Tomoka Shibasaki - Spring Garden

When her seventh beer was brought over, Nishi drained the first half in a single gulp, then said, “Everything in Tokyo happens so fast, doesn’t it? There are these buildings going up and new shops opening all the time, and every time you speak to someone they tell you what the latest big thing is, or what’s going to be the next one. Don’t you think? It’s like, things get better so quickly but then they deteriorate just as fast.”

“Well, yeah, but Tokyo is a big city. I don’t know if you can make that kind of sweeping generalization. The place where I first lived here was a pretty rundown area with a much more local feel to it, and there were quite a few housing estates and factories there.”

“That’s true. But when you live in this central part, you kind of forget about other parts of Tokyo, I think. It’s like you almost forget that other places apart from this one even exist. I’ve think I’ve even forgotten the place I grew up in.”

“I quite like it here, you know.”

“In what way? What do you like about it?” Nishi folded her arms and placed them on the table, then stared straight at Taro.

“I guess I like the fact there’s just so much going on. That cat’s paw thing on the tree, for example.”

“That’s Tokyo for you?”

“Well, this is the first place I’ve ever seen something like that.”

“Isn’t that because you haven’t lived in many other places though?”

“Well, I guess, but…”

“Sorry, it’s not like I can talk, either. Don’t be offended, please.”

“No problem.”

All of the other customers had left the restaurant. The staff were looking at Nishi and Taro from behind the counter as if they wanted to start closing up. It seemed that closing time was earlier on Sunday.

“I’d love to have free rein of that house, just for a day,” Nishi said with a sigh, and downed the last of her beer. When they left the restaurant, Nishi announced she was going to visit her mother in Chiba, and made towards the station.

From that day on, Nishi would sometimes bring round cookies, or pound cake, or biscuits that Miwako had made. Taro always thanked her and accepted them, but since the time back in high school when he’d got food poisoning that had lasted for several days from an undercooked cheesecake his sister had made, he’d had an aversion to cookies or cakes that weren’t shop-bought, so he took all of Miwako’s handiwork into the office and gave it to his colleagues. They loved them, saying that the person who’d made them was clearly an expert at it, and that the kids who got to eat these kinds of things every day didn’t know their luck. One colleague said how much he’d like to try pancakes this person had made. Then he gave Taro a list of the ten best places for pancakes in Tokyo, together with maps showing how to get to them.

One Sunday, at the end of October, Taro was lying on the tatami reading the news on his phone when he came across an article about an unexploded bomb.

On the morning of 27th October, approximately 1,150 people were temporarily evacuated from a residential district in the south of Shinagawa Ward in Tokyo while the Self-Defence Forces conducted a controlled explosion of an unexploded bomb belonging to the old Imperial Army. The bomb was discovered at a construction site in a residential area approximately 500 metres north of Ōimachi JR station. The municipal government dictated that all places in a 130-metre radius of the site should be cleared, and access prohibited. There was no disruption experienced to public transport. The Unexploded Ordnance Disposal Unit of the Eastern Army Combat Service Support Section created a protective wall around the site with large sandbags, and remotely detonated the device at just after 11 a.m. The evacuation order was repealed just after 1 p.m. According to a statement from the municipal authorities, the bomb was 15 cm in diameter and 55 cm in length.

The whole business seemed odd to Taro. He found it easy enough to imagine the bomb lying there underground, but the idea that a rusty old thing like that presented enough danger, after decades of being buried, to warrant such large-scale precautions and such a dramatic disposal struck him less as terrifying, and more like a simple error.

The bomb was probably the same age as his father, and Mrs Snake too. Maybe it had been made around the time they were born, and it had spent all those years, enough for someone to live a whole life, underground.

The following Monday was the anniversary of his father’s death. Taro forgot about it, and remembered a few days after. Yet even when he remembered, there was nothing much to be done—after all, it had already come and gone. Then it occurred to him that, if nothing else, he could at least offer his father a beer. He took the mortar and pestle out of the cabinet, placed it in front of the TV, then placed a can of beer beside it. He wondered if he should put some flowers there as well. Strictly speaking, he was probably supposed to burn incense too, but he had neither flowers nor incense in his flat. In fact, neither of those items had entered his flat in the three years he’d been living there.

Even now, Taro sometimes had the feeling that his father wasn’t dead, but had just gone out. The sensation was a bit like having a dream and forgetting the story half-way through. If his father had just gone out, though, he’d been gone for a really long time. He wondered if he had those kinds of thoughts because, in some way, he didn’t want to accept his father’s death. The same thing could probably be said of the fact he rarely went back to Osaka.

The leaves on the maple in Mrs Saeki’s garden were turning orange and beginning to fall. The ivy was changing colour too, becoming such a bright red that it looked as though it was lit up from the inside.

Taro still walked to the station on the way to work, taking whichever of the three routes appealed to him on that particular day. The number of construction sites around seemed only to increase. He also came across places where they were tearing down buildings. He caught sight of what was left of a wooden house, loaded onto the back of a truck.

Every day, he walked over culverts with rivers running inside them. There were water pipes and gas pipes underground too, and maybe unexploded bombs, for all he knew. Back when he’d been working at the hair salon, he’d heard from an elderly customer that there had been bombs dropped during the war in the area closer to Shinjuku. If there were unexploded bombs still underground, then there must also be bits of the houses that were burnt down then, items of their furniture. Before that, this area had been fields and woods, and the leaves and fruits and berries that fell every year, as well as all the little animals, would also have formed layers over time, sinking down ever deeper under the ground.

And now Taro was walking on top of it all.

One night, when the breeze had started to get chilly, Taro came home straight from a client visit without calling back at his office, and got off at a different station from his usual. He’d set out walking in the direction of home when he saw an animal waddling across the tracks of the Setagaya line. At first, he took it for a fat, ungainly cat, but as he continued watching it, he realized it was a raccoon dog.

Skinny legs poked out from beneath its rounded body. Not pausing once, it kept on going, eventually disappearing into the bushes at the side of the tracks. Taro stood by the metal railing for a while, thinking about the unfamiliar shape of the animal he had just seen, trying to imprint it in his mind.

Around the middle of December, the couple in the Monkey Flat moved out. Taro had never exchanged a single word with them.

That left only three flats in View Palace Saeki III that were still lived in. With two people moving out at once—and the two who had made a lot of noise at that—Taro felt a sense of absence. The block was gradually edging closer to being uninhabited.