Tomoka Shibasaki - Spring Garden

The site that appeared on Nishi’s computer screen was simple and tasteful. The top page showed a picture of a woman holding a yoga pose in a forest of bright green leaves. Her head was turned to the side, and the light was coming from behind it, so it was impossible to make out her expression. When Nishi scrolled down to look at the address of the school, she saw it was in Yamanashi Prefecture, just outside of Tokyo, in one of the cooler regions that people often went to escape the summer heat. Nishi clicked on the tab that read ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR, and a photograph of a woman appeared, and beside it the name ASUKA SAWADA. Apparently, that was Kaiko Umamura’s real name.

The first thought that came to Nishi’s mind was that the woman was stunning. In that yoga pose, with her long black hair swept up into a ponytail, Asuka Sawada definitely resembled Kaiko Umamura. The long, narrow eyes and large mouth were the same. The pose she was adopting too, with her back arched, recalled her acrobatics on the pages of Spring Garden.

And yet, Nishi could not but feel that the woman in those photos was not, in fact, Kaiko Umamura. Her INSTRUCTOR’S MESSAGE, full of wholesome words like ‘natural power’, ‘purification’, and ‘betterment’, didn’t square up with the woman whose face beamed out of the book of photos, or with the one who’d put together that collection of illustrations. Nishi looked through the back entries of the blog that was linked on the website, but the more she read, the further Asuka Sawada grew apart from Kaiko Umamura.

Nishi closed the web page and opened up Spring Garden . Seeing Kaiko Umamura there, she felt a surge of relief. When she stepped out onto her balcony, there was the sky-blue house, unchanged, bathed in sunlight. Inside that house were the windows and stairs that Kaiko Umamura had drawn, Nishi thought, and the desire to make sure of that fact for herself, just once, rose up in her.

Nishi walked past the house twice a day, and gazed out at it from the balcony of the Dragon Flat. The advert for it disappeared from the estate agency site in the middle of February, but there was no sign of anyone moving in, so she guessed that something must have made them decide not to rent it out after all.

It was perhaps this reasoning that made her careless. In any case, to her great frustration, Nishi had been out on the day when the new people moved in, and she had missed it. At the end of March, she had gone for a couple of days to visit her mother, who lived in Chiba Prefecture. Heading out on her morning walk around the block as usual on the day after she got back, and seeing a small car parked in front of the sky-blue house and a tricycle inside the gates, Nishi felt genuine shock. Approaching the gates, she saw there was already a nameplate reading morio, and when she looked up she saw a white blind drawn in one of the first-floor windows.

No, Nishi thought to herself. That’s not how it is in Spring Garden . There was now a blind in the window where there was supposed to be curtains, a tricycle and a bike and various kids’ toys lying outside the front door as if it was the most normal thing in the world, and a nameplate with a modern-looking font.

Nishi’s insides were all in commotion. She returned to her flat, but could hardly concentrate on her work at all. That day, she walked by the house every hour. At four in the afternoon, she saw the car that had vanished at one o’clock returning. Concealing herself behind a telegraph pole, Nishi saw a young-looking mother with two young children getting out of the car. The boy looked about five, and the little girl was in her mother’s arms.

Nishi found the idea that people really had begun living in the house unsettling, somehow bewildering. At first, she thought those feelings were driven by a sense of danger—danger that the house was now going to change and become different from the way it was in the photo book—but after a week of walking past the house that was so rapidly adjusting to its role as the Morio family residence, she realized that that wasn’t it.

Time, which had stopped while the house was empty, was now moving again. The structure itself was exactly the same as it had been a week ago when nobody was in it, and yet its colours, the feel of the place, were now wholly different. It wasn’t just that people were living in it—it was that the house itself had suddenly come back to life. The house which Nishi had been convinced she could carry on looking at forever, in the same way as she could the house in the photos, felt now as if it had taken on a mind of its own, and begun moving. As dramatic as it sounded, it honestly seemed that the house had taken on the same quality as a doll that had suddenly become human. Every time she passed by the house, every time she saw the envelopes poking out from the letterbox or the sheets hanging out to dry on the balcony, she had the physical sensation like something rubbing at her body from the inside.

Since that first day, she had caught sight of the Morios several times. Both of the children got on the same bus that took them to nursery school. It seemed as though the father was usually late getting home, but on one occasion she spotted him. He was a tall man who looked very elegant in his black suit.

Nishi felt closer to the sky-blue house now that it had people living in it, but by the same token, it had also become someone else’s, and therefore a place that she wasn’t allowed to enter. Thinking that she wasn’t allowed in made her want to see it all the more.

If she could somehow get to know Mrs Morio, she thought, then she might be able to find an excuse to enter, so she racked her brains for some way that she might make her acquaintance, but the sorts of places they went and their ways of life were so different as to make it seem impossible. Surely, she told herself, there must be a way.

During the period that she told Taro all this, Nishi polished off seven beers, and went to the ladies’ twice. Taro switched to oolong tea after his first beer. Since his divorce, he’d made it a rule for himself to never drink more than one beer, and had stuck to it now for three years.

Sometimes even now, the image of his dad tripping and falling while drunk at home would flash through Taro’s mind. At first, his dad had only drunk beer, but then at some point—Taro didn’t remember exactly when—had progressed to shochu , and from one glass to two, and then three. If he’d lived longer, he would no doubt have gone on to drink more and more.

Nishi now took a sip from her eighth beer, then looked unflinchingly at Taro from behind her black-rimmed glasses.

“There’s something that’s been bothering me for a long time.”

Her eyes look drunk, Taro thought.

“What’s with the rat and the ox and stuff?”

“The rat?…”

“The names of the flats, I’m talking about. They start with Dragon, right? That’s the fifth one in the zodiac. That means the first four are missing. I think there must have been a View Palace Saeki I and II.”

“I guess that would make sense.”

“I walked around the area a lot looking for them but with no luck. I asked the estate agent too, and they said they had no idea.”

“They’ve probably been demolished already.”

“Right! That’s what I was thinking too. But we’re talking just the first four, right? Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit. It’s hard to imagine two buildings with just two flats each. Or else, maybe there’s some kind of hidden meaning to it all.”

“Who knows.”

Taro lifted his glass of oolong tea, but it was now only ice. The food had been just as good as it had been billed to be. Taro felt like he marginally preferred the deep-fried chicken over the octopus.

“I’m really sorry. When I get nervous I always talk too much to try and cover it up.”