Tomoka Shibasaki - Spring Garden

“Oh, that place! I went to see it a week before it was burned down, when a truck ran into it. We were playing in North Park and there was this huge noise, so we ran to have a look, just in time to see the driver jumping into another car and escaping. The guy in the house chased after him, but I bet he got away. That was a dirty trick to try and get him to move out.”

“I have the feeling I heard about that from someone else, but I have absolutely no memory of it.”

“You’d only have been two or so at that time. I bet the people living in the flats now have no idea that all that stuff went on back in the day.”

“You know, I wonder if anything would turn up if you dug around the back garden.”

“There’ve been a few different people living there since then, right?”

“Yep, three since this book.”

“It’s going to go up for rent again, isn’t it? Why don’t you rent it with someone else? It’s cool these days, sharing houses.”

“I can’t live with other people.”

“Oh yeah, I’d forgotten you’re uptight about that kind of stuff. Remember how you used to cry and say you couldn’t sleep unless it was pitch black, so I had to turn out the nightlight.”

“I didn’t cry about it.”

Taro hadn’t joined me in drinking beer. He was drinking green tea from a plastic bottle.

Looking out of the window as if he was checking something, he said, “You once told me I’d be able to sleep if I watched the red lights of the factory.”

“I don’t remember that at all. It was probably something I made up to shut you up.”

At first I’d had the top bunk, but when Taro started school, he said he wanted it, and my parents made us switch because I was older. Until then, I’d always looked out at the city lit up with those red lights before I went to sleep. Those pulsating lights, they always seemed to me like the night was breathing.

“It’s amazing that we managed to live all that time in the same room.”

“We didn’t know what it was like to have our own space yet, that’s why.”

It was at that moment that I realized that I would never again live with Taro. I felt pretty sure that he was realizing the same thing at the same time.

“Anyway, with those kinds of houses there’s usually a rule that you’re not allowed to share with people who aren’t family. You don’t pass the landlord’s inspection.”

Nodding along with what Taro was saying, I opened my last can of beer. Then I picked up the photo book.

“Don’t you know anyone who’d want to live in a place like this? If it was someone you knew who moved in, you could go round when you wanted.”

“I can’t think of anyone.”

“Yeah, I thought you might say that.”

“What the hell do you mean by that?”

“It looks really big.”

“This whole flat would fit inside the hall.”

“There aren’t any photos of them eating.”

Taro, who was sitting on top of the backrest of the corner sofa, looked at me with an expression like a startled cat. It was a look that somehow made me think of our childhood. I opened the book and held it up in front of his face.

“These two live together in this house, but there isn’t a single photo of them eating. Or of any kind of food, either.”

Taro flipped through the pages and mumbled, “It’s true.”

Then he said, “I wonder if Nishi noticed that.”

“She must have,” I said, but Taro kept on looking at the book.

I’d run out of both beer and food. The snow-covered streets outside were totally still. Quite possibly, I thought, this part of the city was quiet even when it wasn’t snowing. From time to time, we heard a mound of snow falling from a roof or a branch somewhere. The sound was like heaviness itself. The great mass of white crystals sucked away all warmth from the air. The temperature of the houses, the trees, the utility poles, the asphalt, the air, the night, all went on falling.

The next day, it was glorious weather that made the previous day seem like it had been a dream, and melted snow fell from the edges of the buildings like rain. Taro and I took a pot and a frying pan outside, and made a very minimal attempt at clearing away the snow. It was the first time, in fact, I’d ever cleared snow. There were no signs of life from either the sky-blue house or the concrete one, but people from the house diagonally opposite came out and started clearing the snow too, and I felt somehow relieved to see that there were people actually living in the area, given how deserted it had been the day before. I wanted to meet Mrs Snake, but it seemed like she was out.

In the evening, after Taro had voted for the next governor of Tokyo, we went to a yakitori restaurant near the station. It turned out, though, that a lot of food supplies hadn’t been delivered because of the bad weather, and almost everything I wanted to order was unavailable. Taro surprised me by eating the leeks in the negima skewers, rather than picking them out from between the pieces of chicken as he’d used to do.

When we got back to the Pig Flat, I suggested that since the place was so cramped, I should take the green armchair off him. I knew that Taro wouldn’t bother to put up a struggle about this, and, as I thought, he replied, “Yeah, fine, if you want.” As I made the arrangements with the delivery service to have it transported to Nagoya, I had the thought that the next time I saw Taro, not only would he not be living here, but this room, along with the rest of the flat, would no longer exist.

The day after I went back home, Taro began searching for a new flat on estate sites. He knew he had to hurry and find somewhere to live, but he had no idea of the sort of place he wanted to move to, or where. Clicking on the SIMILAR RESULTS images and adverts that popped up in his search results, he found himself looking at a whole house in a town called Teppomachi in Yamagata Prefecture, way out in the countryside in the north of Japan. The picture showed a smallish, two-storey house, surrounded by banks of snow.

Taro realized that, if he wanted to, he could live somewhere like this. That was to say, he could choose a place he’d never been, that he knew nothing about whatsoever. He didn’t know if he’d be able to keep living there or not, but for what it was worth, he could at least move in. Move into a house like this listing with a bedroom that looked perfect for lying around in. He clicked on the various images of the house, one by one, and saw last of all a photo of the bathroom. Seeing the walls with their chequered black and white tiles, Taro decided that he’d put off searching for a flat.

A month later, I was back in Nagoya. I finished work for the day and came back to my fifth-floor flat. Sitting in my green armchair, one half of a matching pair that had once belonged to the Morios and was now shared by Nishi and me, I drank a can of beer. I wasn’t concerned about my alcohol intake like Taro was, but I had noticed recently that my handwriting was beginning to resemble my father’s. The older I got, the more my writing looked like a row of little drunk people walking. When I caught sight of a note I’d scribbled a while back, I would sometimes be sure that my father had written it. My father hadn’t taught me to write, so why my writing should gradually grow to look like his was puzzling. When I’d visited Taro’s flat and caught sight of his handwriting, I’d seen that it didn’t look like either of our parents’.

I opened up my laptop, and after doing the usual survey of my Twitter feed and the blogs I always looked at, checking up on how my friends who lived nearby and a cat that belonged to someone in Toronto I’d never met were doing that day, I put on a DVD that I’d rented. It was a drama based on events of the Second World War. After I’d been watching it for thirty minutes, it dawned on me that I’d seen it before, some time ago.