Spring Garden

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Spring Garden Page 7

by Tomoka Shibasaki


  It finally started getting cooler around the end of September, and halfway through October, Taro’s work-load began to ease a little.

  One sunny Sunday afternoon, Taro opened the door to his balcony. No sooner had he looked towards the sky-blue house than the stained-glass window with the two dragonflies opened upwards, and Nishi’s face popped out of it. It was the window on the landing, where Taro Gyushima was posing with his twin-lens reflex camera in Spring Garden. Seeing Nishi’s face in his line of sight caught Taro by surprise and he started, letting out a noise at almost exactly the same time as Nishi made one too. Yet Nishi didn’t look very surprised. In fact, come to think of it, Taro had never seen Nishi looking particularly shocked, or angry, or overjoyed.

  “You know trespassing is a serious crime, right?”

  “Oh, no, it’s nothing like that! I’ve become friends with Mrs Morio.”

  Nishi lowered her voice as she spoke, so Taro couldn’t catch what she was saying.

  Then he heard a child’s voice calling her. It sounded like the boy.

  Nishi turned around and answered “Coming!” then shut the window.

  Taro stared up at the stained-glass window that was now back in place. He hadn’t known that the window could be opened.

  In the evening, Nishi rang at the door of Taro’s flat, and the two of them headed out to the restaurant they’d been to in May. Taro ordered plates of deep-fried chicken and deep-fried octopus. Nishi drank a beer, and explained to Taro how she’d come to see the house.

  It was in the middle of September, when it was still very hot and humid. After sundown Nishi had set out on her daily circle of the block, and was passing in front of the Morios’ house when she saw something lump-like lying in the street. She thought it might be a cat, but then realized it was too big for a cat. Then the lump got up and walked on two legs. Nishi saw a car passing through the intersection ahead and decided the situation was dangerous. She went up and spoke to the child. The child turned around, and said, “Where’s Mummy?”

  Nishi saw that it was the little Morio girl. She took the girl by the hand and led her over to the house, where she pressed the intercom buzzer, but there was no reply. She pressed it again, and this time heard a frantic-sounding voice calling out, “Just a moment!” The door was flung open and the child’s mother came out.

  “Excuse me, I think I found your child.”

  At the same time as Nishi said this, the woman cried out, “Yuna!” and the little girl instantly began sobbing.

  “I found her in the street. She was just standing there…” Nishi offered in explanation, but the mother was clasping her child tightly to her, comforting her, and it seemed as though Nishi’s words fell on deaf ears. She did afterwards thank Nishi, bowing over and over again so that Nishi bowed in return, and then the mother and child disappeared inside the house.

  When she passed in front of the Morios’ house at ten o’clock the next morning, Mrs Morio was out on the first-floor balcony, hanging out her laundry. She called out to Nishi, and asked her to wait. In a short time, she appeared at the front door, and apologized to Nishi for her rudeness the previous night. She had been in such a panic, she said, she had barely even said thank you. Nishi said, “Not at all,” then explained that she lived in the block of flats behind the house and had just happened to be passing by at that time. Mrs Morio thanked her several more times, then invited Nishi in for a cup of tea.

  “Are you sure?” Nishi asked, staring into the woman’s face. She looked considerably younger than Nishi herself, and had an open, friendly smile.

  “Of course! Come on in.”

  Mrs Morio gestured inside the house behind her with her right hand. Nishi entered through the bramble-entwined metal gates and went up the three porch steps to the house.

  Seeing the stained glass with its pattern of irises up close for the first time, Nishi noticed how the thick glass diffused the light, dyeing the air in the front hall into a tissue of different colours in a way she found very beautiful.

  After taking off her shoes in the entranceway, easily large enough for someone to sleep in, Nishi stepped into the hall with its hardwood floor. When Mrs Morio opened the door on the left, the influx of light was so blinding that Nishi nearly reeled. The living room she was shown into was even larger than she’d expected. The sunlight streaming into the room from the south bounced off the polished floor.

  Covered in natural cotton, the corner sofa that looked out over the garden was as big as a bed. Without any sense of agency, like in dreams where her body stopped moving, Nishi sank into its softness. She felt almost as though she was floating. There was a vase of small white flowers on the oval low table right in front of her.

  Mrs Morio brought over two cups of hojicha and some oatmeal cookies that she said she’d made.

  Her name was Miwako. Her son was Haruki, and her daughter Yuna. Haruki, who was about to turn five, was suffering from bad asthma attacks, and Miwako had barely slept in days. Yesterday, she said, she’d nodded off beside his bed, and that was when her three-year-old daughter had slipped outside.

  “I had no idea she was tall enough to reach the door handle,” she said, sincere in her concern and astonishment. She was pale-skinned, not overweight but nicely rounded. Her way of speaking gave the impression of an incredibly earnest person, the kind who made everyone around her feel secure. On that visit, Yuna was at nursery, but Haruki was in bed upstairs. Nishi told Miwako that she’d had bad asthma as a child too, and it had always acted up at this time of year when the seasons were changing, so she understood her worry fully. At this, Miwako opened her eyes wide and leant forward, saying that she herself had been such a healthy child she’d rarely caught a cold, and had never known anyone with asthma. As a result, she felt terribly anxious that she couldn’t properly understand the suffering her son was going through and that she wasn’t dealing with it in the right way.

  “The fact that he has to go through something like this when he’s so young…” she said, and her eyes welled up with tears. Nishi listened to what Miwako had to say, then talked about her own symptoms and experiences in the hope that it might be of some use. When she explained that asthma often went away as children got older, and that she’d stopped having attacks by the time she started high school, Miwako nodded firmly and said, “I know it’s important that I stay strong through all of this. It’s him that’s suffering, after all, not me.”

  Just then they heard a call of “Mummy”, and the boy came down the stairs. He was in his pyjamas, but didn’t look too poorly at all. Maybe his asthma wasn’t as bad in the daytime, Nishi thought. Prompted by his mother, Haruki said hello to Nishi, and bowed politely.

  Nishi asked him a couple of questions, but she had almost no experience of interacting with kids and wasn’t quite sure how to go about it. Instead, she reached for a nearby sketchpad, and started drawing a selection of animals and cartoon characters, which the boy seemed delighted by. When Nishi explained that illustrating was her job, Miwako looked at her with eyes sparkling and said, “I’m so envious of people with talent!”

  Miwako was from Hokkaido, she told Nishi. While at university in Sapporo, she had taken a part-time job in a hotel restaurant, and it was there that she had met Mr Morio, who had come to stay in the hotel on business. She had got married immediately after graduating, and moved to Tokyo. For that reason, she had no friends nearby, and tended to stay in the house by herself. She invited Nishi to come and see her again.

  Miwako seemed to Nishi like the sort of person who would have no difficulty making friends, but she said that the other mothers at the private nursery her kids went to thought about nothing except how their children could be given the best possible education. They were very group-oriented, she said, and always on top of the latest information about learning, which made Miwako draw back. Something about the phrase “always on top of the latest information” brought a smile to Nishi’s face, and Miwako said, “Sorry, I don’t know why I used that express
ion,” and smiled in embarrassment.

  They had moved into the house because her husband had taken a fancy to it, she said, but he was so busy heading up a new project at his company that he often had to work on weekends as well, and there were few people in the neighbourhood of a similar age to her. All these things that Miwako had been storing up inside her came pouring out now to Nishi.

  “Gosh, yes, it must be really hard for you. It is a pretty elderly neighbourhood around here, isn’t it?”

  As Nishi spoke, she looked around the room at the bright white walls and laminate flooring—different from how it was in Spring Garden.

  She thought about how, twenty years ago, this room had been a Japanese-style room complete with tatami and that antique dresser. Now, there was a low television stand with a fifty-inch screen perched on top of it. The ornamental panels with the elephants were still there above the doors, but the wicker chairs in the sunroom were gone, replaced by a couple of round green padded armchairs. The grass in the garden had a slightly bleached look. Nishi could see the crepe myrtle to the left, and the crabapple next, and the plum to the right. There was no sign of the pine or the stone lantern that had been part of that garden twenty years before.

  There was a child’s drawing hanging in a white frame on one of the white walls. The lines traced in red crayon could have been either a flower or a fish. On the display shelf below it was a row of photographs: the Morios’ wedding day, and the children when they were younger. There had been a photo framed in Kaiko Umamura’s illustrations too, Nishi remembered. She had the feeling it had been a photo of a goldfish.

  Miwako, noticing Nishi’s roaming gaze, smiled a little embarrassedly, and said that she knew that it was a privileged sort of concern to have, but she found the house so big and fancy that often, when it was just herself and her kids here, it made her feel uneasy. She’d always wanted to live somewhere closer to nature, where she’d have a sense of the seasons passing. Before moving into this house, she said, they’d lived in a flat in Meguro, in the heart of Tokyo, but despite the years she’d lived there she’d never got used to how many buildings there were, and how little green. She also told Nishi that although the garden was small, it was her favourite thing about the house.

  “It’s a great garden,” Nishi said. Through the window, she looked at the birds in the trees, flitting between their branches.

  When Miwako had first come to Tokyo and found herself with more time than she knew what to do with, she had spent it all making cakes and biscuits, but now, she said, if she found herself with spare time again, she’d like to get a few planters and grow some vegetables. Then she looked at the clock on the wall and hurriedly stood up, apologizing for having kept Nishi so long.

  Nishi would have visited the Morios’ house every day if she could, but she didn’t want to be thought of as pushy or annoying, so she decided to limit her visits to once or twice a week around lunchtime, or in the evening after the nursery bus had brought the children home, staying for no more than a couple of hours each time.

  Playing with the kids allowed Nishi to explore many different parts of the house. The stair railing, patterned with brambles similar to those fabricated on the front gates, was just as it appeared in the photo book. She learnt that the stained-glass window on the landing could be opened. The sash windows were in a room with parquet flooring, which was used as the children’s room. The room facing the balcony was still floored with tatami as in the pictures from twenty years ago, though now it had a large reclining sofa in it.

  In general, more of the interior had stayed the same than Nishi was expecting, but all of it was now the Morios’ house. It was the house in the photo book, but it was also, now, the house belonging to the Morios. She couldn’t decide if the feeling of those two different houses coinciding perfectly in some places and varying in others was uncomfortable or interesting, and with the question still unresolved in her mind, she went around looking for the little details Kaiko Umamura had depicted in her illustrations, lounging around in the same spaces that appeared in the photo book. At the very least, when she was looking from the living-room sofa through the sunroom out at the garden, Nishi felt totally content. The rays of the setting sun would shine right where she was sitting, and she could hear almost no sounds at all except for the calls of the birds outside. The floor of the sunroom had been worn down and was becoming whitish in places. It seemed as though the decades that had passed there before and the afternoon now slipping by were coming together as one.

  What Mrs Morio had said about her husband not being around much definitely seemed to be true, and about a month had passed before Nishi got to meet him when he came home from work.

  When the two were introduced, he kept his hands neatly by his side and bowed politely to Nishi, saying, “Thank you ever so much for keeping my wife company.”

  It turned out he was the same age as Nishi.

  The previous week, Nishi had gone with Miwako and Haruki, still off sick, to a nearby park. Nishi remarked to Haruki, who was worried about being away from nursery for so long, that she knew the evenings were really hard for him but in the day he was full of beans, wasn’t he, and as he nodded his agreement, Haruki finally let his face relax into a smile.

  The park wasn’t so big, but it had a playing field about the size of a basketball court, surrounded by wire fencing. There, Nishi and Haruki played a slow game of catch with a rubber ball. Haruki was good at catch, as it turned out, and even as Nishi gradually extended the distance between them, he continued to throw the ball in a straight line towards her. Miwako, who said she was no good at ball sports, stood watching, letting out cries of admiration for both Haruki’s and Nishi’s throws.

  From the age of four through to the age of ten, Nishi had been given intensive baseball training by her dad. Every day, from six in the morning, and then from five thirty in the afternoon after her dad had finished work at the factory, they would practice pitching and fielding in the park on the estate. Her father wanted to do something to build up the physical strength of his asthmatic daughter, and he was convinced that, since the times were changing and women in the future would have more freedom to do what they wanted, it was better to do things differently from other people. It also seemed as though he was trying, through her, to reclaim his own childhood, a childhood he had missed because his family had been too poor for him to enter any sports club at school. He told Nishi about his dream of producing Japan’s first female professional baseball player, just like Yuki, the heroine of a Shinji Mizushima manga that he had read over and over. Nishi watched reruns of the cartoon series based on that manga, and really felt like the gutsy Yuki was the image of herself in the future. She believed that, just like Yuki, she would fight and win, and so, apart from the times when her asthma was really bad, she practised every day. Her father had no experience of playing baseball himself, so he read books written by famous players and coaches, and put together a practice schedule for her accordingly.

  After Nishi started primary school, on weekends she visited the batting centre close to the factory where her dad worked. At those times her brother, who was one year younger than her, would tag along, but her father said that male professional baseball players were ten a penny, and that besides, boys should grow up to be brave and strong, and choose their own path, even if it meant breaking the rules a little. After watching a bunch of Jackie Chan movies, her brother took up karate, but packed it in after a few months. It was the summer of Nishi’s fourth year in school when her father decided that she didn’t have what it took to be a professional baseball player. By that time Nishi, who had always turned down requests from friends to play after school or on the weekend, no longer got invited by other kids to do things. When she was left alone in the classroom at break and after school while all the others were in their various clubs, she read the Osamu Tezuka manga series Phoenix and drew pictures in the margins of her notebook or the back of flyers. In other words, Nishi said, it had been her early spel
l of baseball that had led to her developing the talents to do her current job, which she liked, and that was one of the reasons she believed that she had luck on her side. In the fifth year, a girl who entered the class from another school was given the seat next to Nishi, and soon enough, the two began chatting to one another. Through her friendship with that new girl, Nishi began to be included by the other kids too.

  The last time her years of baseball training had proved useful was when she’d started her first job. She and fourteen colleagues had been out drinking, and decided to go to a batting centre. In a game called Strike Out!—where you had to bat the ball and hit nine panels in a grid—Nishi had knocked down seven panels, coming in first among her colleagues, thoroughly surprising them. Being drunk, Nishi had really wanted to tell her father right then and there how happy she was for his training, but her parents had divorced before she’d gone to senior high school and she no longer had any way of contacting him.

  Haruki, who was in top spirits after having his ball skills complimented by Nishi, announced with a gleam in his eye that he wanted to be a baseball player when he grew up. When Nishi saw him again not long after, he’d decided he wanted to play either for the New York Yankees or the Texas Rangers, at which point Nishi realized how much more international baseball had become since she was a kid, when it had all been about Japanese teams.

  Yuna, his sister, was at the age where she was picking up new words at great speed, and would ask Nishi all kinds of questions. Nishi had never been good at interacting with children, but she found that listening to the slightly bizarre things that Yuna came out with was fun. Miwako said her husband had told her he was relieved to see her looking more cheerful.

  “Is that really true?” Taro asked as he squeezed a wedge of lemon over their second plate of deep-fried chicken. “You didn’t just lie your way in there?”

 

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