Tomoka Shibasaki - Spring Garden

A week after, Nishi invited Taro to go over to the Morios’ to see if there was any of their furniture or appliances that he wanted. They were giving it away. The cut on Nishi’s face had mostly healed, and she said the stitches on her arm would be removed in three days’ time. At the Morios’, Miwako served them pancakes, smothered in maple syrup. It was Taro’s policy not to touch home-made cookies and cakes, but he felt like he could hardly refuse when they were set down right in front of him, so he ate one on behalf of his pancake-loving colleague at work. Reciting to himself the words of praise his colleagues had lavished on Miwako’s cooking, he managed to finish the whole thing.

Miwako explained that there was a lot of furniture in the house they were moving into in Fukuoka already, and it would be no mean feat transporting all this stuff, so she’d be positively grateful if they’d take it off her hands. When Taro checked that she meant for free, Miwako laughed and said, “I wish I could be as straightforward as you!”

Nishi took one of the two green armchairs in the sunroom, a steam oven and the bread-making machine.

Taro decided to take the other green armchair, the corner sofa occupying the centre of the living room, the ottoman, the reclining sofa on the first floor, and a chair like an enormous cushion, as well as the large refrigerator.

Over ten years ago, back when he was still living in Osaka, Taro had visited a cafe that featured remakes of the various chairs and sofas seminal in the history of furniture design, and ever since, had nursed the desire to be in a room of chairs and sofas of all kinds. It seemed like the opportunity had finally arrived.

A few days later, with the help of Yosuke Morio and one of his employees, Taro moved the various chairs and sofas to his flat in View Palace Saeki III. They took up so much space that there was barely an inch of his flat left that wasn’t occupied by seating. From that day on, Taro spent almost all of his time at home sitting on one of the sofas or chairs. He placed a board on top of the ottoman and used it as a table. When it was time to sleep, he alternated between the reclining and the corner sofas. Curling up on the sofa sandwiched between the seat cushion and the backrest, he felt like an animal in a nest.

He wondered if this was how the potter’s wasp larva inside the little vase had felt.

Taro asked Mrs Snake if she wanted to take a look around the Morios’ house to see if there were any furniture that took her fancy, but she refused firmly, saying that she was at an age now where she had to be getting rid of things rather than getting more things. He’d got the impression from peering inside her room that she wasn’t somebody who required a lot of furniture anyway, so her answer was expected. He gave her a ticket to an art exhibition that he’d received from one of his sweet-toothed colleagues, and she seemed very pleased. She said she’d not yet started looking for her next flat.

Nishi’s movers came on Tuesday, while Taro was at work, and by the time he got home the Dragon Flat was empty. With the door shut, it didn’t look immediately any different from how it had the previous day, but the darkness of the windows was not the darkness of a place in which someone lived. It was an empty sort of darkness, a darkness that seemed to say that there was nothing behind it at all.

Late that night, Taro got a short email from Nishi:

Thanks so much for your help with seeing the bathroom. I really owe you one for that. View Palace Saeki III is a great place to live, and I hope you enjoy the rest of your time there. I guess the gardens in Mrs Saeki’s and the blue house will soon be full of the joys of spring! I envy you getting to see that.

The email also included a couple of links to websites featuring comic strips she’d drawn and revealing her pen name.

At the same time that Nishi and the Morios moved out, Mrs Saeki’s son moved into the Saeki house. He came over to Taro’s flat to introduce himself, and to tell Taro that he was very sorry but he was going to ask him to move out. He had a round face that seemed like a mismatch with his height of almost six feet. He said that he had just retired, and needed to have various consultations with people about what to do with the land, as well as sorting through things in the house, so he had decided to move back for a while. His mother was doing well in a nearby care home, and he was planning to sell the land that the house and the flats sat on, the entirety of which would be converted into new flats. He handed Taro his business card: TORAHIKO SAEKI. The first part of his name, Tora, meant “tiger”.

“This is going out on a bit of a limb,” Taro said, “but do your brother or sister’s names happen to use the characters for ‘cow’ or ‘rabbit’?”

“I’m an only child,” Torahiko said, in a clipped way. “I’m single and I have no relatives that I can rely on, so I need to clear things up properly with this house while I can. After I go, there’ll be no one else around, so I’ve got to do what I can now. A bird fleeing the nest must leave no mess behind him, as they say.”

This guy’s a crafty one , Taro heard a voice in his head say. The voice was his own, but of course he didn’t say the words out loud, nor did he yet really understand what they meant.

“Did you happen to know Mr Gyushima and Ms Umamura who used to live in the house behind you some time ago, maybe twenty years or so?”

“Oh yes, those oddballs. I knew of them. They released some kind of photo book and for a while afterwards there were young people turning up here to see the house. They only lived there for a year or two. My mother is something of a busybody, so she’d ask them over for a meal or a cup of tea from time to time. Once they came to borrow our birdcage, I think.”

“With the bird inside?”

“We did used to have a budgie, but that would have been after it died. I imagine by that point my mother would just have been using the cage for flowers.”

“Do you still have that cage?”

“Who knows? It might be put away somewhere, but I’m not sure.”

Back inside his flat, after the man had gone, Taro leafed through the pages of Spring Garden . The birdcage was featured in three of the shots, but it was out of focus in all of them, and the outline of the bird, which could have been a parrot or parakeet or budgie, was blurred. Taro squinted at the photos, but could not bring the cage into focus.

Three days later, a gardening company arrived at Mrs Saeki’s house and cut back the trees in the garden drastically. They also totally removed the ivy that was growing up the concrete wall.

It was February when I went to visit Taro. Three years had passed since we’d last seen each other, which was when we’d gone to our home town for the sixth anniversary of our father’s death. At that time, I spent three days in the flat my mum lives in now, not the one on the twelfth floor of the municipal estate we’d grown up in, but a fourth-floor flat in a private block from which you could see that tower. That was the first time I heard about Taro’s divorce.

In February, I was getting ready for a trip abroad. I work as a teacher in a college in Nagoya, and my annual holiday overseas is the thing I look forward to all year. The plan was that I would go over to my friend’s house in Yokohama, where we would meet with another friend, and the three of us would then go to Narita for a flight to Taiwan, but because of heavy snow all transportation to Narita was stopped, and when we contacted the air-lines they said they had no idea when our flight would take off, so we decided by majority vote to abandon the holiday. When I got in touch with my mother to tell her that, she said that since I was in Tokyo, I should go and check on Taro. There were major delays on the trains from Yokohama to Setagaya and it was a major pain to get there, as I began complaining to Taro, who had come to meet me at the station, the moment I saw him.