“Honestly, I can hardly believe it myself that an opportunity like this landed in my lap the way it did. Mrs Morio is just such a good-hearted person. The kind of person who doesn’t understand what it even means to distrust someone, you know? I sometimes wonder if it’s safe, you know, inviting people loitering outside your house inside, but people like her attract positive energy, I think. I get the feeling that family will be blessed somehow, whatever happens. It’s weird to think that those amazing families you sometimes read about in magazines actually exist, though, isn’t it? It’s kind of incredible.”
Nishi was on her sixth beer.
“If that’s true, then why did you have to keep it from me?”
“I didn’t want to jinx it. It’s a rule of mine not to broadcast things until they’ve happened. I didn’t tell anyone the university I was applying to until I got in, and I didn’t tell my friends I was drawing comics, either, until I made it.”
Nishi ordered beer number seven.
“It has happened, though, already. Isn’t this exactly what you wanted?”
“But I still haven’t managed to see the bathroom. To get to it, you have to go through a big washroom with sinks and stuff, so you can’t see it from the hall. That’s my one wish, to see those lime-green tiles. If I can, I want to take a photo, from the same angle as that photo on the last page of the photo book.”
As she spoke, Nishi chewed on an umeboshi from the dish of simmered sardines she had just ordered. Looking at her, Taro began to feel concerned. Nishi was the type of person who wouldn’t have hesitation about exploiting a moment when Mrs Morio was distracted to sneak into the bathroom. Or else she might come up with some ruse in order to get in, like saying that her own bath was broken.
“You told Mrs Morio about the photo book, right?”
“Actually, no.”
“What? You’ve kept that quiet?”
“Just think about it. If someone told you they’d been watching your house for ages, wouldn’t you get a bit scared?”
“You wouldn’t have to mention that part, though. You could just tell her about the book.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
Nishi tilted her head to one side and smiled. There was something affected about the gesture, and it irritated Taro a little. It made him think that for all her friendliness, Nishi was actually just using Mrs Morio.
“Don’t you think it’s time to call it a day? You’ve made it inside the house, and seen the garden.”
“You’re right, of course. I know that. But the thing is, there’s no guarantee how long that house is going to be around for. It’s fifty years old now. The housing market is good at the minute, and there are construction sites springing up all over. That one by the railway tracks, for example. That’s going to be a fancy new apartment block.”
Hearing this, Taro realized that the increase in new detached houses in the neighbourhood and all the renovation taking place was exactly what they were talking about on the news programmes, where they attributed it to the economy and the rush to purchase and fix things before the rise in consumption tax, and so on. He heard people speaking about the housing market when he visited clients, but he’d always thought it was something that bore no relation to his life. But on his way to the station, he saw building after building rigged with scaffolding and covered in plastic sheeting. Now the block of flats across the street from View Palace Saeki III was getting knocked down.
When her seventh beer was brought over, Nishi drained the first half in a single gulp, then said, “Everything in Tokyo happens so fast, doesn’t it? There are these buildings going up and new shops opening all the time, and every time you speak to someone they tell you what the latest big thing is, or what’s going to be the next one. Don’t you think? It’s like, things get better so quickly but then they deteriorate just as fast.”
“Well, yeah, but Tokyo is a big city. I don’t know if you can make that kind of sweeping generalization. The place where I first lived here was a pretty rundown area with a much more local feel to it, and there were quite a few housing estates and factories there.”
“That’s true. But when you live in this central part, you kind of forget about other parts of Tokyo, I think. It’s like you almost forget that other places apart from this one even exist. I’ve think I’ve even forgotten the place I grew up in.”
“I quite like it here, you know.”
“In what way? What do you like about it?” Nishi folded her arms and placed them on the table, then stared straight at Taro.
“I guess I like the fact there’s just so much going on. That cat’s paw thing on the tree, for example.”
“That’s Tokyo for you?”
“Well, this is the first place I’ve ever seen something like that.”
“Isn’t that because you haven’t lived in many other places though?”
“Well, I guess, but…”
“Sorry, it’s not like I can talk, either. Don’t be offended, please.”
“No problem.”
All of the other customers had left the restaurant. The staff were looking at Nishi and Taro from behind the counter as if they wanted to start closing up. It seemed that closing time was earlier on Sunday.
“I’d love to have free rein of that house, just for a day,” Nishi said with a sigh, and downed the last of her beer. When they left the restaurant, Nishi announced she was going to visit her mother in Chiba, and made towards the station.
From that day on, Nishi would sometimes bring round cookies, or pound cake, or biscuits that Miwako had made. Taro always thanked her and accepted them, but since the time back in high school when he’d got food poisoning that had lasted for several days from an undercooked cheesecake his sister had made, he’d had an aversion to cookies or cakes that weren’t shop-bought, so he took all of Miwako’s handiwork into the office and gave it to his colleagues. They loved them, saying that the person who’d made them was clearly an expert at it, and that the kids who got to eat these kinds of things every day didn’t know their luck. One colleague said how much he’d like to try pancakes this person had made. Then he gave Taro a list of the ten best places for pancakes in Tokyo, together with maps showing how to get to them.
One Sunday, at the end of October, Taro was lying on the tatami reading the news on his phone when he came across an article about an unexploded bomb.
On the morning of 27th October, approximately 1,150 people were temporarily evacuated from a residential district in the south of Shinagawa Ward in Tokyo while the Self-Defence Forces conducted a controlled explosion of an unexploded bomb belonging to the old Imperial Army. The bomb was discovered at a construction site in a residential area approximately 500 metres north of Ōimachi JR station. The municipal government dictated that all places in a 130-metre radius of the site should be cleared, and access prohibited. There was no disruption experienced to public transport. The Unexploded Ordnance Disposal Unit of the Eastern Army Combat Service Support Section created a protective wall around the site with large sandbags, and remotely detonated the device at just after 11 a.m. The evacuation order was repealed just after 1 p.m. According to a statement from the municipal authorities, the bomb was 15 cm in diameter and 55 cm in length.
The whole business seemed odd to Taro. He found it easy enough to imagine the bomb lying there underground, but the idea that a rusty old thing like that presented enough danger, after decades of being buried, to warrant such large-scale precautions and such a dramatic disposal struck him less as terrifying, and more like a simple error.
The bomb was probably the same age as his father, and Mrs Snake too. Maybe it had been made around the time they were born, and it had spent all those years, enough for someone to live a whole life, underground.
The following Monday was the anniversary of his father’s death. Taro forgot about it, and remembered a few days after. Yet even when he remembered, there was nothing much to be done—after all, it had already come and gone. Then it occurred to him that
, if nothing else, he could at least offer his father a beer. He took the mortar and pestle out of the cabinet, placed it in front of the TV, then placed a can of beer beside it. He wondered if he should put some flowers there as well. Strictly speaking, he was probably supposed to burn incense too, but he had neither flowers nor incense in his flat. In fact, neither of those items had entered his flat in the three years he’d been living there.
Even now, Taro sometimes had the feeling that his father wasn’t dead, but had just gone out. The sensation was a bit like having a dream and forgetting the story half-way through. If his father had just gone out, though, he’d been gone for a really long time. He wondered if he had those kinds of thoughts because, in some way, he didn’t want to accept his father’s death. The same thing could probably be said of the fact he rarely went back to Osaka.
The leaves on the maple in Mrs Saeki’s garden were turning orange and beginning to fall. The ivy was changing colour too, becoming such a bright red that it looked as though it was lit up from the inside.
Taro still walked to the station on the way to work, taking whichever of the three routes appealed to him on that particular day. The number of construction sites around seemed only to increase. He also came across places where they were tearing down buildings. He caught sight of what was left of a wooden house, loaded onto the back of a truck.
Every day, he walked over culverts with rivers running inside them. There were water pipes and gas pipes underground too, and maybe unexploded bombs, for all he knew. Back when he’d been working at the hair salon, he’d heard from an elderly customer that there had been bombs dropped during the war in the area closer to Shinjuku. If there were unexploded bombs still underground, then there must also be bits of the houses that were burnt down then, items of their furniture. Before that, this area had been fields and woods, and the leaves and fruits and berries that fell every year, as well as all the little animals, would also have formed layers over time, sinking down ever deeper under the ground.
And now Taro was walking on top of it all.
One night, when the breeze had started to get chilly, Taro came home straight from a client visit without calling back at his office, and got off at a different station from his usual. He’d set out walking in the direction of home when he saw an animal waddling across the tracks of the Setagaya line. At first, he took it for a fat, ungainly cat, but as he continued watching it, he realized it was a raccoon dog.
Skinny legs poked out from beneath its rounded body. Not pausing once, it kept on going, eventually disappearing into the bushes at the side of the tracks. Taro stood by the metal railing for a while, thinking about the unfamiliar shape of the animal he had just seen, trying to imprint it in his mind.
Around the middle of December, the couple in the Monkey Flat moved out. Taro had never exchanged a single word with them.
That left only three flats in View Palace Saeki III that were still lived in. With two people moving out at once—and the two who had made a lot of noise at that—Taro felt a sense of absence. The block was gradually edging closer to being uninhabited.
Taro spent New Year in the Pig Flat. From New Year’s Eve through the second of January, there was no one else in the block. Taro kept his television on the entire time.
After the New Year’s holiday was over, Taro noticed that the nameplate outside the concrete vault next door had vanished. There had never been any sounds from inside the house, so apart from the disappearance of the nameplate, the fact that the residents had moved out altered nothing. Taro asked Nishi about it when he ran into her outside the block one day, and she said that they’d left over a month ago. Nishi hadn’t seen the move herself, though. Looking out at the house from his balcony, Taro saw that a plant abandoned on the roof had dried up and died, and it was then that he understood that there really had been people living in that house until relatively recently.
All the leaves had fallen from the snowbell, but the cat’s paw gall still held on, though by now its little bunches had shrivelled up and turned black. The lice would have left a long time ago, which meant those nests, too, would be empty. Only the empty houses remained. The potter wasp’s nest he’d discovered by his sliding door was still there, as he’d found it. Sometimes he went out and checked it, but no wasps went anywhere near it. Both the cat’s paw galls and the vases were, he guessed, things that were used once and then never again. They were like houses that were destined to have one set of residents. There would be no new people coming to live in View Palace Saeki III either, though it was possible that new people would move into the concrete vault.
On his phone, Taro searched again for the page with the explanation of the cat’s paw gall that he had previously closed in disgust. The pictures of insects were as gross as ever, but this time he tried to avert his eyes from the photos and focus on the text.
The louse that creates the cat’s paw gall comes and goes between the Japanese snowbell and plants in the grass family, the article said, repeatedly multiplying asexually and sexually. They can therefore only survive in regions that contain both kinds of plants.
For a time when he was in high school, Taro used to think that evolution involved an element of will on the part of the creatures involved, so that to a certain extent, the form that living creatures took reflected their desire to become a particular way. He knew that, according to biology and evolutionary theory, that hypothesis of his wasn’t correct, and now, when Taro learnt about the habitats of strange creatures like these, he thought, like everyone else, that they had been formed that way as the result of a process he didn’t understand, and once they had turned out that way, they kept on going, repeating the same actions, endlessly. He could now accept that was all there was to it.
The only option available was to go on doing the same things endlessly, wondering why everything had to be such a pain, about how good it would be if you could eat leaves or fruit from some other kind of tree instead of the one you’d landed on. Once you could no longer go on repeating those actions, then you and your species, at least in its current form, would disappear.
The potter wasp’s case seemed a bit simpler, but even with that, he thought what a pain it must be to make a different little vase for each new larva. Did having individual nests like that increase the chance of survival over having a big nest where all the young ones incubated together? Could living creatures be relied on to find the best solutions to their problems?
There was no way that Taro could even begin to answer such questions, but he felt like having one of those miniature vases to himself would be better than living packed tightly alongside all his brothers and sisters inside one of those cat’s paw sacs.
One Saturday, the start of a three-day weekend, a delivery truck brought Taro two styrofoam boxes. They were from Numazu, sent from his new place in Kutchan. Taro had received an email from Numazu the previous evening, the first in ages. He said he’d finally settled into both his new home and his new job, and that he would be sending Taro some local specialities from Kushiro, so to keep an eye out for the delivery. He apologized that it had taken so long to thank Taro for the present of the cuckoo clock. It was the exact same clock his wife had seen in a shop and regretted not buying. She had been searching for one like it ever since, so she’d been overjoyed by the gift. It was even colder than he’d been expecting, he said, but it wasn’t so bad. He’d attached a picture with his wife holding the clock. It was the first time Taro had seen a photo of Numazu’s wife, and his first thought was that she looked like Numazu. Noting the unusual surname written in Numazu’s handwriting in the SENDER box on the delivery form, he got the feeling that Numazu was now totally used to his new name.
Inside one box were three horsehair crabs. The other contained dried Atka mackerel and a jar of salmon roe. Taro regretted not telling Numazu that he didn’t like dried fish. If he had done that, Numazu might have sent him something else, something he’d have liked. More salmon roe, or maybe some kind of squid, or fish cake
s. In any case, there was far too much here for him, or anybody, to eat on his own.
Numazu knew that Taro lived alone, but he must have been trying to express the depth of his gratitude with these gifts. Taro had no idea about how to cook horsehair crabs, so he went up to the first floor and knocked on the door of the Snake Flat. There was no reply. He couldn’t see any lights on inside, either, so he guessed Mrs Snake must be out. Come to think of it, he hadn’t seen her around for a while. He felt sure she couldn’t have moved out without saying anything, but it was possible that she was getting ready to move elsewhere. Taro then tried the Dragon Flat next door. As he knocked, it occurred to him that he’d received the cuckoo clock from Nishi in the first place, so the gift he’d received in return should by rights belong to Nishi too. She answered the door wearing a padded wide-sleeved kimono over a hooded sweatshirt and a thick woollen hat, yet her feet were bare.
When Taro told her about the seafood, Nishi suggested, eyes twinkling, that they take it over to the Morios’ house.
Taro went back to his flat, ahead of Nishi. Alone, he found himself staring at the crabs. He’d never eaten horse-hair crabs before. He studied the spines scattered across their shells, picking them up and turning them over, freaking out at their eyes sticking out from their shells, and so round and black that they didn’t seem like real eyes at all. He was still doing this when Nishi came to the door. She’d changed out of her sweatshirt into a blue cardigan and grey trousers in a thick material, and looked smart. The Morios, she told him, didn’t have dinner plans, so it was fine to go over. Mrs Morio had said that if there was salmon roe, then she’d prepare hand-rolled sushi. Nishi and Taro should definitely come over, she’d said, and they could eat all together.
Nishi knelt down beside the styrofoam boxes in Taro’s kitchen, and began prodding the crabs.
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