Over ten years ago, back when he was still living in Osaka, Taro had visited a cafe that featured remakes of the various chairs and sofas seminal in the history of furniture design, and ever since, had nursed the desire to be in a room of chairs and sofas of all kinds. It seemed like the opportunity had finally arrived.
A few days later, with the help of Yosuke Morio and one of his employees, Taro moved the various chairs and sofas to his flat in View Palace Saeki III. They took up so much space that there was barely an inch of his flat left that wasn’t occupied by seating. From that day on, Taro spent almost all of his time at home sitting on one of the sofas or chairs. He placed a board on top of the ottoman and used it as a table. When it was time to sleep, he alternated between the reclining and the corner sofas. Curling up on the sofa sandwiched between the seat cushion and the backrest, he felt like an animal in a nest.
He wondered if this was how the potter’s wasp larva inside the little vase had felt.
Taro asked Mrs Snake if she wanted to take a look around the Morios’ house to see if there were any furniture that took her fancy, but she refused firmly, saying that she was at an age now where she had to be getting rid of things rather than getting more things. He’d got the impression from peering inside her room that she wasn’t somebody who required a lot of furniture anyway, so her answer was expected. He gave her a ticket to an art exhibition that he’d received from one of his sweet-toothed colleagues, and she seemed very pleased. She said she’d not yet started looking for her next flat.
Nishi’s movers came on Tuesday, while Taro was at work, and by the time he got home the Dragon Flat was empty. With the door shut, it didn’t look immediately any different from how it had the previous day, but the darkness of the windows was not the darkness of a place in which someone lived. It was an empty sort of darkness, a darkness that seemed to say that there was nothing behind it at all.
Late that night, Taro got a short email from Nishi:
Thanks so much for your help with seeing the bathroom. I really owe you one for that. View Palace Saeki III is a great place to live, and I hope you enjoy the rest of your time there. I guess the gardens in Mrs Saeki’s and the blue house will soon be full of the joys of spring! I envy you getting to see that.
The email also included a couple of links to websites featuring comic strips she’d drawn and revealing her pen name.
At the same time that Nishi and the Morios moved out, Mrs Saeki’s son moved into the Saeki house. He came over to Taro’s flat to introduce himself, and to tell Taro that he was very sorry but he was going to ask him to move out. He had a round face that seemed like a mismatch with his height of almost six feet. He said that he had just retired, and needed to have various consultations with people about what to do with the land, as well as sorting through things in the house, so he had decided to move back for a while. His mother was doing well in a nearby care home, and he was planning to sell the land that the house and the flats sat on, the entirety of which would be converted into new flats. He handed Taro his business card: TORAHIKO SAEKI. The first part of his name, Tora, meant “tiger”.
“This is going out on a bit of a limb,” Taro said, “but do your brother or sister’s names happen to use the characters for ‘cow’ or ‘rabbit’?”
“I’m an only child,” Torahiko said, in a clipped way. “I’m single and I have no relatives that I can rely on, so I need to clear things up properly with this house while I can. After I go, there’ll be no one else around, so I’ve got to do what I can now. A bird fleeing the nest must leave no mess behind him, as they say.”
This guy’s a crafty one, Taro heard a voice in his head say. The voice was his own, but of course he didn’t say the words out loud, nor did he yet really understand what they meant.
“Did you happen to know Mr Gyushima and Ms Umamura who used to live in the house behind you some time ago, maybe twenty years or so?”
“Oh yes, those oddballs. I knew of them. They released some kind of photo book and for a while afterwards there were young people turning up here to see the house. They only lived there for a year or two. My mother is something of a busybody, so she’d ask them over for a meal or a cup of tea from time to time. Once they came to borrow our birdcage, I think.”
“With the bird inside?”
“We did used to have a budgie, but that would have been after it died. I imagine by that point my mother would just have been using the cage for flowers.”
“Do you still have that cage?”
“Who knows? It might be put away somewhere, but I’m not sure.”
Back inside his flat, after the man had gone, Taro leafed through the pages of Spring Garden. The birdcage was featured in three of the shots, but it was out of focus in all of them, and the outline of the bird, which could have been a parrot or parakeet or budgie, was blurred. Taro squinted at the photos, but could not bring the cage into focus.
Three days later, a gardening company arrived at Mrs Saeki’s house and cut back the trees in the garden drastically. They also totally removed the ivy that was growing up the concrete wall.
It was February when I went to visit Taro. Three years had passed since we’d last seen each other, which was when we’d gone to our home town for the sixth anniversary of our father’s death. At that time, I spent three days in the flat my mum lives in now, not the one on the twelfth floor of the municipal estate we’d grown up in, but a fourth-floor flat in a private block from which you could see that tower. That was the first time I heard about Taro’s divorce.
In February, I was getting ready for a trip abroad. I work as a teacher in a college in Nagoya, and my annual holiday overseas is the thing I look forward to all year. The plan was that I would go over to my friend’s house in Yokohama, where we would meet with another friend, and the three of us would then go to Narita for a flight to Taiwan, but because of heavy snow all transportation to Narita was stopped, and when we contacted the air-lines they said they had no idea when our flight would take off, so we decided by majority vote to abandon the holiday. When I got in touch with my mother to tell her that, she said that since I was in Tokyo, I should go and check on Taro. There were major delays on the trains from Yokohama to Setagaya and it was a major pain to get there, as I began complaining to Taro, who had come to meet me at the station, the moment I saw him.
Taro responded in his usual half-hearted way, saying things like “really” and “oh” in a way that left you unsure if he was really listening to what you were saying. He seemed to have put on a bit of weight since the last time I’d seen him.
It was past three in the afternoon, but there was almost no one outside. The low-hanging sky was smothered with grey clouds, and everything around was snow as far as the eye could see. There was a strong wind, and even under an umbrella, my coat quickly turned white. The snow was already a good twenty centimetres deep, and our feet were buried in it. Taro, who I’d made carry my suitcase, was especially suffering. Midway home, I slipped and fell into the snow, which made Taro laugh. We saw several snowmen and what was, I guessed, supposed to be a snow grotto, though it looked more like a hole in the ground. I remembered once making a snow grotto at the ski slope that someone had taken us to. Thinking that Taro must share the memory, I grew excited and said what fun that had been, hadn’t it, but Taro could only remember the skiing part. That was twenty-five years ago.
By the time we finally reached View Palace Saeki III, my coat and boots were soaked through with melted snow, and my fingers and toes were beginning to ache. For the first time, I saw Taro’s Pig Flat. It was less messy than I’d expected, but I was shocked to see the entire room taken up with sofas and armchairs. The padded green armchair took up the middle of the hall, and the central tatami room contained the large corner sofa, which was turned to face the ottoman and the reclining sofa. The majestic silver fridge-freezer, which seemed to occupy half the kitchen, also took me by surprise. It was the kind that could freeze food to a specific temperature so it co
uld then be cut without thawing it first. I’d heard about them, and had been wanting one myself, so I kept opening and closing the door of the freezer, saying how envious I was. Taro made vague noises: “ah”, “yeah”, “hmm”, “I know”. I knew that he secretly felt quite proud of himself for having a fridge like that.
After I’d finished my inspection of the fridge, I noticed that there was a book of photos on top of the ottoman. From its binding, it looked like a large children’s book; it was called Spring Garden. Seeing my interest, Taro said, “That’s the house just over there.”
“Is it?”
“You could at least pretend to be surprised.”
“If there’s photos of a house, it stands to reason that the house exists somewhere in the world, surely.”
“But look! It’s just over there.”
I walked to the door that led onto the balcony where Taro was pointing. Past the snow piled up on the concrete wall and the branches of the tree, and through the snow that was still falling at a slant, I could see the corner of the sky-blue house. It was already starting to get dark outside.
“Looks like it’s pretty big.”
“The person who gave me that book is the same age as you. She moved out recently, though.”
On a board on top of the ottoman I arranged the ham, cheese and Baumkuchen that I’d got from my friend, and I opened a can of beer. Taro lounged around on the corner sofa, alternating between the middle and the end, and I went for the reclining sofa, sitting with my feet to the side or my knees up in front of me. If our mother was here, I thought, she would tell us off for sitting like slobs. It also struck me that I was far past the age when my mother would speak to me like that. And yet, the way that we were behaving wasn’t so different from when we were kids, I thought to myself, and it was possible that someone watching us right now would find the sight ridiculous, or even kind of creepy. As he told me the story of the woman in the Dragon Flat, the house behind his flat, and the Morios who lived there, Taro would occasionally pick up Spring Garden and flick through it, then put it down again.
As it happened, I had seen Spring Garden before. A friend of mine in high school had been a big fan of Taro Gyushima’s. She didn’t really care about the adverts he made—she was more concerned with him as a man. Seeing the photos of him that accompanied his interviews, she’d come to think that he was her idea of the perfect guy. Naturally, she didn’t like Kaiko Umamura at all. She hated the way she always acted cute and dumb, and said her name was weird. When I suggested that Kaiko Umamura was a stage name, probably the name of her character in the theatre troupe, my friend said she couldn’t possibly get along with someone who would choose a name like that. In her mind, Kaiko Umamura could do nothing right.
“What do you reckon he’s doing in this one?”
Taro opened the book at the page with the photo of Taro Gyushima digging a hole in the garden and showed it to me.
“Who knows. Maybe he was trying to make a pond.”
“A pond…” said Taro, in a way that suggested that wasn’t something that had ever occurred to him. He seemed so taken by the idea that he went on staring at the photo for a while.
It was night now, but the snow reflected the light from the flat, giving it a faint glow. It felt a bit as if we’d come to a hot-spring resort in one of the snowier parts of the country. True, Taro’s flat was absolutely nothing like the traditional Japanese-style rooms you’d find in a hot spring, and it was over ten years since I’d been to a hot spring in the snow, but still, that was the thought that went drifting through my mind.
“It’s about the right size to bury a dog in, don’t you reckon?”
Still staring at the photo of the garden, Taro started telling me about Numazu and Cheetah. I instantly thought of Peter. Peter was a stray dog that we’d kept in the place where the motorbikes were parked in the municipal estate, back when I’d just started primary school. A bunch of boys from the estate a bit older than me, third and fourth years at my school, would bring it food and things. But then one day, after a few weeks, I came back from school and Peter was gone. I heard from the other kids that he’d been taken to the pound. Someone carved PETER into the trunk of a fnearby camphor tree. I doubt that anyone else could have deciphered the strokes, but we all knew what it said, and what it meant. I would think of him every time I saw the cuts in that tree.
On the estate, the other kids and I always hung around in a big group. There was someone from the same year as me at school on each of the floors of the block, and we were always fighting for space in the titchy little parks in the estate grounds. The school we went to, which they were now considering closing down and merging with another school, was cramped with forty-five desks in a single classroom. There was barely space to move, and while there was expansion work going on, we had our lessons in prefab classrooms. Anywhere you went in that poky part of town, you would see someone you knew. I was always a part of a crowd. And yet, strangely enough, I never talked about Peter with any one of my classmates.
“I still feel sad when I think about him now,” I said to Taro.
“I don’t think he got taken to the pound, you know. He was white with brown patches and droopy ears, right? When I went round to Matsumura’s house in year four, he was there. Some of the kids from the estate had asked Matsumura’s brother to take him home, and he did.”
“Wow, I never knew that. When I told my friends at high school about it, I went on and on about how horrible they were for taking him away. And it wasn’t even true!”
“I think he probably lived to a good old age. Matsumura used to live next to the house in Ni-chome. You know, the one that was set on fire by that land-shark. They moved right behind the school just before it happened. I remember his mum saying how lucky they’d been and stuff.”
“Oh, that place! I went to see it a week before it was burned down, when a truck ran into it. We were playing in North Park and there was this huge noise, so we ran to have a look, just in time to see the driver jumping into another car and escaping. The guy in the house chased after him, but I bet he got away. That was a dirty trick to try and get him to move out.”
“I have the feeling I heard about that from someone else, but I have absolutely no memory of it.”
“You’d only have been two or so at that time. I bet the people living in the flats now have no idea that all that stuff went on back in the day.”
“You know, I wonder if anything would turn up if you dug around the back garden.”
“There’ve been a few different people living there since then, right?”
“Yep, three since this book.”
“It’s going to go up for rent again, isn’t it? Why don’t you rent it with someone else? It’s cool these days, sharing houses.”
“I can’t live with other people.”
“Oh yeah, I’d forgotten you’re uptight about that kind of stuff. Remember how you used to cry and say you couldn’t sleep unless it was pitch black, so I had to turn out the nightlight.”
“I didn’t cry about it.”
Taro hadn’t joined me in drinking beer. He was drinking green tea from a plastic bottle.
Looking out of the window as if he was checking something, he said, “You once told me I’d be able to sleep if I watched the red lights of the factory.”
“I don’t remember that at all. It was probably something I made up to shut you up.”
At first I’d had the top bunk, but when Taro started school, he said he wanted it, and my parents made us switch because I was older. Until then, I’d always looked out at the city lit up with those red lights before I went to sleep. Those pulsating lights, they always seemed to me like the night was breathing.
“It’s amazing that we managed to live all that time in the same room.”
“We didn’t know what it was like to have our own space yet, that’s why.”
It was at that moment that I realized that I would never again live with Taro. I felt pretty sure that
he was realizing the same thing at the same time.
“Anyway, with those kinds of houses there’s usually a rule that you’re not allowed to share with people who aren’t family. You don’t pass the landlord’s inspection.”
Nodding along with what Taro was saying, I opened my last can of beer. Then I picked up the photo book.
“Don’t you know anyone who’d want to live in a place like this? If it was someone you knew who moved in, you could go round when you wanted.”
“I can’t think of anyone.”
“Yeah, I thought you might say that.”
“What the hell do you mean by that?”
“It looks really big.”
“This whole flat would fit inside the hall.”
“There aren’t any photos of them eating.”
Taro, who was sitting on top of the backrest of the corner sofa, looked at me with an expression like a startled cat. It was a look that somehow made me think of our childhood. I opened the book and held it up in front of his face.
“These two live together in this house, but there isn’t a single photo of them eating. Or of any kind of food, either.”
Taro flipped through the pages and mumbled, “It’s true.”
Then he said, “I wonder if Nishi noticed that.”
“She must have,” I said, but Taro kept on looking at the book.
I’d run out of both beer and food. The snow-covered streets outside were totally still. Quite possibly, I thought, this part of the city was quiet even when it wasn’t snowing. From time to time, we heard a mound of snow falling from a roof or a branch somewhere. The sound was like heaviness itself. The great mass of white crystals sucked away all warmth from the air. The temperature of the houses, the trees, the utility poles, the asphalt, the air, the night, all went on falling.
The next day, it was glorious weather that made the previous day seem like it had been a dream, and melted snow fell from the edges of the buildings like rain. Taro and I took a pot and a frying pan outside, and made a very minimal attempt at clearing away the snow. It was the first time, in fact, I’d ever cleared snow. There were no signs of life from either the sky-blue house or the concrete one, but people from the house diagonally opposite came out and started clearing the snow too, and I felt somehow relieved to see that there were people actually living in the area, given how deserted it had been the day before. I wanted to meet Mrs Snake, but it seemed like she was out.
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