Since that first day, she had caught sight of the Morios several times. Both of the children got on the same bus that took them to nursery school. It seemed as though the father was usually late getting home, but on one occasion she spotted him. He was a tall man who looked very elegant in his black suit.
Nishi felt closer to the sky-blue house now that it had people living in it, but by the same token, it had also become someone else’s, and therefore a place that she wasn’t allowed to enter. Thinking that she wasn’t allowed in made her want to see it all the more.
If she could somehow get to know Mrs Morio, she thought, then she might be able to find an excuse to enter, so she racked her brains for some way that she might make her acquaintance, but the sorts of places they went and their ways of life were so different as to make it seem impossible. Surely, she told herself, there must be a way.
During the period that she told Taro all this, Nishi polished off seven beers, and went to the ladies’ twice. Taro switched to oolong tea after his first beer. Since his divorce, he’d made it a rule for himself to never drink more than one beer, and had stuck to it now for three years.
Sometimes even now, the image of his dad tripping and falling while drunk at home would flash through Taro’s mind. At first, his dad had only drunk beer, but then at some point—Taro didn’t remember exactly when—had progressed to shochu, and from one glass to two, and then three. If he’d lived longer, he would no doubt have gone on to drink more and more.
Nishi now took a sip from her eighth beer, then looked unflinchingly at Taro from behind her black-rimmed glasses.
“There’s something that’s been bothering me for a long time.”
Her eyes look drunk, Taro thought.
“What’s with the rat and the ox and stuff?”
“The rat?…”
“The names of the flats, I’m talking about. They start with Dragon, right? That’s the fifth one in the zodiac. That means the first four are missing. I think there must have been a View Palace Saeki I and II.”
“I guess that would make sense.”
“I walked around the area a lot looking for them but with no luck. I asked the estate agent too, and they said they had no idea.”
“They’ve probably been demolished already.”
“Right! That’s what I was thinking too. But we’re talking just the first four, right? Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit. It’s hard to imagine two buildings with just two flats each. Or else, maybe there’s some kind of hidden meaning to it all.”
“Who knows.”
Taro lifted his glass of oolong tea, but it was now only ice. The food had been just as good as it had been billed to be. Taro felt like he marginally preferred the deep-fried chicken over the octopus.
“I’m really sorry. When I get nervous I always talk too much to try and cover it up.”
Nishi shot him a grin as she drained the last of her eighth beer. Glancing at her in profile, Taro said, “I think you must be about the same age as my older sister.”
“Really? I’ve got a younger brother too, actually, a year younger. What does your sister do?”
“She works in a college in Nagoya.”
“In Nagoya! Whereabouts?”
“Where was it again? I’ve forgotten the name of the place.”
“Ask her next time, and tell me! Do you look alike?”
“People don’t seem to think so. We’re five years apart, after all, and kind of different. She works all year round and saves up for a big annual holiday overseas. She’s just come back recently from—ah, where was it? Some kind of ruins in Mexico.”
“Wow, she sounds interesting. Does she ever come to Tokyo?”
“Not at all, no. I haven’t seen her in three years.”
“Three years! Wow.”
“Yeah, that’s how it is with us. We sometimes email each other and stuff, but that’s about it.”
“Really! Wow, gosh, I can’t imagine. Wow.”
Nishi had suddenly become very friendly, no doubt owing to the drink. But Taro decided that stoking her enthusiasm further would only mean bother, so he resisted telling her that he shared a first name with the guy who’d lived in the sky-blue house, or that he’d grown up in a municipal estate like she had. It hadn’t been a four-storey one, but a fourteen-storey one—cutting-edge, at the time it had been built. Taro’s flat had been on the twelfth floor. He had slept in a bunk bed by the window that led onto the balcony, and from the time he’d started school, the bottom bunk had been his sister’s, and the top bunk his. Every night, before going to sleep, he had looked out at the city. There was the bridge going over the canal, the factories with their bare metal scaffolding, and the chimneys rising above the rubbish-incineration plant. The incineration plant had flashing red lights, and when he breathed in and out three times in time with them, he would get sleepy. That was something his sister had taught him.
The restaurant bill was so cheap that Taro wondered if there wasn’t some kind of mistake. Nishi paid, as she’d promised. As they headed towards the station, she announced that she was going to visit a friend. Taro accompanied her as far as the ticket gates, where Nishi removed her copy of Spring Garden from the cloth bag, and split it into two—or so it seemed until Taro figured out that there had been two books all along. Nishi held one of them out to him.
“I was in such a rush to get it I ended up ordering two copies. So here, you have one.”
Taro accepted his copy of the book and thanked her. Then holding it in one hand, he wandered towards View Palace Saeki III. When he passed the shopping arcade and found himself on the residential streets, everything around him was dark and quiet, and he didn’t see a soul.
Taro thought about how different the place he now lived was from the place he’d grown up—the size of the buildings and the gaps between them, the number of people living there, the general feel of it, everything. His home town as it existed in his memory seemed distant to him, like something that belonged to another person. It was almost as though he’d mistaken a place he’d seen on TV or in a film for a thing of his own, or else that the sights seen by someone in one of the thousand or so different flats on that estate had somehow snuck their way into his mind and still remained there. That was how it seemed from time to time.
The next morning, when Taro opened his door, he found a paper bag, inside of which was a twenty-centimetre-square cardboard box and a slip of paper with a note in green ink:
My friend’s gift shop is closing down, so she gave me this. It’s a cuckoo clock. I thought I’d give it to you as a thank-you present. Nishi.
Taro found it hard to see appeal in anything that made a noise every hour. He lifted the lid of the box just far enough to glimpse the wooden top of the clock, then closed it again immediately, and put it away inside his closet.
At some point not long after that, Taro began to pass along the side of the Morios’ house on his way to work. It was a little bit of a detour for him, but not too much.
Occasionally there would be a German car parked in front of the house, alongside the small family car. He’d heard from Nishi that the husband drove this second car to work. It was dark navy, an unusual sort of colour for a car. The walls of the house and the second car were both a light shade of blue, so Taro assumed that at least someone in the family must be keen on the colour.
Sometimes he would hear high-pitched children’s voices, but he had never actually seen the Morio kids. He felt sure that Nishi, passing by the house several times a day as she did, would come to be known to the inhabitants as someone to watch out for, if in fact that hadn’t happened already.
After a few days, Taro noticed it wasn’t just the Morios’ house that he was examining carefully, but all the houses on his way to work.
Taro’s immediate neighbourhood was said to be a posh part of town, but it wasn’t as though the posh and less posh parts of town were divided up by street, or anything so obvious. To be sure, there was a kind of slow shift taking place, so the
large houses and low-rise blocks of high-class flats gradually gave way to more blocks of single-room flats, narrow houses, and multi-purpose buildings with restaurants, shops and offices the closer you got towards the station. Still, there were places where a block of flats older and more cramped than View Palace Saeki III stood right next to a great big detached house with security cameras affixed to the walls, and at the end of an alley off the shopping arcade that led up to the station was a grand house with an impressive set of gates, of the sort that typically belonged to families who had owned the land for generations.
Buildings that had stood the test of time rubbed shoulders with newly built detached houses; flats with all kinds of modern conveniences found themselves alongside those whose wear and tear stood out for a mile. There were houses where celebrities lived and there were also, as Taro had discovered from the listings online, flats that didn’t even have baths in them.
The people who constructed these buildings must have had some kind of mission they wished the buildings to fulfil, some form of hope for them, but looking at the area in general, it was hard to see any kind of communality or purpose at all. It seemed more like the place was the result of everyone’s individual ideas and contingent circumstances commingling, all their little details then driving them further from one another over time. Somehow the thought put Taro’s mind at ease. It made him feel better about the fact that, somewhere in the midst of all that, he spent entire days just lolling about on the floor and napping.
Taro began to get better at spotting empty houses. Just like Nishi had said, houses that were empty gave off a fundamentally different feeling than those with people living in them. Even vacant houses that were well looked after, so that it might appear at first as though they just had nobody at home, he came to be able to recognize quickly as actually uninhabited. There were so many different types of empty houses, flats and offices, too. The train he took to work ran along an elevated rail track, and from it he could see into the rooms on one floor of all the office buildings and blocks of flats that the train passed.
Taro found it peculiar that there should be so many homes without people living in them. Across the country, far away from here, there were areas losing the vitality they’d once had, and there were shopping arcades close to major stations that now lay deserted, their shutters permanently down. The shopping arcade close to the flat Taro had grown up in was the same, dark during the day. But that was vacant property in places where whole areas were in decline. Compared to those, the vacant houses in this city, which people were still flooding to from all across Japan and whose rent prices now beggared belief, didn’t carry with them such desolation or gravity. Rather, they seemed more like hidden caverns he’d happened to stumble across. All around, enormous buildings and blocks of flats were being constructed day by day, and yet, hidden away on the inside, there were secret caves. It brought to mind the cracks that formed inside daikon radishes when you left them out for a while without eating them, although then Taro thought about how those vacant houses would be lived in again some day, and how buildings could be demolished and built again, so they weren’t really so similar to daikon after all. He tried thinking of them instead in terms of sponges, or holey cheese, but couldn’t quite seem to land on the right metaphor.
Taro wondered what would happen if someone were to sneak inside one of those vacant houses and begin living there. Would they be found out? For sure there would be no running water or gas or anything like that, but then he also had come across a few houses with signs alerting people they had well water they could provide to others in the case of an earthquake. As long as you had water, you could manage somehow. These were the places his thoughts carried him to, though he had no actual intention of testing these ideas out.
Behind the shopping arcade that led away from the station, to one side of a road he passed on the first of his three routes to work, was an uninhabited house with a reasonably sized garden. The smallish car parked inside the gates must have been there for years; there were weeds growing inside it. How did that happen? Had the bottom fallen out, or what? The evergreen trees in the garden had grown so high that they were wound around the utility pole, and their foliage was now dangling towards the houses on the other side of the street. From the gaps in the wooden fence in the front of the house, he could see the sunroom attached to the single-storey house. The sunroom had no storm shutters, only regular windows, and then, on the inside, latticed paper screens, which were shut. Some light was making its way through the paper of the screens, so the inside of the house wouldn’t be pitch black. The tatami would be mouldy, and there would be a few bits of abandoned furniture, in the same way that the bike and laundry rack, now rusted, had also been left. Time inside the house was a cycle of murky days and nights of total darkness. You’d sometimes hear the sound of rats echoing through the ventilation shaft. For some reason Taro could imagine the scene inside the house vividly, could picture it in as much detail as rooms that he’d actually seen.
Then, one day, all that was left of it was an empty lot. In the place where it should have been, unchanged from the week before, there was now, quite abruptly, nothing. The overgrown trees, the single-storey house, the small car and the weeds were all gone, and Taro found he couldn’t remember what else had been there to begin with.
There was another plot of razed land diagonally opposite from that house. Taro could not remember what had been there before either. In yet another plot, which had been vacant for as long as he could remember, construction work had now begun. He suddenly began paying attention to signs announcing demolition, or announcing who had commissioned forthcoming construction on the site.
He realized that next year or the year after, a similar sign would appear outside his own block of flats, and tried picturing it. There would be nobody moving into the empty flat next to his or the one next to that. He had peered through the window of the flat next to his, and at the back of the dim space, a closet with its fabric door was ripped and left wide open. Everything awaited demolition. Taro was suddenly visited by the thought that he better start thinking about where he was going to move to.
When he saw Nishi, she would greet him in a way that seemed friendly, but there was something a bit distant about the way she acted. She didn’t drop by his flat, or start conversations. Perhaps, he thought, she was embarrassed about having drunk too much and spoken more than she meant to.
When Taro returned home from work in the evening, he could always see from the street that lights were on in the Dragon Flat, but he never caught sight of her on the balcony. Sometimes he saw Mrs Snake sticking her head over her balcony railing, seemingly looking in the direction of his flat.
Midway into June was supposed to be the time when the rainy season came. That year there wasn’t a great deal of rain, but it was always overcast.
Every day, the sky was slathered with a layer of low, thick clouds. Taro’s cloud daydream didn’t get triggered on days when it was so cloudy that there was no sky in sight, or on rainy days either. At these times, he stopped being able to imagine that there was anything above the clouds at all. Beyond them, he imagined, was neither blue sky, nor dark cosmos, but just see-through space, stretching on and on with nothing to fill it.
The first time Taro had been in an aeroplane, it had been raining. The aeroplane had risen through the rain-clouds, their insides like dry-ice vapour, and then emerged above the clouds, into a bright blue sky. Taro was flabbergasted. He felt quite unnerved, thinking that he might have moved into a different world from the one he thought existed. But the tops of the bright white clouds that he peered down on from the double-paned windows, with their fierce brightness and their overpowering mass and scope, were just like the ones that had appeared in his visions. It seemed uncanny that he could have known about them, could have pictured them with such clarity, when he had never once seen them before. He kept scanning the tops of the clouds for people walking about, but couldn’t spot anyone. Frost spread its way
like snowflakes between the two panes of glass.
When the plane passed over gaps between the clouds, Taro saw the ocean and the land beneath. He saw coast-lines with the same contours that he knew from maps. As his mind made these connections, he had a visceral realization that the world as it existed in his head and the ground that he walked on every day were actually the same place. From that time on, he had been a fan of aeroplanes.
Taro’s father had died without having once boarded a plane. He had rarely been on holidays of any kind, except for his fishing trips. He would talk about America a lot, declaring that America was such and such, or saying that in a situation like this one, the US Government would do such and such, but he had never once left Japan, let alone visited the States.
Last New Year, his mother had gone to Hawaii for the third time, and he was pretty sure his sister had been to both New York and San Francisco, but Taro found all the preparation for going abroad such a hassle that the only time he’d been overseas was on his honeymoon to Italy. His clearest memory was the ruins of an old market he’d seen there.
When he had time to kill between coming home from work and going to bed, Taro would look through Spring Garden. He tried comparing the pictures in the book to the house that he could see from his balcony.
The fact that he shared a first name with the man who had taken some of those photos and who appeared in others, though, didn’t give rise to any real interest on his part. Nishi had gone on about how much she liked the unpretentiousness of Kaiko Umamura’s expression, and how the couple’s intimacy seemed to radiate naturally from the photos, and how the feel of the house seemed to be connected to their relationship, but Taro wasn’t struck by any of those things especially.
Spring Garden Page 5