of high school. One of her friends had brought the book to school, though she couldn’t recall who. Books of photographs weren’t popular in the way they would later go on to be, but some authors and actresses popular at the time had praised this one, and it was written up in various culture magazines, making it something of a hit. Going on that, it seemed likely that either Kobayashi, who was in a band, or Nakamura, who was hoping to go to art school, brought the book to school. All Nishi could remember for certain, though, was that someone opened up the book when they were crowded round a desk eating their bento box lunches and one of Takahashi’s cherry tomatoes rolled across its open pages.
The book was a collaboration between Taro Gyushima, an advertising director, and his wife, Kaiko Umamura, a stage actress. About two-thirds of the photos had been taken by Gyushima, the rest by Kaiko.
At that time, several of Taro Gyushima’s TV adverts were the talk of the town, and there would often be interviews with him in magazines. One of his adverts featured actresses whose bodies looked like they were made of porcelain or metal, as if rendered with computer graphics, and another depicted in soap-opera style a highly detailed imaginary world inhabited by a made-up race of people. The adverts really were unlike anything that had come before, and spawned many imitations, but they struck Nishi as too contrived, and she wasn’t a fan.
The photographs that made up Spring Garden, on the other hand, were mostly regular shots, and unlike the commercials, seemed pretty unpretentious. Nishi thought it a really good collection of photos. She liked the innocent look that Kaiko Umamura had about her, and found her handstands, cartwheels and various other odd poses fun. There were even shots of the actress brushing her teeth in the garden, and taking a nap at the low table.
Nishi studied the house where the couple lived in great detail. It was a world apart from the standardized accommodation that she had grown up in. The stained glass and the carved panels above the doors looked custom-made. Even the handrail on the stairs had carvings in it. From watching television and reading comics, Nishi was familiar with things like windows that opened up and down in the Western style instead of side to side like the old Japanese ones, not to mention sunrooms and gardens, but they had never made an appearance in her own life. Best of all, though, she liked the bathroom with its mosaic of tiles in that mysterious pattern. It reminded her of a photo she’d seen of the walls in a block of flats designed by Gaudi. Of course, the bathroom in the sky-blue house wasn’t in quite such good taste, but the thought that there were people who had specifically commissioned a bathroom like that, people who had built it, and people who used that bathtub day in day out, brought a smile to her face.
It was while looking at that book that it occurred to Nishi for the first time that maybe falling in love and getting married and all that stuff might not actually be such a bad thing. In the photographs, Taro Gyushima and Kaiko Umamura seemed totally content. Never before or since had Nishi felt such a strong sense that living with someone you loved could be enjoyable. Six months later, she enrolled in university in Tokyo where, at the suggestion of a girl she sat next to in the matriculation ceremony, she joined the university’s photography club. Spring Garden was on the bookshelf of the clubroom, and Nishi would often take it down and flip through it. She didn’t buy a copy herself because she was spending a lot of money as it was on cameras and film and supplies, and she could look through the book whenever she wanted at the clubroom. When she graduated, and no longer had access to a darkroom, she more or less stopped taking photographs. What Nishi had liked best of all were those moments in the darkroom when she would stand in front of a piece of photographic paper dipped in developer and watch as a scene straight out of the past came floating to the surface. Without those moments, she hadn’t much use for photography at all.
Nishi stayed on in Tokyo after graduating. The first place she lived in by herself was an old flat in the suburbs. The block of flats was built on the same grounds as the landlord’s house, and the window of her first-floor flat had a great view over the trees into the landlord’s large garden. From there, Nishi would watch the seasons changing. The Hall crabapple blossomed, then the zelkova would come into bud, the hydrangea would change colour, the crepe myrtle would shed its flowers for a good three months, and the bright orange flowers of the osmanthus would infuse the garden with its scent, then the leaves would turn and fall. In February, when the weather was still cold, she would catch a whiff of something and discover the vivid pink of the plum tree in bloom, and not long after that the big white magnolia flowers would open. The magnolia and the Hall crabapple she found particularly beautiful.
Up until that point, Nishi had always thought of trees as something that grew by the road or in parks, or else up in the mountains far away, so being able to watch the seasons passing like that from inside her own home came as a real surprise. What was more, the garden wasn’t visible from the road, so they were seasons shared only by the landlord’s family and the people living in her block. The plants in the garden weren’t just objects that grew older with the passing years, she realized. Rather, they grew and they blossomed, and new buds appeared on branches that had dried up during the winter. There was life, plenty of it. Nishi had never had a pet of any kind, and the fact that there were living things that had no connection to her, inhabiting the same space as her, seemed wondrous.
That landlord’s house was gone now, destroyed in a fire. It happened after Nishi had moved out, and fortunately, there had been no casualties. The house had looked a lot like Mrs Saeki’s, next to View Palace Saeki III. That fact made Nishi suspect that her selection of her current flat wasn’t a complete coincidence.
Spring Garden, which could not now be found in bookshops anywhere, was supposedly a collaboration between Taro Gyushima and Kaiko Umamura, but there was no indication which photos had been taken by whom. The book was the only photo collection that either of them had made. Two years after its publication, the couple divorced. Taro Gyushima became an artist and moved to Berlin. Very occasionally, his name would appear in flyers or announcements for art-related events in Japan, even now. And Kaiko Umamura gave up her acting career. She had never been a major actress to begin with—number three even within her small company, plus the occasional bit-part in films—so it was little wonder that she had disappeared without trace.
In one photo, where sunlight from the window reached a good distance onto the tatami, Kaiko Umamura was right in the middle of it, doing a handstand. Even without a wall for support, her legs were entirely straight, her toes pointed. She must have been an exceptionally sporty type. One of Nishi’s university friends who went to a lot of theatre had told her Umamura often did backwards somersaults in the swordfights of the plays she performed in.
One photo showed a birdcage hanging in the sunroom. Sunlight was coming from behind it, and that part of the photo looked to be deliberately out of focus, so it was hard to know what was in the cage, but it looked like some kind of parrot or parakeet. Who had taken the bird after the divorce? Nishi wondered to herself, and then concluded that it must have been Kaiko. It must have been Kaiko who named it as well. She’d read an article online about how Winston Churchill’s parrot was still alive, so it was highly possible that the bird was still living with Kaiko somewhere now.
When Nishi first moved into her current
flat in February, the trees in Mrs Saeki’s garden had been mostly bare, but there were still a lot of birds that came flying through the cold air to perch on them. The electronic dictionary Nishi owned included an Illustrated Guide to Birds among its additional features, and she used the photos and recordings of the bird calls to identify the birds that appeared in the garden: brown-eared bulbuls, Oriental turtle doves, sparrows, tits, azure-winged magpies, and so on. The brown-eared bulbul was described in the Illustrated Guide as having a ‘loud and nagging’ call. She looked it up in a guidebook to wild birds, and learnt that it only existed in Japan and nearby countries, meaning that in the rest of the world it was thought of as a pretty rare species.
Nishi often went out on the balcony of the Dragon Flat with her ring-bound sketchbook to draw the plants that appeared in Mrs Saeki’s garden as the seasons changed, or the cats that went walking along the top of the concrete wall, or the roofs and windows of the houses, and even sometimes the passing butterflies.
Nishi worked as an illustrator and a comic-strip artist. After graduating from university, she was employed by a company that did contract work for an advertising agency. While working there, she had begun to take on illustration jobs on the side, and had quit her job five years ago when a manga series she’d written was given a weekly slot in a magazine. Now, her main jobs were making comic strips out of readers’ stories submitted to a job-seeking portal and a cooking magazine site, and individual commissions for magazines and adverts. On her homepage, she occasionally posted short comic strips based on Chinese legends or idioms that came from particular historical events.
In March, she had met with an editor who had suggested collecting these pieces together and publishing them as a book. At that time, the editor had mentioned in passing a proposal he’d made for a book of photos, rejected on the grounds that books of photos didn’t sell these days, which had prompted Nishi to raise the topic of Spring Garden. But the editor in question, still in his mid-twenties, had heard neither of the book itself nor of Taro Gyushima or Kaiko Umamura, and hadn’t seemed particularly interested. A few days later, though, when stuck for conversation with his boss, the editor had suddenly remembered that her previous job had been something to do with theatre and the arts, and he had asked on a whim if she had heard of Taro Gyushima or Kaiko Umamura. As it happened, his boss had interviewed Kaiko Umamura several times while working for an events magazine. She reminisced to the editor about how she had gone to an after-party for a show, and how, following that, Kaiko Umamura had given her a collection of annotated illustrations that she’d produced after her divorce. The editor, getting excited and declaring this an amazing example of synchronicity, told his boss about how Nishi was a huge fan of Kaiko Umamura’s. The boss thought he was using the word ‘synchronicity’ wrong, but nevertheless, heartened by the fact that this subordinate of hers she found difficult to relate to was listening to her with apparent interest for once, hunted down the collection
of illustrations and brought it in. A few days later, it was delivered to Nishi in a padded envelope.
Made of A4-sized paper folded in half and stapled together, the pamphlet Nishi received was less like a book of illustrations, and more like a handmade zine. It had eighteen pages, colour-photocopied rather than printed. Tiny illustrations in colour pencil, about the size of postage stamps, were scattered randomly across the pages. There was the stained-glass window with the red dragonflies, a wicker chair, the sunroom, various bits of tableware. It seemed like the illustrations were all either parts of the sky-blue house or objects she’d used in there. They were really no more than doodles, but assured doodles nonetheless, that captured the shape of what they were depicting very well. Short writings snaked their way between them.
Wooden houses sure let the cold in! Brrr!
Found a caterpillar on the porch. I really hate insects.
Why does it have to be dragonflies? Insects are gross…
Been studying the strips of fabric round the edge of the tatami mats. The patterns are different on the ground floor and first floors. Something about staring at those nothingy patterns makes me remember being little.
I like this window. The glass is a little bit warped, and it makes it seem like the air outside is warped too. The light bends, changes speed.
I’m soooo sleepy…
Broke a teacup. The thought of sweeping it up and throwing it away made me too sad so I just left it there.
It was mostly jottings, like talking to herself, but through the medium of pen and paper. There was no mention of Taro Gyushima, nor of any of her plays or her friends or anything like that. The booklet was about bits of the house and her thoughts about them.
Nishi was impressed by how good the drawings were. The jottings weren’t fascinating or anything like that, but they seemed exactly like the things that she would have expected the Kaiko Umamura who appeared in that book of photos to say. It came to Nishi that the captions might work perfectly as speech bubbles, so she photocopied the booklet, cut out the lines of text, and tried arranging them on top of the photos.
A few days later Nishi received an email from the same editor, saying that his boss had learnt that Kaiko Umamura was now running a yoga school. He included a link to the yoga school’s website. If it was just a regular yoga school, Nishi thought, then maybe she could go and actually meet Kaiko Umamura in the flesh. With anticipation and a fair amount of apprehension, Nishi clicked on the link to the homepage.
The site that appeared on Nishi’s computer screen was simple and tasteful. The top page showed a picture of a woman holding a yoga pose in a forest of bright green leaves. Her head was turned to the side, and the light was coming from behind it, so it was impossible to make out her expression. When Nishi scrolled down to look at the address of the school, she saw it was in Yamanashi Prefecture, just outside of Tokyo, in one of the cooler regions that people often went to escape the summer heat. Nishi clicked on the tab that read ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR, and a photograph of a woman appeared, and beside it the name ASUKA SAWADA. Apparently, that was Kaiko Umamura’s real name.
The first thought that came to Nishi’s mind was that the woman was stunning. In that yoga pose, with her long black hair swept up into a ponytail, Asuka Sawada definitely resembled Kaiko Umamura. The long, narrow eyes and large mouth were the same. The pose she was adopting too, with her back arched, recalled her acrobatics on the pages of Spring Garden.
And yet, Nishi could not but feel that the woman in those photos was not, in fact, Kaiko Umamura. Her INSTRUCTOR’S MESSAGE, full of wholesome words like ‘natural power’, ‘purification’, and ‘betterment’, didn’t square up with the woman whose face beamed out of the book of photos, or with the one who’d put together that collection of illustrations. Nishi looked through the back entries of the blog that was linked on the website, but the more she read, the further Asuka Sawada grew apart from Kaiko Umamura.
Nishi closed the web page and opened up Spring Garden. Seeing Kaiko Umamura there, she felt a surge of relief. When she stepped out onto her balcony, there was the sky-blue house, unchanged, bathed in sunlight. Inside that house were the windows and stairs that Kaiko Umamura had drawn, Nishi thought, and the desire to make sure of that fact for herself, just once, rose up in her.
Nishi walked past the house twice a day, and gazed out at it from the balcony of the Dragon Flat. The advert for it disappeared from the estate agency site in the middle of February, but there was no sign of anyone moving in, so she guessed that something must have made them decide not to rent it out after all.
It was perhaps this reasoning that made her careless. In any case, to her great frustration, Nishi had been out on the day when the new people moved in, and she had missed it. At the end of March, she had gone for a couple of days to visit her mother, who lived in Chiba Prefecture. Heading out on her morning walk around the block as usual on the day after she got back, and seeing a small car parked in front of the sky-blue house and a tricycle inside the gates, Ni
shi felt genuine shock. Approaching the gates, she saw there was already a nameplate reading morio, and when she looked up she saw a white blind drawn in one of the first-floor windows.
No, Nishi thought to herself. That’s not how it is in Spring Garden. There was now a blind in the window where there was supposed to be curtains, a tricycle and a bike and various kids’ toys lying outside the front door as if it was the most normal thing in the world, and a nameplate with a modern-looking font.
Nishi’s insides were all in commotion. She returned to her flat, but could hardly concentrate on her work at all. That day, she walked by the house every hour. At four in the afternoon, she saw the car that had vanished at one o’clock returning. Concealing herself behind a telegraph pole, Nishi saw a young-looking mother with two young children getting out of the car. The boy looked about five, and the little girl was in her mother’s arms.
Nishi found the idea that people really had begun living in the house unsettling, somehow bewildering. At first, she thought those feelings were driven by a sense of danger—danger that the house was now going to change and become different from the way it was in the photo book—but after a week of walking past the house that was so rapidly adjusting to its role as the Morio family residence, she realized that that wasn’t it.
Time, which had stopped while the house was empty, was now moving again. The structure itself was exactly the same as it had been a week ago when nobody was in it, and yet its colours, the feel of the place, were now wholly different. It wasn’t just that people were living in it—it was that the house itself had suddenly come back to life. The house which Nishi had been convinced she could carry on looking at forever, in the same way as she could the house in the photos, felt now as if it had taken on a mind of its own, and begun moving. As dramatic as it sounded, it honestly seemed that the house had taken on the same quality as a doll that had suddenly become human. Every time she passed by the house, every time she saw the envelopes poking out from the letterbox or the sheets hanging out to dry on the balcony, she had the physical sensation like something rubbing at her body from the inside.
Spring Garden Page 4