Tomoka Shibasaki - Spring Garden

Taro responded in his usual half-hearted way, saying things like “really” and “oh” in a way that left you unsure if he was really listening to what you were saying. He seemed to have put on a bit of weight since the last time I’d seen him.

It was past three in the afternoon, but there was almost no one outside. The low-hanging sky was smothered with grey clouds, and everything around was snow as far as the eye could see. There was a strong wind, and even under an umbrella, my coat quickly turned white. The snow was already a good twenty centimetres deep, and our feet were buried in it. Taro, who I’d made carry my suitcase, was especially suffering. Midway home, I slipped and fell into the snow, which made Taro laugh. We saw several snowmen and what was, I guessed, supposed to be a snow grotto, though it looked more like a hole in the ground. I remembered once making a snow grotto at the ski slope that someone had taken us to. Thinking that Taro must share the memory, I grew excited and said what fun that had been, hadn’t it, but Taro could only remember the skiing part. That was twenty-five years ago.

By the time we finally reached View Palace Saeki III, my coat and boots were soaked through with melted snow, and my fingers and toes were beginning to ache. For the first time, I saw Taro’s Pig Flat. It was less messy than I’d expected, but I was shocked to see the entire room taken up with sofas and armchairs. The padded green armchair took up the middle of the hall, and the central tatami room contained the large corner sofa, which was turned to face the ottoman and the reclining sofa. The majestic silver fridge-freezer, which seemed to occupy half the kitchen, also took me by surprise. It was the kind that could freeze food to a specific temperature so it could then be cut without thawing it first. I’d heard about them, and had been wanting one myself, so I kept opening and closing the door of the freezer, saying how envious I was. Taro made vague noises: “ah”, “yeah”, “hmm”, “I know”. I knew that he secretly felt quite proud of himself for having a fridge like that.

After I’d finished my inspection of the fridge, I noticed that there was a book of photos on top of the ottoman. From its binding, it looked like a large children’s book; it was called Spring Garden . Seeing my interest, Taro said, “That’s the house just over there.”

“Is it?”

“You could at least pretend to be surprised.”

“If there’s photos of a house, it stands to reason that the house exists somewhere in the world, surely.”

“But look! It’s just over there.”

I walked to the door that led onto the balcony where Taro was pointing. Past the snow piled up on the concrete wall and the branches of the tree, and through the snow that was still falling at a slant, I could see the corner of the sky-blue house. It was already starting to get dark outside.

“Looks like it’s pretty big.”

“The person who gave me that book is the same age as you. She moved out recently, though.”

On a board on top of the ottoman I arranged the ham, cheese and Baumkuchen that I’d got from my friend, and I opened a can of beer. Taro lounged around on the corner sofa, alternating between the middle and the end, and I went for the reclining sofa, sitting with my feet to the side or my knees up in front of me. If our mother was here, I thought, she would tell us off for sitting like slobs. It also struck me that I was far past the age when my mother would speak to me like that. And yet, the way that we were behaving wasn’t so different from when we were kids, I thought to myself, and it was possible that someone watching us right now would find the sight ridiculous, or even kind of creepy. As he told me the story of the woman in the Dragon Flat, the house behind his flat, and the Morios who lived there, Taro would occasionally pick up Spring Garden and flick through it, then put it down again.

As it happened, I had seen Spring Garden before. A friend of mine in high school had been a big fan of Taro Gyushima’s. She didn’t really care about the adverts he made—she was more concerned with him as a man. Seeing the photos of him that accompanied his interviews, she’d come to think that he was her idea of the perfect guy. Naturally, she didn’t like Kaiko Umamura at all. She hated the way she always acted cute and dumb, and said her name was weird. When I suggested that Kaiko Umamura was a stage name, probably the name of her character in the theatre troupe, my friend said she couldn’t possibly get along with someone who would choose a name like that. In her mind, Kaiko Umamura could do nothing right.

“What do you reckon he’s doing in this one?”

Taro opened the book at the page with the photo of Taro Gyushima digging a hole in the garden and showed it to me.

“Who knows. Maybe he was trying to make a pond.”

“A pond…” said Taro, in a way that suggested that wasn’t something that had ever occurred to him. He seemed so taken by the idea that he went on staring at the photo for a while.

It was night now, but the snow reflected the light from the flat, giving it a faint glow. It felt a bit as if we’d come to a hot-spring resort in one of the snowier parts of the country. True, Taro’s flat was absolutely nothing like the traditional Japanese-style rooms you’d find in a hot spring, and it was over ten years since I’d been to a hot spring in the snow, but still, that was the thought that went drifting through my mind.

“It’s about the right size to bury a dog in, don’t you reckon?”

Still staring at the photo of the garden, Taro started telling me about Numazu and Cheetah. I instantly thought of Peter. Peter was a stray dog that we’d kept in the place where the motorbikes were parked in the municipal estate, back when I’d just started primary school. A bunch of boys from the estate a bit older than me, third and fourth years at my school, would bring it food and things. But then one day, after a few weeks, I came back from school and Peter was gone. I heard from the other kids that he’d been taken to the pound. Someone carved PETER into the trunk of a fnearby camphor tree. I doubt that anyone else could have deciphered the strokes, but we all knew what it said, and what it meant. I would think of him every time I saw the cuts in that tree.

On the estate, the other kids and I always hung around in a big group. There was someone from the same year as me at school on each of the floors of the block, and we were always fighting for space in the titchy little parks in the estate grounds. The school we went to, which they were now considering closing down and merging with another school, was cramped with forty-five desks in a single classroom. There was barely space to move, and while there was expansion work going on, we had our lessons in prefab classrooms. Anywhere you went in that poky part of town, you would see someone you knew. I was always a part of a crowd. And yet, strangely enough, I never talked about Peter with any one of my classmates.

“I still feel sad when I think about him now,” I said to Taro.

“I don’t think he got taken to the pound, you know. He was white with brown patches and droopy ears, right? When I went round to Matsumura’s house in year four, he was there. Some of the kids from the estate had asked Matsumura’s brother to take him home, and he did.”

“Wow, I never knew that. When I told my friends at high school about it, I went on and on about how horrible they were for taking him away. And it wasn’t even true!”

“I think he probably lived to a good old age. Matsumura used to live next to the house in Ni-chome. You know, the one that was set on fire by that land-shark. They moved right behind the school just before it happened. I remember his mum saying how lucky they’d been and stuff.”