The Graveyard Apartment

by Mariko Koike

  1. A plan is in place, commencing in 1964, to erect municipally managed high-rise apartments in an area extending roughly one kilometer south from Takaino Station, on a site comprising approximately fifteen acres. The land is presently occupied by Manseiji, a Buddhist temple, and an adjacent cemetery. A concomitant plan, currently under consideration, proposes the construction of an underground shopping area that would also extend in a southerly direction from Takaino Station. This addition would aim to (a) accommodate the anticipated population growth; and (b) revitalize the economy of the area.

  2. The underground shopping area would originate on the belowground level of Takaino Station (operated by Japan Rail), and would terminate, variously, at the basements of each of the high-rise apartments.

  3. The primary goal is to attain a harmonious consolidation of this underground shopping arcade with the shopping streets already in existence in the neighborhoods around the station, without in any way undermining the atmosphere or market share of the latter. Additionally, the new shopping development would actively seek to attract the patronage of people who live near other stops along the same train line.

  4. Needless to say, safety and security would be prime considerations. This project would provide numerous car parks as well as terminals with boarding areas for various bus lines, designed to separate pedestrians from vehicular traffic. In addition, all the latest safety systems would be put in place to handle fire, earthquakes, and other natural disasters.

  Misao went back and reread the first item on the numbered list. So the land currently occupied by Manseiji—the temple itself and the adjoining cemetery—had once been officially targeted as a site for high-rise apartment blocks, operated by the city?

  If the temple and graveyard had been transplanted to another location and high-density housing had been built on that land, there would surely have been a significant increase in the area’s population. If a typical building had fourteen floors, with approximately seven units on each floor, that would work out to close to a hundred households. Factoring in extended families, it would be reasonable to assume an average of four people per household. So if there were ten apartment buildings, that would mean the wholesale addition of approximately four thousand new residents to the neighborhood. Such a sizable influx would inevitably cause the existing shopping areas around the station to become far busier than usual, if not inconveniently overcrowded, so the reasoning behind the proposed creation of an underground shopping mall or arcade definitely made sense.

  Misao continued leafing through the pamphlet. Several pages were devoted to demographic aspects of the Takaino area, such as consumer spending habits and longevity of residence. Next came specifications for the underground arcade, including the number of shops and the amount of retail space allotted to each one. There were even diagrams showing the physical layout of the subterranean shopping mall, plotted out in minute detail.

  The proposed underground shopping area was long rather than deep, and its layout was quite compact. If that mall had been built, the facing rows of stores would probably have projected a distinctly low-key, homey atmosphere. It would have been the kind of place where the residents of the local apartment towers could do their shopping dressed in casual clothes and plastic shower sandals, or stroll out on a Sunday afternoon to enjoy a late brunch with the entire family in tow. Twice a month, there would have been “mega-discount” sales, and the specialty food stores were to have had “charismatic barkers” out front, to lure customers. There would have been clothing shops offering what the brochure described as “tasteful, stylish fashions—for a song!” The lineup would also feature an assortment of family-friendly pubs, restaurants, and snack bars, where parents could feel comfortable about bringing their children along. Judging from the plans, the mall would have been a safe, cozy, convenient place to shop and spend some leisure time. However, those plans never became a reality. Why?

  Leaving the pamphlet open on the desk, Misao stood up and once again went over to browse the bookshelves. There were any number of other publications on the topic of the redevelopment of “K” Ward, but at a glance they all seemed to contain the same basic information.

  In one corner of the bookcase, she noticed a stack of forsaken-looking old scrapbooks bound in heavy brown paper and bundled together with string. The books were covered with a thick layer of dust. When Misao extracted one scrapbook from the pile and pried it open, the metal staples that held the pages together made a reluctant creaking sound.

  Inside was a large assortment of full-color PR releases, specially issued pamphlets, and other publications related to the underground mall project, all dating from the late 1950s through 1965 or so. The bound pages were arranged in chronological order, and as Misao flipped through them one by one she came upon a thin, flimsy booklet bearing the headline “Let’s Make Them Relocate the Manseiji Graveyard ASAP, Without Further Delay!” In addition, there were detailed maps of the temple and the graveyard, along with densely written text.

  Manseiji, with its adjoining graveyard, located in “K” Ward, owns and occupies a space to the north and south of Takaino Station, comprising a total area of approximately fifteen acres. At present, the Tokyo metropolitan government has drawn up plans to develop this centrally located area into high-rise apartments, along with a complementary underground shopping arcade to serve the area’s burgeoning population.

  In order to facilitate those plans, the municipal government has requested that both Manseiji (the temple itself) and the adjacent graveyard be relocated. A search is currently under way for a suitable alternative site. The candidates at present include (1) an existing graveyard in the Kodaira area, on the outskirts of Tokyo, which has ample room for expansion; and (2) an extensive plot of empty land with terrain that includes both hills and forests, located in the suburbs of the city of Musashino, in Saitama Prefecture. There are other possibilities, as well.

  However, the representatives of Manseiji continue to insist that because the history of the graveyard in its current location dates back to the Taisho Era [July 1912 through December 1926]—a period when interment (ground burial), as opposed to the currently popular cremation, was the prevailing custom—moving so many skeletal remains to another location would be an impossibly difficult task. For this and numerous other reasons, the temple refuses to accept the city’s proposal, and as a result a redevelopment plan that would benefit the area has reached an impasse. That is where matters stand at the present time.

  For their part, the city’s representatives have given careful consideration to the temple’s highly detailed conditions and demands, and have stressed their commitment to making the process of moving the remains as respectful, efficient, and faultless as possible. Therefore, there seems to be no reason to expect that the surviving family members would experience any significant degree of inconvenience.

  We deeply regret that our visionary plan for creating a new, improved township in the area has been stalled due to logistical complications. We will not abandon this vision, and it is our hope that the current residents of the area will help us neutralize the opposition to the relocation of the cemetery, so that we can all work together to make this forward-looking development a reality.

  The next publication was titled The Committee for a Grass-Roots Protest Movement Against the Relocation of Manseiji. At a guess, that “committee” probably consisted of a small group of people—relatives of some of the graveyard’s occupants, perhaps?—looking for a way to make their voices heard.

  Misao moseyed back to her desk, where she sat down and spent the next few moments lost in thought. She couldn’t begin to explain why she had become so preoccupied—if not obsessed—with the matter of the underground shopping arcade. The facts had become clear: A couple of decades ago, planning was under way for the building of a cluster of publicly managed apartment towers in tandem with the construction of an underground shopping mall, but that two-pronged plan was opposed by the temple-and-graveyard coalition becau
se it would have required the relocation of a large number of graves containing uncremated human remains. In a nutshell, the city wanted to buy some land and the temple declined to sell, and that was the end of it. There was nothing remarkable about the outcome; in the annals of urban planning, tales of abortive developments were a dime a dozen. This was just another of those close-but-no-cigar stories.

  So why did the details of the narrative bother Misao so much? More specifically, what had motivated her to make the trek to this out-of-the-way place to research the matter of the underground shopping area—which she had only heard someone mention once, in passing?

  Misao glanced at her wristwatch. It was eleven a.m. She had another thirty minutes or so before she would need to head out to fetch Tamao from kindergarten. This was Tamao’s first day back at school since the accident, and Misao couldn’t help worrying. She hoped Tamao wouldn’t fall down on the playground and reopen the wound.

  Outside, the sky had begun to cloud over, while a lusterless, sleepy-looking cherry tree seemed to be trying to stretch its misshapen branches past the reading room’s third-floor window. Misao now had that room completely to herself. Two young men who appeared to be university students had been aimlessly milling around, but they had either left the building or gone to another section. Misao could feel a slight headache coming on.

  The bottom line of her research was that the ambitious construction project had ultimately been abandoned. The subterranean shopping arcade and the apartment towers were never built, and the neighborhood around the train station’s south exit had gradually fallen into its current state of seedy disrepair. What remained? Nothing but a handful of modest shops and a gigantic graveyard.

  “Ground burial.” That term popped into Misao’s head as she was remembering a sentence she had read about the temple’s reasons for refusing to sell the land, whose wording (she thought) seemed to teeter on the edge of insolence. Snarky tone aside, she hadn’t realized that the Manseiji graveyard had been in use since the Taisho Era, when interment was more common than cremation.

  So when she gazed at the view from her balcony, some of the graves she saw every day contained the remains of human beings who had died a long time ago and been buried as corpses, instead of being cremated. The thought made her skin crawl. If the temple had decided to go ahead and try to move all the buried skeletal remains to another location, how on earth would they have gone about transporting them? Sixty or seventy years would have passed since the initial interments, so surely the wooden coffins would have decayed to the point where they would immediately crumble into dust upon being exposed to the air.

  Misao got up from her chair and carried the pamphlet she’d been perusing back to the bookcase. After reshelving it, she once again ran her eyes over the materials on the shelves, but she didn’t see any later accounts of what had become of the underground construction project when the redevelopment plans hit a terminal snag.

  She wondered what Teppei would say if he knew she had made a special trip to the ward library to delve into a matter like this. Would he laugh indulgently? Or would he say something like, “Why don’t you just give all this nonsense a rest,” with no attempt to hide his disapproval? Probably the latter. Ever since Tamao’s accident, Teppei had appeared to be waging an internal battle against a legion of personal demons—a struggle he couldn’t (or didn’t choose to) talk about.

  Misao’s headache was becoming more severe by the minute. I need to take some aspirin as soon as I get home, she thought.

  When she reached the first floor of the library she saw the white-haired man sitting idly at the reception desk, staring into space. Propelled by a sudden impulse, Misao approached the desk and said, “Um, excuse me?”

  The man turned his head to glance at her, but he didn’t say a word.

  “This is probably going to seem like a strange question,” Misao began.

  “Huh?” The man seemed startled.

  “I’m sorry, are you by any chance familiar with this part of the city?”

  The man shot her an indignant look, then mumbled, “Well, I’ve been working here for the past thirty-two years, so I ought to be.”

  “Oh, that’s great!” Misao said happily, beaming at the man. “The truth is, I’m trying to get some perspective on the history of this area, and there’s one thing that isn’t clear to me.”

  “What would that be?” If the man was intrigued by the question, he didn’t show it. Wearing a bored expression, he turned away from Misao and once again stared straight ahead.

  “Quite some time ago, there was a plan to build an underground shopping arcade beneath Takaino Station. Did you know about that?”

  “Oh, that. Yes, I do know about that plan. It was back in the sixties.”

  “I gather there was some difficulty with relocating the graves from the Manseiji cemetery, and that’s why the plan never came to fruition?”

  “Yes, that’s right. It just fizzled out in the end, even though the developers had already gone to the trouble of digging a hole. That was a major waste of time and money.”

  “A hole?” Misao asked with mounting excitement. “So the excavation work had already been done when the project was abandoned?”

  “Well, I’m not sure, but that’s the impression I got. Apparently the developers got into a big dispute with the temple, and in the end the whole thing just blew up in their faces. I don’t know what they were thinking, but I guess at some point the developers must have been feeling optimistic, so they said, ‘Hey, let’s go ahead and spend a small fortune digging out this underground road, just in case our plan works out.’ I gather they had high hopes of building some big apartment complexes in the neighborhood, too. Before they could do any of that, of course, they had to reach an agreement with the temple about buying the land, but even when it started looking like that wasn’t going to work out, they continued with the excavation.” The previously stolid man seemed to have become almost manic. His voice had risen in both pitch and volume, to the point where it seemed to be echoing faintly off the walls.

  “It was really an exercise in futility,” he went on. “I mean, to go ahead and dig a hole before everything was signed, sealed, and delivered? That makes no sense at all. There used to be a signboard for the construction company at the building site. I remember seeing it every day, and then it suddenly disappeared. It really was an incredible waste, doing all that work for nothing.”

  “Are there records of that excavation in the archives here?”

  “Hmm,” the man said thoughtfully. “I couldn’t say for sure, but I have a feeling there aren’t—at least not here. Like the proverb says: ‘If something stinks, you’d better put a lid on it.’ That’s the go-to formula in government, too, of course. If a project has a negative outcome, they prefer not to publicize it too much. Why are you so interested in this, anyway? Are you planning to write an article or a book or something?”

  “No, no, nothing like that,” Misao protested, shaking her head.

  The man shot her a warning look that reminded her of a parent trying to caution a headstrong child against doing something rash, then crossed his arms over his chest. “The thing is, it isn’t exactly a pleasant topic, so people tend to avoid looking into it too deeply,” he said. “I guess most folks would rather let sleeping dogs lie.”

  “No, as I said, I have no intention of writing about this,” Misao protested. “I just got interested because I live nearby, and a neighbor was talking about the development. So do you happen to know what became of the hole, in the end?”

  “You really are an inquisitive one,” the man said with a laugh that showed his unnaturally white front teeth. Misao recognized them immediately as dentures. “Hey, after all, we aren’t mole people, right? The hole would have been useless, so I imagine they must have filled it in after the project went belly up.”

  “Of course, that must be it,” Misao said. She laughed, too. “Thank you for your help. I’m sorry to have taken up so much of your ti
me,” she added, with a minimal bow.

  The receptionist responded by bobbing his own head ever so slightly, and Misao left the building.

  As she was walking back to the station, she suddenly remembered the phrase Eiko had used—“phantom road to nowhere”—and a small shiver ran down her spine.

  10

  May 6, 1987

  It was the Wednesday after the annual Golden Week holiday. Sitting at her pinewood work desk, Misao looked out the window and yawned. The air in the living room was hot and sultry. Outside, the sky looked as though rain might begin to fall at any minute. It wasn’t yet three in the afternoon, but the day had turned so dark and gloomy that Misao found herself craving light.

  Over the long weekend the Kano family had gone to a department store to buy a new sports jacket for Teppei, then stopped off in the trendy, upscale Aoyama district to grab a bite at an Italian bistro on the way home. Aside from that outing they hadn’t really done anything special, and midway through the holiday Teppei had been called away for two days to work on a TV commercial being filmed on location for one of the agency’s new accounts.

  During his absence, Misao’s mother came up to Tokyo from the family home in Izu City for an overnight stay, which (in Misao’s opinion) had ruined what would otherwise have been a pleasant couple of days. Her mother’s last visit had been more than a year earlier, so she had never been to the new apartment. When she saw the graveyard in front of the building her eyebrows shot up, but she refrained from commenting.