“Time is running out for me,” she said suddenly, as if she was delivering a dramatic line from a soap, then stood up and looked at Taro. “I’m moving out next month.”
It turned out that Nishi’s mother, who lived alone in a new town in the north part of Chiba, had been diagnosed with breast cancer four years ago. The tumour had been removed, and the cancer hadn’t come back, but for six months she’d been prone to illness, so Nishi had decided to move in with her. Of late she’d been visiting once a week to help out, but it was really too far to commute. Her younger brother in Nagoya had newborn twins and was unable to get over to Tokyo easily. She had a reasonable amount of steady work now, had just got another contract for a weekly illustration slot on a website, so moving wasn’t going to affect her career. Her mother’s place was a flat in yet another housing estate, but it was on the sixth floor and surrounded by beautifully shaped zelkova trees, and the view from the window, at least, was great.
“So the thing is, I was wondering if I could ask you a favour.”
Thinking he’d heard a very similar line from Nishi before, Taro resisted nodding.
“When we’re at the Morios’ and everyone’s busy eating the crabs, I’m going to put a beer glass on the corner of the table. Could you please knock it over,” Nishi said, gesturing to illustrate what she meant.
“You put a glass on the table, and I knock it over?” repeated Taro.
“Yes, because that way it’ll go on my clothes, right? Then I’ll say, ‘Oh, do you mind if I use the bathroom to wash it off?’”
“The bathroom,” Taro repeated.
“I’ll make sure I get a tall glass, one that’ll be easy to knock over.”
“Right, yeah.” Taro was making sure to be noncommittal. One part of him felt Nishi should see this plan through on her own, but he was also curious to get a look inside the Morios’ house himself. It was less that he wanted to make sure that it really was the same house in the photo book, and more that he wanted to see with his own eyes the sort of house that could bring about such fixation on Nishi’s behalf.
At five o’clock, Nishi and Taro went over to the Morios’ house, each carrying a styrofoam box of seafood. When they pressed the buzzer to the intercom by the gate, they heard a pattering sound and then the front door was wrenched open forcefully.
“Hello!” said the little boy and girl in unison. Miwako appeared behind them, and introduced herself to Taro, thanking him, telling him that crab was a big favourite of her kids, and saying she’d heard a lot about him from Nishi.
The children stood on either side of Nishi, each taking one of her hands, seeming as attached to her as the tales he’d heard.
Taro was shown into the large living room, which was filled with warm light. It made a pretty different impression from the photos in Spring Garden, Taro felt. Thinking about it, he realized that the book didn’t contain a single shot taken after dark.
“Actually, I was hoping to see you soon anyway,” Miwako said, looking at Nishi as she placed tea things on the low table. “We’re having to move to Fukuoka. It’s such bad timing. Just when I’ve finally found a friend in Tokyo.”
In a slow, gentle tone, Mrs Morio recounted how her husband originally came from Fukuoka, where his parents ran a scientific materials company. The company he was currently working for was an affiliated firm, and he had always been destined to take over the whole business eventually, but his stepfather had fallen ill and so the change was happening sooner than expected. They were going to live in his parents’ house, but would have one part of it all to them themselves—a part originally converted for Mr Morio’s stepbrother and his family, who had since moved abroad for work. The house was a little way from the centre of the city, and close to the sea, which Mrs Morio thought might do Haruki’s health good.
Nishi listened mostly without altering her expression, occasionally saying things to Yuna, who came padding over with her toys.
“My grandpa’s house is huge. They’ve got a teddy bear that’s this big. It looks exactly like a bear in a zoo!” Haruki exclaimed.
Looking at Haruki, stretching his arms wide and speaking with animation, Taro noticed that the boy’s fringe was so long it was practically falling in his eyes.
“His hair’s quite long, isn’t it?” he said.
“You’re right,” Mrs Morio said. “It’s too long. We’ve been so busy with this and that that I haven’t had time to have it cut. I wish I could just do it myself but I made a mess of it once and ever since then he won’t let me near it.”
“Yeah, cos everyone in my class laughed at me!”
“I used to be a hairdresser, back in the day. I’ll cut it for him, if you like.”
Taro almost smiled at his own phrase, “back in the day”. It was only three or four years ago he’d been a hairdresser, but there was no doubting the fact that, to him, it already felt like the distant past.
They sat Haruki on one of the chairs in the sunroom, spread out newspapers and bin bags around him, and then Taro began to cut the boy’s hair with a pair of scissors that Miwako had. It had been a while since he’d held a pair of scissors, although these scissors designed for home use felt totally different from the sharpened professional ones he’d used at work. Still, their familiar snip seemed to resonate somewhere deep inside him. Taro still had two pairs of haircutting scissors put away in his closet. He hadn’t decided how he felt about the whole hair-salon business. He hadn’t made up his mind to give it up forever, but neither was he sure that he wanted to go back to it. It was a decision that he was avoiding making.
Through the windows of the sunroom Taro could make out the garden, illuminated by the lights from the house. The glass reflected the interior of the room, making it hard to get a good look out, but he could see enough to know that it was definitely the same one as in Spring Garden.
Taro looked over to the right corner of the garden, in front of the plum tree. It was too dark to say for sure, but it didn’t seem like there was anything there. It was the place where Taro Gyushima in the photo book had been digging—either transplanting or burying something.
As Taro was cutting Haruki’s fringe, he noticed that the boy kept sticking his fingers in his mouth. “What’ve you got in there?” he asked.
“Keigo’s and Yuki’s have come out already,” Haruki said. With his tiny index finger, he was checking his bottom front teeth to see if they were wobbly.
From behind the kitchen counter, Miwako called out, “All his best friends’ teeth are coming out, and he won’t stop talking about it. I think he’s scared of being the last.”
Haruki opened his mouth wide to show Taro two neat little rows of blue-white teeth.
“If the baby teeth don’t fall out soon, your adult teeth will start growing out of other parts of your body. Did you know that? Your hands and things.”
Haruki looked petrified by this idea, so Taro immediately assured him he was kidding.
Taro thought about how he had believed until he was in high school that adult teeth fell out as easily as milk teeth did. He remembered asking one of his relatives, who was talking about the traumatic experience of having wisdom teeth removed, what was so bad about it, and having his question laughed at. All of Taro’s wisdom teeth had grown in dead straight and he hadn’t had to have a single one removed. He didn’t know if he had his bone structure to thank for that, or what. People rarely told him that he looked like his father, but it seemed that they were alike in having good bones, at least.
The haircut was over in no time, and for a while Taro played with the two children. He’d spent a fair bit of time with his ex-wife’s niece and nephew, so he was more used to dealing with kids than Nishi was. Hearing them shouting out the names of characters from various cartoons, it occurred to him that maybe he had a distorted view of how special this family was.
Together, Nishi and Miwako boiled the horsehair crabs. Miwako, who said her parents had grown up by the Sea of Okhotsk in Hokkaido, was clearly used
to handling the creatures. As she deftly broke off their legs, explaining to Taro and Nishi what she was doing, her face was so full of life that she looked like a different person.
When Taro had heard that Miwako felt that the size of the house made her uneasy, he’d assumed, without any real reason, that she’d spoken out of spite, but when he saw her tucking enthusiastically into the crabs, he realized, to his surprise, that she really meant it. Just because you had the kind of life that everyone envied didn’t mean that it was right for you. And yet Taro felt that if someone were to offer him the chance to live in this house, he would take them up on it without a second thought.
Taro wondered whether horsehair crabs, a local speciality in Hokkaido, were just a fact of life for Numazu now. And what about the graveyard in the woods buried in snow, where even the air was frozen? Would Numazu get accustomed to the idea of being buried there? He himself had felt more at home where he now lived than the place he’d grown up, and a picture flitted into Taro’s head of Numazu and his wife in matching knitted hats, skiing together, smiling.
Everyone sat around the large low table on a green rug, eating the horsehair crabs, making hand-rolled sushi with salmon roe, tuna and salmon, with the three adults drinking beer. Miwako confessed that it had been a long time since she’d last had a drink, and asked Nishi several times if her face had reddened. The children, having finished off their meal with Hokkaido ice cream from Miwako’s parents, seemed satisfied. They stood up and then began running and chasing each other around the living room, excited by the presence of the visitors.
Round and round and round they went, screeching and laughing. Miwako told them to stop, but her words had no effect on the kids, who seemed to be getting more and more absorbed by their game of tag. They kept on running, chasing after one another, as if caught up in a whirlpool. From time to time they would call out, “Wait!” or “You can’t catch me!”, sometimes switching roles, but however many times they went round, the game showed no signs of ending.
Eventually, the fact that the children weren’t remotely getting tired of the game started to freak Taro out a little bit, and he began to feel like the great forty-square-metre room with its Indian-style wooden panels above the lintel was itself revolving. Noticing that Nishi was glaring at him, he suddenly remembered the plan to knock over the beer glass. But in that very moment, Taro saw Haruki come flying towards the table, and he let out a gasp.
Haruki landed hard on Nishi’s back, and Nishi went crashing headfirst into the table. Not just Nishi’s beer glass, but the other glasses and plates also went flying, and a chorus of breaking dishes rang out across the room. From where he lay draped across Nishi’s shoulders, Haruki yelled out in surprise, then flung himself backwards. Yuna stood stock still behind where Nishi lay slumped over the table.
Miwako screamed. Looking up at her screaming, her mouth wide open, Taro no longer had any doubt that she truly was a good-hearted person, just as Nishi had said.
Nishi slowly peeled herself off the table and sat up. There was a shard of glass sticking out of her left arm. Her sleeve was rolled up, and the skin between her wrist and her elbow was cut in several places. There was blood on her face as well.
Seeing this, Miwako, who had come to Nishi’s side, shrieked again, at which Haruki and Yuna both burst into tears.
“I’m okay, really,” Nishi said, using her right arm that was free from glass to wipe the blood from the left side of her forehead. A trickle was running down to her ear, as if it had been painted there with a brush.
“Can I use your bathroom?”
“Hmm?” said Miwako, not understanding what she meant.
“Do you mind if I use your bathroom? I want to wash the blood off.”
“Oh yes, of course,” Miwako said, persuaded by the urgency in Nishi’s tone, but as she was showing her the way, she stopped still in the doorway.
“Don’t you think you should go to hospital?”
“Let her use the bathroom first,” Taro cut in straight away. “She should wash the wounds off first in the bathroom.”
For a couple of seconds Miwako stood frozen, then, coming back to herself, said, “Right, right. I’ll bring her something to change into.”
This, too, Taro challenged.
“I think it’d be better to clear this stuff up first. It’s dangerous to leave it like this, with the kids around. I’ll make sure she’s okay.”
Confronted by someone so dead set on achieving their objective, even after sustaining such injuries, Taro felt like he couldn’t sit back and do nothing. How long was it since he’d had this feeling of wanting to help someone? Since he’d had this almost dutiful sense that he had to step in and do something for another person? Taro put his arm around Nishi, who had got slowly to her feet, and the two of them went out of the room. Down the hall and on the right, he opened the door to the washroom. Nishi had shown him the plan of the house, so he knew where all the rooms were.
They passed the washing machine and the sink, a double-bowled affair that was different from the one in the photo book, and opened the frosted glass door at the back of the room. When Taro flicked the light switch, the lime-green space instantly rose in front of them. For the first time ever, Nishi saw the bathroom. There were the tiles coating the entire space, the slow gradation from forest to lime green. The curved lines of colour covering the walls and the rim of the bathtub came together and overlapped with one another, so that even the air itself seemed stained a pale green.
Unlike the shot in Spring Garden, though, it was now evening, so there was no light from the window. Even during the day, Taro thought, most of the light would have been blocked by the concrete wall outside, which hadn’t been there twenty years ago. Under the lights of the room, the greens of the tiles in front of them now were dull and flat. Taro felt a vague sense of disappointment. It was just a bathroom—just someone’s bathroom. There was a plastic children’s ball, an enamel washbowl with a cartoon character on it, and shampoo, conditioner and liquid soap that had been decanted into plain dispensers.
It was the bathroom of a house in which a young, wealthy family lived in 2014.
Seeming to have forgotten about the splinter of glass in her arm, Nishi had sat down on the rim of the bathtub and was looking around the small room. Her lips were parted slightly, and behind her glasses, her eyes had a dim gleam to them, a bit like she had fallen into a trance. The blood running down from the cut on her forehead had already dried a blackish red. Then Taro noticed a faint smile on her lips. He remembered what she’d said before: I’ve always had luck on my side.
Unfortunately, though, Nishi had forgotten about the compact camera she’d slipped into her pocket expressly to take photographs of the green-tiled bathroom. Instead, she tried simply to imprint the scene in her mind.
Afterwards Miwako called a taxi, and Taro accompanied Nishi to a hospital with a 24-hour accident and emergency clinic. She was made to wait for a while, but didn’t complain about the pain. Instead, she seemed in a state of mild frenzy, and kept on talking about the bathroom tiles.
“What can I use to recreate those colours? That’s the big question. I guess maybe watercolour acrylics would be best. Though I might need to use some kind of special effects on the image, maybe. What do you think?”
“I know nothing about art.”
“I thought you might say that. I guess that rather than drawing in each individual tile, it might be better off capturing it generally, getting the overall balance of colour. Actually, maybe overlapping layers of coloured pencil could work.”
“It was just like in the photo, right?”
Nishi gave no reply.
They heard the siren of an ambulance, and then a patient was carried in on a stretcher. At the reception desk, an old man was complaining about something, repeating the same words over and over.
The cuts on Nishi’s arms were deep, and she got a total of eleven stitches in three different places. Luckily, maybe thanks to the protection of
fered by her glasses, the damage done to her face was minor. The cut above her cheekbone didn’t need stitches.
While Nishi and Taro were waiting to be charged for the treatment, Miwako’s husband Yosuke appeared. It was the first time Taro had met him. He was a tall, polite man with a classically handsome face. He apologized very simply to Nishi, and paid all the hospital fees. Then he drove them back to their block of flats in his navy German sports car. Both Nishi and Taro were impressed by how nice it felt to ride in it. The following day, the whole Morio family appeared on Taro’s doorstep, apologizing and thanking him. Haruki said in a loud clear voice, “I’m very sorry,” though he didn’t look up, so Taro knelt down and patted his head.
A week after, Nishi invited Taro to go over to the Morios’ to see if there was any of their furniture or appliances that he wanted. They were giving it away. The cut on Nishi’s face had mostly healed, and she said the stitches on her arm would be removed in three days’ time. At the Morios’, Miwako served them pancakes, smothered in maple syrup. It was Taro’s policy not to touch home-made cookies and cakes, but he felt like he could hardly refuse when they were set down right in front of him, so he ate one on behalf of his pancake-loving colleague at work. Reciting to himself the words of praise his colleagues had lavished on Miwako’s cooking, he managed to finish the whole thing.
Miwako explained that there was a lot of furniture in the house they were moving into in Fukuoka already, and it would be no mean feat transporting all this stuff, so she’d be positively grateful if they’d take it off her hands. When Taro checked that she meant for free, Miwako laughed and said, “I wish I could be as straightforward as you!”
Nishi took one of the two green armchairs in the sunroom, a steam oven and the bread-making machine.
Taro decided to take the other green armchair, the corner sofa occupying the centre of the living room, the ottoman, the reclining sofa on the first floor, and a chair like an enormous cushion, as well as the large refrigerator.
Spring Garden Page 9