Tomoka Shibasaki - Spring Garden

Taro climbed back up the concrete wall and, holding onto the gutter for support, found his way onto the second-floor balcony. The old ground-floor windows leading to the sunroom had been replaced with new ones, but not those on the first floor. When Taro had gone into the bedroom with the balcony to collect the reclining sofa, Mr Morio had told him that the lock on the door was broken, and you could open the door with a good thump. Now Taro did just that, hitting the place near the lock several times. He rattled the door and saw that the lock, shaped like an ear, had come undone. He opened the glass door, took off his shoes and put them in the cloth bag on his back, then stepped onto the tatami.

If Nishi’s favourite room in the house was the bathroom, then Taro’s was this bedroom. Because of his habit of sprawling out on the floor in whatever room he happened to be in, he liked rooms with tatami floors, which were softer and nicer for lying on. There were five photos of this room in the book, including one of Kaiko Umamura doing a bridge right in the middle of the room. Her head was touching the floor, and her arms were folded across her chest. She was smiling. In another shot, she was mid-cartwheel, moving so fast that the photo was blurred, and yet, even amid the blur, you could see the gleam in her eyes.

The room was spacious. It still smelt a little of the rushes that were used to make the tatami. Taro sat down on the tatami, pulled out a fleece blanket from his bag, and rolled himself up in it. Facing towards the window, he could see the sky. It occurred to him that he had never once seen a shooting star. He could hear crows cawing.

He was woken by the sun, now high up in the sky. When he checked his phone, he saw it was past ten.

He could hear noises from downstairs, and several different voices. Still lying on the floor, he listened carefully, but couldn’t make out what was being said. Figuring that potential residents had probably come for a viewing, he felt anxious, and got up. He went down a few steps on the staircase, trying to gauge the situation, and peeped down through the handrail from a spot where he would not be visible from the floor below.

There was a man in a blue uniform with yellow letters on his back that read METROPOLITAN POLICE DEPARTMENT. He wore his baseball cap of the same blue backwards.

“We’ve found a woman’s body in the garden,” a man’s voice was saying. The voice had a strange clarity to it, and Taro felt as though he’d heard it somewhere before.

“Did you hear any noises at all last night?”

“No, nothing at all,” said a young woman’s voice.

Trying not to make any noise, Taro went down another step, and then another. When he reached the midway landing, he saw a man in a suit standing next to the criminal investigator and, opposite them, a woman.

The woman had her eyes cast down. She kept putting a hand up to touch her long hair. From the side, she looked a lot like Kaiko Umamura in the photo of her reading in a wicker chair in the sunroom.

“What time did you get home yesterday?”

“What are you trying to say, sir?”

“Okay, and cut!” said a voice, and the floor suddenly filled with commotion. The lights dropped, and three men dressed in blue uniforms moved up and down the corridor. Someone, either the director or another member of the crew, was giving directions for the next scene to be shot.

Only the woman stayed in the same place, her head now raised. From the front, she didn’t look like Kaiko Umamura after all. In fact, she looked more like Nishi. But that thought only stayed in Taro’s mind for a second, and then he remembered the actress’s name.

She looked Taro straight in the eye, and made a gesture with her hand, as though lifting something up. Taro eventually realized she was telling him to go back upstairs. He nodded at her. He saw her mouth move, but failed to catch what she said.

Taro went up the stairs and back into the bedroom, shouldered his bag, then stepped out onto the balcony. Looking down from there, he saw two vans filling the parking spaces, and members of the crew carrying lights and microphones up and down the street. When would it be screened? he wondered. He knew it usually took a long time after filming before programmes actually made it onto the TV.

He climbed over the balcony railing, and holding on to the gutter for support, managed to get a footing on the concrete wall. With his hands on the side of the sky-blue house, he walked carefully along the top of the wall. It was a clear, sunny day and the temperature was rising. He felt sweat on his back.

When he reached the border with the Saeki house, the concrete vault, and View Palace Saeki III, Taro stopped. With his hands still touching the blue wooden boards of the house, he looked over towards his block of flats. On her first-floor balcony, Mrs Snake was hanging out her washing. There was one piece of fabric in navy and one in dark green, although what shape those clothes would take when Mrs Snake put them on, he had no idea. Other than the Snake Flat, and the Pig Flat in the right corner of the ground floor, all the flats were now empty.

Their windows and the balconies were arranged in two neat lines. The sunlight shone into the windows, all shaped exactly the same. He could see the lines dividing light from shade falling on the walls of the first-floor flats, and on the tatami of those on the ground-floor flats. Nothing changed. Nothing made a sound. Only the boundary lines between the light and the shade shifted, like a sundial.

Taro’s flat was full of sofas and chairs. The whole place was buried in ivory-coloured fabric. Sitting on top of the wall and looking into his room, he could see the enormous refrigerator gleaming silver. He remembered that there was tofu in there he had to eat today, before it went bad.

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