Tomoka Shibasaki - Spring Garden

Taro wondered whether horsehair crabs, a local speciality in Hokkaido, were just a fact of life for Numazu now. And what about the graveyard in the woods buried in snow, where even the air was frozen? Would Numazu get accustomed to the idea of being buried there? He himself had felt more at home where he now lived than the place he’d grown up, and a picture flitted into Taro’s head of Numazu and his wife in matching knitted hats, skiing together, smiling.

Everyone sat around the large low table on a green rug, eating the horsehair crabs, making hand-rolled sushi with salmon roe, tuna and salmon, with the three adults drinking beer. Miwako confessed that it had been a long time since she’d last had a drink, and asked Nishi several times if her face had reddened. The children, having finished off their meal with Hokkaido ice cream from Miwako’s parents, seemed satisfied. They stood up and then began running and chasing each other around the living room, excited by the presence of the visitors.

Round and round and round they went, screeching and laughing. Miwako told them to stop, but her words had no effect on the kids, who seemed to be getting more and more absorbed by their game of tag. They kept on running, chasing after one another, as if caught up in a whirlpool. From time to time they would call out, “Wait!” or “You can’t catch me!”, sometimes switching roles, but however many times they went round, the game showed no signs of ending.

Eventually, the fact that the children weren’t remotely getting tired of the game started to freak Taro out a little bit, and he began to feel like the great forty-square-metre room with its Indian-style wooden panels above the lintel was itself revolving. Noticing that Nishi was glaring at him, he suddenly remembered the plan to knock over the beer glass. But in that very moment, Taro saw Haruki come flying towards the table, and he let out a gasp.

Haruki landed hard on Nishi’s back, and Nishi went crashing headfirst into the table. Not just Nishi’s beer glass, but the other glasses and plates also went flying, and a chorus of breaking dishes rang out across the room. From where he lay draped across Nishi’s shoulders, Haruki yelled out in surprise, then flung himself backwards. Yuna stood stock still behind where Nishi lay slumped over the table.

Miwako screamed. Looking up at her screaming, her mouth wide open, Taro no longer had any doubt that she truly was a good-hearted person, just as Nishi had said.

Nishi slowly peeled herself off the table and sat up. There was a shard of glass sticking out of her left arm. Her sleeve was rolled up, and the skin between her wrist and her elbow was cut in several places. There was blood on her face as well.

Seeing this, Miwako, who had come to Nishi’s side, shrieked again, at which Haruki and Yuna both burst into tears.

“I’m okay, really,” Nishi said, using her right arm that was free from glass to wipe the blood from the left side of her forehead. A trickle was running down to her ear, as if it had been painted there with a brush.

“Can I use your bathroom?”

“Hmm?” said Miwako, not understanding what she meant.

“Do you mind if I use your bathroom? I want to wash the blood off.”

“Oh yes, of course,” Miwako said, persuaded by the urgency in Nishi’s tone, but as she was showing her the way, she stopped still in the doorway.

“Don’t you think you should go to hospital?”

“Let her use the bathroom first,” Taro cut in straight away. “She should wash the wounds off first in the bathroom.”

For a couple of seconds Miwako stood frozen, then, coming back to herself, said, “Right, right. I’ll bring her something to change into.”

This, too, Taro challenged.

“I think it’d be better to clear this stuff up first. It’s dangerous to leave it like this, with the kids around. I’ll make sure she’s okay.”

Confronted by someone so dead set on achieving their objective, even after sustaining such injuries, Taro felt like he couldn’t sit back and do nothing. How long was it since he’d had this feeling of wanting to help someone? Since he’d had this almost dutiful sense that he had to step in and do something for another person? Taro put his arm around Nishi, who had got slowly to her feet, and the two of them went out of the room. Down the hall and on the right, he opened the door to the washroom. Nishi had shown him the plan of the house, so he knew where all the rooms were.

They passed the washing machine and the sink, a double-bowled affair that was different from the one in the photo book, and opened the frosted glass door at the back of the room. When Taro flicked the light switch, the lime-green space instantly rose in front of them. For the first time ever, Nishi saw the bathroom. There were the tiles coating the entire space, the slow gradation from forest to lime green. The curved lines of colour covering the walls and the rim of the bathtub came together and overlapped with one another, so that even the air itself seemed stained a pale green.

Unlike the shot in Spring Garden , though, it was now evening, so there was no light from the window. Even during the day, Taro thought, most of the light would have been blocked by the concrete wall outside, which hadn’t been there twenty years ago. Under the lights of the room, the greens of the tiles in front of them now were dull and flat. Taro felt a vague sense of disappointment. It was just a bathroom—just someone’s bathroom. There was a plastic children’s ball, an enamel washbowl with a cartoon character on it, and shampoo, conditioner and liquid soap that had been decanted into plain dispensers.

It was the bathroom of a house in which a young, wealthy family lived in 2014.

Seeming to have forgotten about the splinter of glass in her arm, Nishi had sat down on the rim of the bathtub and was looking around the small room. Her lips were parted slightly, and behind her glasses, her eyes had a dim gleam to them, a bit like she had fallen into a trance. The blood running down from the cut on her forehead had already dried a blackish red. Then Taro noticed a faint smile on her lips. He remembered what she’d said before: I’ve always had luck on my side .

Unfortunately, though, Nishi had forgotten about the compact camera she’d slipped into her pocket expressly to take photographs of the green-tiled bathroom. Instead, she tried simply to imprint the scene in her mind.

Afterwards Miwako called a taxi, and Taro accompanied Nishi to a hospital with a 24-hour accident and emergency clinic. She was made to wait for a while, but didn’t complain about the pain. Instead, she seemed in a state of mild frenzy, and kept on talking about the bathroom tiles.

“What can I use to recreate those colours? That’s the big question. I guess maybe watercolour acrylics would be best. Though I might need to use some kind of special effects on the image, maybe. What do you think?”

“I know nothing about art.”

“I thought you might say that. I guess that rather than drawing in each individual tile, it might be better off capturing it generally, getting the overall balance of colour. Actually, maybe overlapping layers of coloured pencil could work.”

“It was just like in the photo, right?”

Nishi gave no reply.

They heard the siren of an ambulance, and then a patient was carried in on a stretcher. At the reception desk, an old man was complaining about something, repeating the same words over and over.

The cuts on Nishi’s arms were deep, and she got a total of eleven stitches in three different places. Luckily, maybe thanks to the protection offered by her glasses, the damage done to her face was minor. The cut above her cheekbone didn’t need stitches.

While Nishi and Taro were waiting to be charged for the treatment, Miwako’s husband Yosuke appeared. It was the first time Taro had met him. He was a tall, polite man with a classically handsome face. He apologized very simply to Nishi, and paid all the hospital fees. Then he drove them back to their block of flats in his navy German sports car. Both Nishi and Taro were impressed by how nice it felt to ride in it. The following day, the whole Morio family appeared on Taro’s doorstep, apologizing and thanking him. Haruki said in a loud clear voice, “I’m very sorry,” though he didn’t look up, so Taro knelt down and patted his head.