Tomoka Shibasaki - Spring Garden

“So the thing is, I was wondering if I could ask you a favour.”

Thinking he’d heard a very similar line from Nishi before, Taro resisted nodding.

“When we’re at the Morios’ and everyone’s busy eating the crabs, I’m going to put a beer glass on the corner of the table. Could you please knock it over,” Nishi said, gesturing to illustrate what she meant.

“You put a glass on the table, and I knock it over?” repeated Taro.

“Yes, because that way it’ll go on my clothes, right? Then I’ll say, ‘Oh, do you mind if I use the bathroom to wash it off?’”

“The bathroom,” Taro repeated.

“I’ll make sure I get a tall glass, one that’ll be easy to knock over.”

“Right, yeah.” Taro was making sure to be noncommittal. One part of him felt Nishi should see this plan through on her own, but he was also curious to get a look inside the Morios’ house himself. It was less that he wanted to make sure that it really was the same house in the photo book, and more that he wanted to see with his own eyes the sort of house that could bring about such fixation on Nishi’s behalf.

At five o’clock, Nishi and Taro went over to the Morios’ house, each carrying a styrofoam box of seafood. When they pressed the buzzer to the intercom by the gate, they heard a pattering sound and then the front door was wrenched open forcefully.

“Hello!” said the little boy and girl in unison. Miwako appeared behind them, and introduced herself to Taro, thanking him, telling him that crab was a big favourite of her kids, and saying she’d heard a lot about him from Nishi.

The children stood on either side of Nishi, each taking one of her hands, seeming as attached to her as the tales he’d heard.

Taro was shown into the large living room, which was filled with warm light. It made a pretty different impression from the photos in Spring Garden , Taro felt. Thinking about it, he realized that the book didn’t contain a single shot taken after dark.

“Actually, I was hoping to see you soon anyway,” Miwako said, looking at Nishi as she placed tea things on the low table. “We’re having to move to Fukuoka. It’s such bad timing. Just when I’ve finally found a friend in Tokyo.”

In a slow, gentle tone, Mrs Morio recounted how her husband originally came from Fukuoka, where his parents ran a scientific materials company. The company he was currently working for was an affiliated firm, and he had always been destined to take over the whole business eventually, but his stepfather had fallen ill and so the change was happening sooner than expected. They were going to live in his parents’ house, but would have one part of it all to them themselves—a part originally converted for Mr Morio’s stepbrother and his family, who had since moved abroad for work. The house was a little way from the centre of the city, and close to the sea, which Mrs Morio thought might do Haruki’s health good.

Nishi listened mostly without altering her expression, occasionally saying things to Yuna, who came padding over with her toys.

“My grandpa’s house is huge. They’ve got a teddy bear that’s this big. It looks exactly like a bear in a zoo!” Haruki exclaimed.

Looking at Haruki, stretching his arms wide and speaking with animation, Taro noticed that the boy’s fringe was so long it was practically falling in his eyes.

“His hair’s quite long, isn’t it?” he said.

“You’re right,” Mrs Morio said. “It’s too long. We’ve been so busy with this and that that I haven’t had time to have it cut. I wish I could just do it myself but I made a mess of it once and ever since then he won’t let me near it.”

“Yeah, cos everyone in my class laughed at me!”

“I used to be a hairdresser, back in the day. I’ll cut it for him, if you like.”

Taro almost smiled at his own phrase, “back in the day”. It was only three or four years ago he’d been a hairdresser, but there was no doubting the fact that, to him, it already felt like the distant past.

They sat Haruki on one of the chairs in the sunroom, spread out newspapers and bin bags around him, and then Taro began to cut the boy’s hair with a pair of scissors that Miwako had. It had been a while since he’d held a pair of scissors, although these scissors designed for home use felt totally different from the sharpened professional ones he’d used at work. Still, their familiar snip seemed to resonate somewhere deep inside him. Taro still had two pairs of haircutting scissors put away in his closet. He hadn’t decided how he felt about the whole hair-salon business. He hadn’t made up his mind to give it up forever, but neither was he sure that he wanted to go back to it. It was a decision that he was avoiding making.

Through the windows of the sunroom Taro could make out the garden, illuminated by the lights from the house. The glass reflected the interior of the room, making it hard to get a good look out, but he could see enough to know that it was definitely the same one as in Spring Garden .

Taro looked over to the right corner of the garden, in front of the plum tree. It was too dark to say for sure, but it didn’t seem like there was anything there. It was the place where Taro Gyushima in the photo book had been digging—either transplanting or burying something.

As Taro was cutting Haruki’s fringe, he noticed that the boy kept sticking his fingers in his mouth. “What’ve you got in there?” he asked.

“Keigo’s and Yuki’s have come out already,” Haruki said. With his tiny index finger, he was checking his bottom front teeth to see if they were wobbly.

From behind the kitchen counter, Miwako called out, “All his best friends’ teeth are coming out, and he won’t stop talking about it. I think he’s scared of being the last.”

Haruki opened his mouth wide to show Taro two neat little rows of blue-white teeth.

“If the baby teeth don’t fall out soon, your adult teeth will start growing out of other parts of your body. Did you know that? Your hands and things.”

Haruki looked petrified by this idea, so Taro immediately assured him he was kidding.

Taro thought about how he had believed until he was in high school that adult teeth fell out as easily as milk teeth did. He remembered asking one of his relatives, who was talking about the traumatic experience of having wisdom teeth removed, what was so bad about it, and having his question laughed at. All of Taro’s wisdom teeth had grown in dead straight and he hadn’t had to have a single one removed. He didn’t know if he had his bone structure to thank for that, or what. People rarely told him that he looked like his father, but it seemed that they were alike in having good bones, at least.

The haircut was over in no time, and for a while Taro played with the two children. He’d spent a fair bit of time with his ex-wife’s niece and nephew, so he was more used to dealing with kids than Nishi was. Hearing them shouting out the names of characters from various cartoons, it occurred to him that maybe he had a distorted view of how special this family was.

Together, Nishi and Miwako boiled the horsehair crabs. Miwako, who said her parents had grown up by the Sea of Okhotsk in Hokkaido, was clearly used to handling the creatures. As she deftly broke off their legs, explaining to Taro and Nishi what she was doing, her face was so full of life that she looked like a different person.

When Taro had heard that Miwako felt that the size of the house made her uneasy, he’d assumed, without any real reason, that she’d spoken out of spite, but when he saw her tucking enthusiastically into the crabs, he realized, to his surprise, that she really meant it. Just because you had the kind of life that everyone envied didn’t mean that it was right for you. And yet Taro felt that if someone were to offer him the chance to live in this house, he would take them up on it without a second thought.