For sure, these were the sorts of natural expressions you’d expect to see in people’s private photos, but when you looked at a whole book’s worth of them, they came to seem a little too natural. The exquisiteness of all the aged furniture and the low table with exactly the right amount of clutter seemed to Taro too perfect to be trusted. That was especially true of Taro Gyushima—the expressive look on his face in each photo, his long, dishevelled hair arranged to look as if he hadn’t laid a finger on it, his white shirt intended to seem like it was his everyday attire. Even the angle at which he turned seemed calculated to look casual. Taro didn’t like men like that, who were always thinking about how they were coming across. It was maybe that feeling that prevented him from being able to simply enjoy looking at the photos.
Nevertheless, when he thought about how these rooms actually existed inside the walls of that sky-blue house over the wall, he could at least understand Nishi’s desire to go and see it with her own eyes.
On one of the last pages of the book was a shot of Taro Gyushima in the garden. He was standing over to the right, in front of the plum and the pine, digging with a spade. He wore the same white shirt even when gardening, but in this shot alone he was paying more attention to what he was doing than to the camera, or at least, so it seemed to Taro. The hole was about one metre in diameter, and twenty or thirty centimetres deep. When Taro compared this to the other photos, the shrubbery around looked different, so he guessed that he might have been transplanting something.
When Taro was hanging his laundry out on the balcony, he looked in the direction of the house, but he couldn’t see the garden. The trees and the ivy in Mrs Saeki’s garden were growing wilder by the day, and the branches of the maple that overhung the wall were now poking their way into Taro’s balcony. There were crows cawing at each other. It sounded as if they were having a conversation. Taro suddenly remembered Numazu’s story about burying Cheetah in his garden. The hole Taro Gyushima was digging might have been to bury something, he thought. Maybe that bird from the cage. It wasn’t as though the photographs were arranged in chronological order, so maybe the bird had died, and he was burying it. Then again, he thought, that hole was far too big for burying a bird in.
Taro felt an itch on his foot, and realized he’d got his first mosquito bite of the summer.
One rainy Saturday at the end of June, Taro stepped out of his flat. He didn’t really want to go out in the rain, but he didn’t have any food that didn’t require cooking, and so he’d decided to go to the convenience store to pick up a ready meal. Standing by the bottom of the stairs to the first floor were Nishi and Mrs Snake, chatting and pointing up at the branches of the tree that grew beside the staircase.
Taro didn’t know the name of the tree, but it had thin branches and luminous green leaves. At the beginning of the summer before last, when he had first seen the tiny white flowers hanging on it, he had been surprised that a tree could produce anything so delicate and pretty. He remembered that it had flowered this year too, not long ago. After that, some clusters had formed on the tips of the branches, but the clusters were a strange shape that didn’t seem to fit with the flowers. He didn’t remember having seen them until last year, either. It seemed that it was those clusters that Mrs Snake and Nishi were pointing to now.
“What are those things?” Taro asked.
“They’re galls,” Mrs Snake replied.
“What’s that?”
“A kind of plant tumour. They’re caused by parasitic lice that make the buds mutate and change shape, and then larvae grow inside them. They only form on Japanese snowbells like this one. The ‘cat’s paw’ part comes from their shape.”
“I thought they looked like bunches of mini bananas, actually,” Taro said. “But now that you mention cats, they seem less like paws and more like the tails on nekomata. You know, the demon-cats, with nine tails.”
“It’s foxes that have nine tails,” Nishi corrected him, looking for some reason very pleased with herself. “Nekomata only have two.”
Mrs Snake looked up at Taro, once again with a child-like gaze, and said, “There aren’t any foxes around here, but there are raccoon dogs. Did you know that? There’s a mother and her cub living by the tracks of the Setagaya line. I wonder what on earth they find to eat around here! They look a lot like badgers, but they’re definitely raccoon dogs.”
“And I thought this was supposed to be the city,” Taro said.
Mrs Snake’s eyes were sparkling. Taro had seen her speaking to cats by the side of the road several times, and imagined that she was something of an animal lover. Nishi was standing behind her, nodding silently.
That evening, Taro was eating a dinner of grilled mackerel in his flat when Mrs Snake brought him three illustrated guides: one for plants, one for birds, and one for wild animals.
“I’m sure they’ll come in handy,” she said, pressing them on him.
On a sudden whim, Taro asked her what kind of people had lived in the sky-blue house before. Kaiko Umamura and Taro Gyushima were no longer there when she moved in, she said. That was seventeen years ago. An American couple lived there for ten years, and after that, a family with two sons in high school. Taro vaguely remembered seeing the couple with the two sons at some point, but he had no clear mental image of them.
Mrs Snake said she had known the American couple a little, too. The husband was in Japan for his job, which had something to do with aircraft. The wife was often out tending the garden, and Mrs Snake would sometimes come across her while she was working in the flower beds by the front door. The woman didn’t speak much Japanese, but she was friendly, and would greet Mrs Snake with a pleasant “Konnichiwa!”. Feeling obliged to return her kindness, Mrs Snake would talk for a while, managing to get across in stilted English the fact that she liked Neil Young, and had been born in the same year as he was. She had been invited over to their house three times for dinner, and they played Neil Young for her on the big stereo in the living room. By that point, the tatami had been replaced by laminate flooring, but the pine was still in the garden, and the kitchen hadn’t yet been renovated. Nishi, who Mrs Snake had told this to the other day, had been incredibly envious, she said.
Taro felt surprised to think that his dad, too, must have been born in the same year as Neil Young, but when he thought about it he realized he hardly knew Neil Young’s music. He looked away from the shining eyes of Mrs Snake, who was still stood outside his front door, and said, “My father always had this really stereotypical image of rock music, or any music produced by any kind of band, as being about young people in scruffy clothes making as much noise as possible. In fact, I got told off for buying a guitar. Of course, my father lived until he was eighteen in the mountains in Shikoku, so I guess his way of thinking was a bit behind compared with other people of his generation.”
“Even where I grew up, they thought of me as a kind of rebel, and that was in the suburbs of Tokyo. I really do miss those times, you know. I went to see the Beatles when they came to Japan. I still feel proud about that.”
“Wow, that’s amazing.”
“Is your father in good health?”
“Actually no, he passed away almost ten years ago.”
“Really, I’m sorry to hear that. He must have been young.”
As Mrs Snake spoke, her voice sounded choked up and her eyes grew moist. Taro looked at her curiously. Why would you cry about the death of someone you’d never met, the father of someone you weren’t particularly close to?
Mrs Snake stayed for a while longer in Taro’s doorway, reminiscing about the past. Taro learnt many things: She’d been born in a town called Tanashi, which had become a subdivision of Tokyo, and had been renamed. Until a few years ago, she had taught sewing at a fashion design college. She had been to see the Beatles playing the Budokan, and also travelled to America to see Neil Young. Neil Young was Canadian. When Mrs Saeki, now in a care home, had married into the Saeki family and had first come to live here, the land
all the way over to the railway tracks had been fields, and the family had owned all of it (although Mrs Snake thought that might be a bit of an exaggeration). Mrs Saeki’s husband, who had passed away, had been the headmaster of a junior high school, and before Taro had moved into the Pig Flat, there had been a Chinese girl, a student, living there.
At the end of June, Numazu, the colleague of Taro’s who had married a woman from Kushiro and changed his name to hers, left the company and moved to Kutchan, in Hokkaido, to work in a hotel with his wife.
When Taro asked Numazu if he’d be living close to his wife’s parents, Numazu chuckled, and said that Kutchan was 400 kilometres from Kushiro; it was a seven-hour drive, the same distance as between Tokyo and Osaka. Taro didn’t feel particularly happy about being treated so condescendingly, given that until very recently Numazu hadn’t known the first thing about Hokkaido. On Numazu’s last day at work, Taro gave him the cuckoo clock that he’d received from Nishi and that had been stuffed in his closet all this time.
The weather was beginning to get hot and sticky, and Taro took to leaving the glass door to his balcony open, and just pulling the screen door shut. The mesh had started to fray, however, and the screen door itself would often come off the track. One day, while Taro was trying to fix a hole in the mesh, the screen door came off its track again. He was considering just leaving it to spare himself the annoyance when he noticed a round stone wedged in the right corner of the track. He crouched down to pick it up and found that, instead, it was a tiny, round vessel about one or two centimetres in size, about the same as the tip of his finger.
Taro got a torch, and tried shining it on the thing. It seemed to be some kind of miniature urn or vase, the upper section tapered, like the neck of a saké flask. It was grey in colour, and as evenly and exquisitely shaped as if it had been formed on a potter’s wheel. It was as hard as cement. Taro had never seen anything like it before, and assumed that it was the egg sac of an insect, or else some kind of nest.
Feeling a little creeped out, Taro closed the glass door gently, then realized that where the tiny vase had been wedged, in one of the grooves in the track, was exactly the place where it would not be crushed by the door.
Taro regretted that there was no illustrated guide to insects among the books that Mrs Snake had given him.
He tried an internet search on his phone, entering terms like “vase”, “insect” and “nest”, and found several images that looked quite like the thing that he’d discovered. It seemed to be the nest of a “potter wasp”. The wasp would lay an egg inside the vase, deposit the larvae of other insects as food for the wasp larva, then seal the vase. The wasp supposedly made a separate vase for each of its larva. Taro checked his balcony and window frames for other tiny vases that might be lying around, but he couldn’t find any.
The article went on to explain that when the potter wasp larva emerged from its egg and developed into an adult, it would break open the lid of the vase and emerge. The vase that Taro had found was without a lid, which meant the wasp that had been born inside must have already flown its nest. Taro examined the tiny vase again. The inside was pitch black, and he couldn’t see a thing. That tiny bit of darkness seemed bottomless to him.
Taro then tried doing a search for “cat’s paw gall” and “Japanese snowbell”. The site he found had plenty of details and many close-up photos of the galls, tightly packed with squirming insects. Overcome by disgust, Taro quickly closed the page.
With the tasks that he had to take over because of Numazu’s departure, as well as the training of the new staff member assuming Numazu’s role, Taro had a very busy summer. It was an especially hot summer, too, and every time he left the office to visit a client, the rays of the sun and the body heat of everyone crammed on the trains sapped his strength. On his way to work, he had to transfer at Shinjuku. Just when he’d been thinking that the engineering works that had been going on there forever had finally been completed, he noticed that new engineering works had now begun on a different set of tracks. When Taro had visited Tokyo for the first time thirteen years before, to attend a training course for the first hair salon he’d worked at, there had been engineering works ongoing then, and they had been going on ever since, in some part of the station or other. In the last few years, it had been large-scale engineering works that had affected the entire station.
Now the realization struck Taro: the works would never come to an end. They would finish only when the station had ceased to be used. Every day, Taro got home late at night and went straight to bed, turning the air conditioning on so he’d be able to sleep in that stuffy apartment, not bothering to open the windows. The air-conditioning unit had to be over ten years old. It certainly produced plenty of noise, but it didn’t do much in the way of making the room comfortable. It was either so powerful that he would feel chilled, or it did nothing to cool the room at all. It was like it had sensed the fate awaiting it in a year or two, and had stopped caring about its job performance. The rumbling from the fridge, too, had become more frequent, and it sometimes woke Taro. It sounded like a motorbike engine revving up.
Mrs Snake would come over from time to time, bringing souvenirs purchased from places she’d been, or sharing presents that people had given her. When Taro received some cookies that a colleague had brought back from a holiday overseas, he took them over to Mrs Snake’s flat, hoping to repay her kindnesses. It was the first time that he’d ever been up to the first floor.
From the doorway to Mrs Snake’s flat, where he stood, he could see that she had very little furniture, and hardly any other stuff either. The only furniture he could see was a cabinet for dishes in the kitchen and a low table in the tatami room. Not even a TV. That kind of minimalist interior, which made her place look a lot more spacious than his flat did, was different from what he’d been expecting, based on Mrs Snake’s clothes and her way of speaking. The fact that it was tidy came as no surprise, and neither did the purple flowers arranged meticulously in the vase on top of the shoe cabinet, nor the cushions laid out, nor the traditional Japanese fabric in navy and maroon, which seemed similar to the kind of clothes she wore. It was that the room went beyond mere tidiness to something spooky. Taro felt that things he would have expected to be there, things that should have been there, were missing. It lacked the feel of being lived in, a bit like a room at a ryokan, or a cheap motel.
The thought crossed his mind that it was already like an uninhabited place. Taro then hurriedly attempted to get rid of that thought. Mrs Snake invited him in for a cup of tea, but he declined. He returned to his own flat, where he began to regret his behaviour slightly.
He ran into Nishi on his way home from work, in the convenience store outside the station. As they walked back to their block of flats together, he mentioned how tidy Mrs Snake’s flat was, and Nishi told him that she wanted to take a leaf out of Mrs Snake’s book, that her own flat was so crammed full of stuff that there was barely space for her, even though it wasn’t long before she’d have to move out.
Taro asked if Mrs Snake had always lived alone, and Nishi told him that she’d been married once, but that her ex-husband had come from a very strict, traditional family. Mrs Snake had moved in with the family, as was convention, but her mother-in-law had been very hard on her, and she had eventually been driven out, forced to leave her two-year-old son behind.
As they reached the front of the block of flats, Nishi mentioned that the bulb in her ceiling light needed changing, but that she was too short to manage it. She asked Taro if he’d mind helping her.
Just as Nishi had warned, the hall, the kitchen and the main tatami room were a cluttered mess. Every available bit of wall space was filled with shelves heaving with boxes and books, the gaps between crammed with trinkets and paper.
“It’s times like these when I think about how handy it would be to have a man around. Like, when I’m trying to open a jar, or carrying heavy luggage. I get over it soon enough, mind you.”
“Yo
u could have left that last bit out.”
“You’re right. That’ll teach me for trying to be funny.”
“Yeah, I gave that up a long time ago.”
On a shelf, painted a similar shade of blue as the house, was a single-lens reflex camera. Taro was by no means an expert, but it looked vintage. The top of the camera was raised into a silver triangle, a bit like a pointed roof, and it struck Taro that the shape resembled the roof of the sky-blue house. The large lens had no cap, and the inside of its cylinder was dark. He thought of the darkness inside the potter wasp’s nest. Both the camera itself and all the things around it were conspicuously dusty, and Taro imagined that Nishi probably hadn’t touched the camera since putting it on the shelf.
On the table beside the balcony were a large computer monitor and a white panel-shaped device with a stylus. The space around them was buried in comics, books, pens and cups.
“Is this what people these days use to draw manga?”
“People draw their first drafts by hand. Usually with felt pen, sometimes with acrylic paint. Then you scan those drawings in and neaten up the fine details using a tablet.”
“Do you have any books of your stuff?”
“Ha! I’m flattered, but please don’t feel you need to show interest.”
Actually, Taro hadn’t been asking out of politeness, but simple curiosity. Still, whether Nishi was just shy or she actually didn’t want him to see her stuff, she wouldn’t even tell him her pen name.
He replaced the bulb, and began putting on his shoes to leave. Nishi promised that she would do something as a thank you next time, but Taro told her not to worry about it. When he walked into his flat, the fridge began its usual rumbling.
Spring Garden Page 6