Tomoka Shibasaki - Spring Garden

Sometimes Taro wished that he had that kind of job. He wanted to do the sort of work that drew upon a rare skill developed through experience, and that required the passion of a real artisan—a profession that wasn’t much known about, but that was indispensable in sustaining people’s daily lives.

Until his divorce, Taro had been a hairdresser, managing one of the branches of a hair salon owned by his wife’s father. His father-in-law was a good-natured man and, saying that Taro’s relationship with his daughter didn’t affect his evaluation of Taro’s work skills, had offered Taro a job in a branch in the neighbouring prefecture. But Taro’s back pain had been getting worse, and he had grown sick of the whole lifestyle that was a part of hair salons anyway, so he was keen to be done with it. When he went home to attend the Buddhist ceremony marking the sixth anniversary of his father’s death, he learnt from an old high school classmate that the Tokyo company his younger brother had started was hiring, and decided to apply.

He was now in his third year at the company, a five-person business that managed PR for other firms, and created display booths and promotional banners and signs. The job had been a total change for him, but as the manager of a hair salon, his duties had included dealing with advertising and promotion, so he wasn’t a complete novice with that, and it felt fresh and exciting to have meetings with clients here and there rather than being stuck in the same space all day. So long as he did the tasks that had been assigned to him, he’d get his salary at the end of the month—which was less than before, but still. Compared to the years he’d spent staring at endless pages of monthly sales targets and customer counts while worrying about how to deal with employees and whether he was pleasing his boss, which was to say, his father-in-law, mostly going without days off, this was a piece of cake.

A little while back, during a meeting with a client who owned an imported food store and was opening a new branch, Taro discovered that the client had once lived near View Palace Saeki III.

“There’s a lot of celebrities living in that area, aren’t there?” the client said.

“Yes, I guess so,” Taro replied.

The client mentioned a few names: an elderly stage actor who was now in suspense films on TV, an enka singer caught up in a debt scandal, and so on. Taro tried to seem interested.

Not long after, while taking the second of his three routes to the station, Taro discovered a house with the nameplate of one of the celebrities mentioned by the client. The actor had been the lead in a superhero series, though it was before the time when Taro had watched it. The actor’s house was a three-storey affair with a façade of white tiles, its left side in the form of a half-cylinder. Looking up, Taro saw that one of its windows, curved to fit the cylindrical wall, was open, but for some reason, the house still didn’t look at all like a sort of place people actually lived in. If the man himself came out at this very moment, Taro thought, I’d probably just think, well, there he is. Back when Taro was a kid, though, it would have been a different matter. He felt sure that seeing someone from TV walking around his neighbourhood, dressed totally differently from how he looked on screen, would have had a huge effect on him—he imagined it wouldn’t have been joy he felt so much as confusion. Taro had liked superhero programmes when he was young, but he’d been the sort of child who’d got the most pleasure from the silly parts. He’d once made a kid at nursery cry by telling him that superheroes were just made up.

Taro had been brought up in Osaka, and to him back then, the places he saw on TV programmes seemed very far away, with no relation to the place he lived. Even the street scenes that popped up in the background looked nothing like the streets he knew, with its reclaimed land surrounded by factories. The way people spoke on TV was completely different as well—they spoke Tokyo Japanese, not Osaka dialect. For that reason, he’d been able to laugh at the programmes in safety. What would it have been like if the world from TV had actually existed in the place he’d grown up in? He’d probably have been unable to tell which version was real, and been too freaked out to leave the house. He wondered now how kids who grew up in a place like this were able to tell the difference between the two worlds.

Maybe, Taro thought to himself, maybe the person who’d moved into that sky-blue house was a celebrity too. That would mean the Dragon Woman was either a diehard fan, or else she was just a snoop. Either way, Taro thought, that would be a pretty boring solution to the mystery.

In the middle of the night, Taro was woken by the sound of a crow cawing. Wanting to keep on sleeping, he didn’t open his eyes. He could hear the scratching of the crow’s feet, too, and figured it must have been walking across the roof of Mrs Saeki’s house. It was then he realized he needed to take his rubbish out. Funny as it was, it seemed like the crows were better at remembering the day for rubbish collection than he was. Taro had always thought crows couldn’t see in the dark, though. Had they suddenly developed nocturnal vision? Were they all going around in search of that owl that had dyed the crow’s wings black and fled? Wait a minute, where had he heard that story? A vague image of his classroom in nursery school floated into Taro’s mind, and then he fell back into sleep.

He woke after ten o’clock, too late to take the rubbish out. He ate the bun with burdock that his boss had given him as a thank you for the coffee sachets he’d brought into work, then lay sprawled out on the tatami. Taro would always be overtaken by the urge to lie back and doze off after he’d eaten something. He’d been the same since he was a kid, and his parents had often warned him that he’d turn into a cow if he wasn’t careful. As it happened, not only was Taro a Taurus, but the upper part of his head did jut out a bit at the sides, and at some point in childhood, he had genuinely believed he might become a cow. His horns, though, were yet to appear.

From time to time, Taro heard a cawing sound from the direction of Mrs Saeki’s house. When crows were around making a commotion, he never heard any other bird calls. By the looks of things, it was a nice day outside. Taro could see a small section of sky through the screen door to the balcony. Viewed through the fine mesh of the screen, it looked like an image on a bad-quality monitor. Then Taro heard a noise. At first he thought it was just the wind, or another crow, or else a cat, but then he distinctly heard the scraping of stone or concrete. He stood up and walked towards the balcony, and as he got closer, he could see a human figure.

There, in the courtyard overgrown with weeds, was the Dragon Woman, in a sweatshirt and jeans, at the corner of the concrete wall that separated the courtyard from Mrs Saeki’s house, the sky-blue house and the vault. She’d stacked two cement blocks, which she was using to give herself a lift as she tried to scramble up the wall. But the dense, overgrown ivy covering the wall and the maple branches poking over the top weren’t making it easy. Her feet searched around in vain for a foothold.

“Hey!” Taro called out from his balcony.

The Dragon Woman turned around.

“I don’t think you’re supposed to be there.”

The woman stared blankly at Taro for a few seconds, then suddenly shot him a friendly smile.

“You’re absolutely right!”

She came over to stand next to his balcony.

“I wonder, then, could I possibly trouble you for a favour?”

Here we go, thought Taro to himself. This is where the trouble begins. These kinds of favours that people asked were never good news. They were phrased like polite questions, but he was never really being given an option.