The Graveyard Apartment

by Mariko Koike

  They sound like they’re tending the counter in a hamburger joint, Misao thought. Every employee’s eye was fixed on the door in a collective gaze that seemed to be calculating how much cash the newcomers might have, and how they could most efficiently be pressured into parting with some of it.

  The real estate office, which occupied a compact two-room space in a modern building, was one of the branches of a new firm whose ads had been sprinkled throughout the rental-listing magazines. Several customers—a young man who looked like a university student; a dour-faced young couple; and a middle-aged woman who, judging by her appearance, worked in the “water trade” of bars and nightclubs—were engaged in various transactions with clerks and agents. The older woman was carelessly scribbling her signature on a stack of papers. She wore an aggrieved expression, and a lit cigarette dangled from her thick, unpainted lips, which were almost cadaverously pale.

  “Hello! Were you looking for something to rent today?” a clean-cut young man asked in a smooth, polite tone as he approached Misao and Teppei.

  Teppei nodded, then explained that they had telephoned earlier.

  “We’re grateful for your patronage,” the young man said automatically, flashing a patently synthetic smile of the sort most often seen on the faces of hosts and hostesses at late-night clubs. “Please, follow me.” He led Teppei and Misao to an inexpensive-looking sofa, and they sat down.

  “What sort of accommodations were you hoping to find?” the agent asked. He seemed to be the type who never deviated from his prepared script, and every question he asked, by rote, would be designed to market his company’s wares. Before Misao and Teppei had a chance to reply, the young man went and fetched a large list of properties, dropped it onto the glass-topped table in front of the couch with a thud, then fanned out the pages with a hasty, impatient motion that seemed to be characteristic of everything he did.

  Well, here goes nothing, Misao thought. It wasn’t as if they had come to this place hoping to find somewhere flawless to live for the next few decades. The truth was—and she wished this were hyperbole—almost any place would do. If the real estate agent could just show them a rental that wasn’t a hellish haunted house, they were in no position to be picky about the particulars.

  Teppei ran through a quick litany of their requirements, which included a reasonably convenient commute to his downtown office and a kindergarten nearby. If possible, he added, it would be great to have a house with a garden, since they were a family of three with a dog.

  “And how much were you looking to spend per month?” the agent asked, looking at Teppei and Misao with coolly appraising eyes.

  “Well, needless to say, the cheaper the better,” Teppei said with a laugh. “That being said, we do have a pretty good sense of the current rental market.”

  The man began shuffling rapidly through the pile of listings with an air of aggravation. “Darn, I could have sworn there was a house rental that came in yesterday,” he said. “It was quite affordable, too. Let me see now, where could it have gone?”

  Hastily, the man put the pages back in order, then turned and called over his shoulder, “Hey, remember the listing that came in yesterday, for the single-family house? Has anyone seen the fact sheet for that property?”

  A young woman with hennaed hair, dressed in the company’s navy blue uniform, got up from her seat with a show of weariness and brought over a handful of photocopies. “Ah, here it is,” the male agent said, offering one of the crisp, new pages to Teppei with a deferential gesture. Misao scooted closer to her husband on the couch, and they studied the fact sheet together.

  Two bedrooms, and a combination living room and eat-in kitchen. A small attached garden. The photograph of the property was slightly out of focus, but the house resembled one of those prefabricated storage sheds you sometimes see plunked down in the middle of a field in rural areas. However, the location and the monthly rental fee caught Misao’s attention. The rent was only a hundred thousand yen a month, and the place was about a twenty-minute walk—or five minutes by bus—from the next train station after Takaino. There was a bus stop right next to the house, too.

  “I realize it doesn’t look like much, but considering the location this little place is quite a bargain,” the young agent said as he once again began leafing through his stack of papers. “The landlord lives nearby, and until recently the house was being rented by his son and daughter-in-law. Having a garden like this would be perfect for a family with a dog, don’t you think?”

  “It isn’t bad at all,” Teppei said. “I mean, it looks a bit small, but…” Small? More like minuscule. I’m sure I can find a way to make it work for us, though, Misao thought. The two bedrooms were just over a hundred square feet apiece, and there was a living/eating/cooking area of about the same size. They wouldn’t be able to cram all their furniture into the house, but it would be easy enough to stash the overflow in a storage unit somewhere.

  “Is it ready to move into right away?” Misao asked.

  “Yes,” the agent replied with a nod. “It’s completely empty at the moment, so you could move in whenever you like. How would you feel about going over and taking a look at the property right now? I’d love to show it to you.”

  “Isn’t there anything else?” Teppei inquired.

  “What, you don’t like this one?” Misao asked, nudging Teppei’s knee with her own. “The location is good—it isn’t that far from where we’re living now—and the size seems okay for our current needs.”

  “Sure, sure. I just think we should look at some other places as well.”

  “We really don’t have time to shop around, though, do we?” Misao protested, furrowing her brow in consternation. “I think we should just take whatever we can get, right now.” It’s not as if we were just moving in together for the first time, and we aren’t searching for a lifelong home, either. We just need to find a place of temporary refuge so we can get out of that dreadful place … That’s what Misao felt like saying, but she controlled her emotions and held her tongue.

  “To tell you the truth,” the agent said, looking from Teppei to Misao and back again, “when people say things like ‘Any place will do,’ that can actually make the process more difficult on our end.”

  Discretion was part of the man’s job description, and he was clearly disciplining himself not to ask any intrusive questions. He wasn’t as successful at controlling his face, though. It was alive with undisguised curiosity, and Misao felt a faint flush spreading over her own cheeks in response.

  “How about something like this?” the agent asked, leaning forward. “It’s close to the same train station as the house.” He began to read aloud from a fact sheet: “Two rooms and an eat-in kitchen. Eastern exposure. Seven-minute walk to the station. Third floor of an apartment building. A hundred and thirty thousand yen a month. Oh, wait a minute—this one is still occupied, but the tenant should be vacating around the middle of July.”

  The agent passed the listing page, which was encased in a sheet of plastic, to Misao and Teppei. After studying the page for a long moment, Teppei said, “This one isn’t half bad, either.”

  “There’s a shopping district nearby, too,” the agent said. Telegraphing his eagerness to move on to the next stage of the process, he fished some car keys out of the inside pocket of his jacket and began gently jingling them in the palm of his hand. It was clear that his only desire was to get the Kanos’ signatures on a rental agreement as quickly as possible so he could move on to more profitable pursuits. He looked as though he would have liked to say, “Okay, people, let’s get this show on the road. Can’t you see that dillydallying over low-end rentals that won’t bring in much more than a hundred thousand yen a month is a ridiculous waste of my valuable time?”

  When the agent did speak, though, it was in a cordially professional tone: “This apartment is a bit more expensive than the house, but I think it might actually work better for you. The building has freshly painted white walls througho
ut, and everything is nice and bright inside. It’s ideal for newlyweds.”

  Misao couldn’t help laughing. “We aren’t exactly newlyweds,” she said. “As we told your colleague on the phone, we have a five-year-old daughter.”

  “Well, close enough,” the agent grinned, flashing his teeth and narrowing his eyes. Unlike most people, when he smiled his face became less attractive, rather than more.

  “But does that building allow pets?” Teppei asked.

  The agent raised one twitchy eyebrow, then made a show of looking furtively around to make sure no one was eavesdropping. “Well, this is just between us,” he said in a confidential tone, “but I think that would be open to discussion. The resident manager has close ties to this firm, so it should be no problem to keep a pet or two there, discreetly. The building has an absentee owner, and he would never need to know.”

  It was plain that there was something shady going on with the agency, the resident manager, and renters who wanted to bring in pets—under-the-table payoffs, perhaps?—but at this point Misao simply thought, If that’s the way it’s done, then that’s the way we’ll do it.

  “That’s good to know,” she said out loud. Turning to Teppei, she asked, “So shall we go and take a look at those two places right now?”

  “Hmm,” Teppei replied. He still seemed dissatisfied about something, and he spent the next few minutes rummaging through the fact sheets. Finally, he glanced up from the pile and said, “Yes, let’s do that.”

  Misao and Teppei followed the agent outside, and the three of them piled into one of the real estate company’s corporate cars.

  The single-family dwelling was their first stop, and that house turned out to be considerably more appealing than it appeared in the photograph: clean, cozy, and shipshape. The overall construction gave the impression of having been done on the cheap, but the exterior walls had been recently stuccoed and looked like new. It felt like the kind of house that would become exponentially more agreeable once the new occupants began to settle in and fix it up.

  Misao’s artistic imagination immediately sprang into action. If we just planted clumps of marguerite daisies around here, it would look so much cuter, she thought as she surveyed the entrance. The garden was larger than expected, and would get plenty of sun. There were a number of empty holes in the ground, which seemed to indicate that the previous tenants had dug up quite a few plants and taken them to their new house. In one corner of the garden a small flowerbed had been attractively laid out and those plants, at least, remained.

  Misao caught Teppei’s eye. “This seems fine to me,” she said. Teppei nodded in agreement. They had left Tamao back at the Central Plaza Mansion, in the care of Sueo and Mitsue Tabata, and it occurred to Misao that they should have just brought her along. What were they thinking, leaving their daughter behind in that unsafe building? She wished she could dash back there, grab Tamao, and move into the sweet little house right this minute.

  The interior looked as worn as might have been expected from a longtime rental, but the tatami matting on the floors had been recently replaced and the rooms were filled with the earthy green scent of newly mowed hay.

  “This room would be the master bedroom, and the other bedroom could be the nursery,” the real estate agent explained with an air of omniscience. “As for a living room, this end of the dining area should fit the bill well enough. The garden is quite large, so I don’t think you’ll feel too confined.”

  “And the rent’s only a hundred thousand yen? That’s quite a bargain,” Teppei said.

  The agent bobbed his head energetically. “The owner just happens to be the kind of person who doesn’t want to raise the rent every time a new tenant moves in,” he said. “He really is a very kindhearted soul.”

  A very kindhearted soul. Misao was captivated by that phrase, although she couldn’t have explained why.

  The agent was looking at her with an oddly lewd smile, the likes of which he hadn’t displayed before now. “I’m happy to see that you seem to be finding this place satisfactory, Mrs. Kano,” he said.

  Misao averted her eyes and murmured, “Yes, totally.”

  Standing a bit too close for comfort, the young man told her about the convenience store, liquor shop, and hospital that were all within easy walking distance—two minutes away, or three at the most. Then he added with a broad grin that he was fairly certain there was a maternity hospital in the neighborhood, as well. Misao wasn’t sure what he was getting at with that remark, and she didn’t want to know.

  They left the little house behind and drove the few miles to the apartment building. It was in a rather scruffy location, just one street behind the lively blue-collar shopping district that had grown up around the next train station after Takaino. If you needed to describe the building in one word, “minimal” or “cramped” would probably be closest to the truth. There was no way it could have been called splendid, even in the most shameless copywriter’s hyperbole, but the laundry fluttering on the narrow balconies and the cluster of housewives chatting in front of the building seemed to indicate that this was, at the very least, a place where people could feel safe and secure.

  The man from the real estate company rang a buzzer labeled “Resident Manager.” The person who emerged from the caretaker’s apartment was a benevolent-looking older man with salt-and-pepper hair.

  “Hello, sir. Did you have a chance to let the occupant of the apartment on the third floor know that we’d be stopping by?” the agent asked politely.

  “I did, I did. She’s expecting you. Shall we go up?”

  Beaming broadly, the resident manager exchanged nods of greeting with Misao and Teppei. “Right this way,” he said briskly as he led the group toward a nearby elevator.

  The floor of the elevator was littered with assorted bits of rubbish, including the paper wrapper from an ice cream treat of some kind (probably dropped by a child) and a discount flyer from a local supermarket. The caretaker nonchalantly bent down to pick up the trash, then touched the “3” button. Turning to Misao, he said with a smile, “There are lots of children in this building, so it’s a really cheerful place to live.”

  The doorplate outside the third-floor apartment read “305.” The resident manager rang the doorbell, and a moment later a young woman opened the door and peeked out. “Please come in,” she said, opening the door all the way. “It’s a total mess, but…”

  The current tenant wore her hair in a short, sleek bob, and her lightly suntanned complexion was free of blemishes. She was dressed in tight jeans with the cuffs rolled up to expose her golden-brown ankles, and her high, round buttocks swayed from side to side as she turned and vanished into the apartment. A popular singing show was blaring from the television, but the set was quickly switched off. Hesitantly, the four visitors followed the woman into her tiny living room.

  “We’re so sorry to barge in like this,” Misao said. “I’m afraid we’ve disturbed you on your day off.”

  “No, it’s fine,” the young woman reassured her in a friendly way. “I’m busy getting ready to move next month, and I just had the TV on full blast to keep me company. I’m the one who should apologize for keeping you waiting.” The woman’s smile exposed her oversized front teeth and made her look, momentarily, like a child.

  “This young lady is getting married next month!” the resident manager announced. The woman flushed crimson up to her ears and she protested shyly, “Now, you didn’t have to go and tell them that, Uncle.”

  The man from the real estate office turned and looked away, as if nothing could interest him less than this stranger’s marital prospects, but Misao and Teppei both offered polite congratulations. At this, the young woman’s face turned a deeper red and she lowered her eyes in embarrassment.

  The interior of the apartment consisted of a miniature living room that flowed directly into the kitchen, and two small Japanese-style bedrooms separated by sliding shoji doors. The layout was purely functional, and there were no u
nnecessary embellishments.

  After taking in the living room’s rather endearing decor, which centered on a plain white sofa bed framed in pale wood and garnished with two red, heart-shaped throw pillows, Misao said, “Thank you so much for showing us around. This has been very helpful.”

  The young woman nodded. “It really isn’t a bad apartment,” she said. “It gets a lot of light during the day, and there’s more than enough storage space.”

  “Yes, I can see that,” Misao responded with a smile. Glancing at Teppei, she could tell immediately that he didn’t care for this place at all. Judging from his dissatisfied expression, he was probably thinking there was no way a family of three (not to mention a dog) could coexist in such a small, charmless space.

  Misao, however, was thinking, Yes, this might work for us, barely. Though compared with the spacious apartment we live in now, it would feel like a little box where we would only want to come home in order to sleep.

  The group stayed inside the apartment for another minute or two, then said their polite thank-yous and farewells to the young woman. After they had filed out into the hallway, Misao (hoping to avoid being grilled by the agent) sidled up to Teppei and said in a low voice, “I think the house we looked at is a thousand times better than this, without a doubt.”

  “That’s putting it mildly,” Teppei said dryly.

  “The house would give us a lot more space, and it’s cheaper, too. And whatever you say, there’s something special about having a garden, however small. Not only that, but the house is available now so we could move right in. I really can’t bear to think about having to stick it out in our current place for another month.”

  “The only thing is, the house is kind of far from the station.”

  “Really? That seems like a minor drawback to me. You know what they say: ‘Beggars can’t be choosers,’” Misao quipped, jocularly elbowing Teppei in the ribs. “No, seriously, I really want to move away as soon as possible.”