Tomoka Shibasaki - Spring Garden

THE WOMANwas looking at something over her first-floor balcony, her hands gripping the railing, her neck craned forward.

From the ground floor, Taro watched the woman. She did not move. The sunlight that reflected off her black-framed glasses meant that Taro couldn’t tell which direction she was looking, but she was faced straight ahead, towards the concrete wall and, beyond it, the house of Mrs Saeki, who owned the flats.

It was a block of flats shaped like an L flipped and rotated so that the short section was hanging down. Taro’s flat was in the short section. The woman on the balcony was at the far end of the long section, the flat farthest away from his. He had happened to catch sight of her as he went to shut the small window looking out onto the courtyard—although courtyard was really too grand a word for that space, three metres wide with weeds growing in the gaps between the paving stones, and to top it all, a sign that read no entry. With the arrival of spring, the concrete wall separating the flats from Mrs Saeki’s house had suddenly become thick with ivy. The two trees growing immediately behind the wall, a maple and a plum, had been left untended, and their branches now stretched over it. Behind the trees was the two-storey wooden house belonging to Mrs Saeki which, to go by its appearance, must have been pretty old. As usual, there were no signs of anyone at home.

The woman hadn’t moved an inch. From where Taro stood, he could see only the concrete wall and the roof of Mrs Saeki’s house, but he assumed that from the first floor the woman could probably see down to the ground level of the house and its garden. Still, what could have been so fascinating about a view like that? The most striking thing about the house’s red corrugated iron roof and its dark brown wooden walls was the extent of their wear and tear. It was now a year since Mrs Saeki, who’d been living on her own, had moved into a care home for seniors. She’d looked spritely enough whenever Taro saw her sweeping the front of her house, but apparently she was about to turn eighty-six. All this Taro had learnt from the estate agent.

Beyond the roof of Mrs Saeki’s house, Taro could see the sky. It had been perfectly clear when he woke up, but now there were a few clouds—bright white lumps, the sort that usually appeared in midsummer, although it was only May. Looking at the tops of the clouds that bulged right up and towered above the rest, he thought about how they actually had to be several kilometres above the earth. The contrast between them and the deep blue of the sky was so strong it hurt his eyes.

Taro imagined himself standing on a cloud. This was something he did often. After walking for miles, he would reach the cloud’s edge. Grasping the edge, he would look down at the city thousands of metres below. He could see the narrow little roads intertwined, the roofs of houses clustered together. Cars the size of insects zipped along the streets. Small aeroplanes cut across the space between the city and the cloud. For some reason, in this vision of Taro’s, the planes alone were cartoon drawings, nothing else. Behind their glass-fronted noses, the cockpits were empty. The planes made no sound. In fact, it wasn’t just the planes that were silent—there was no noise of any kind anywhere. As Taro stood up slowly, he bumped his head up against the top of the sky. There was nobody else around.

Taro had been picturing this exact same sequence of events ever since he was a child. After it ran its course this time, he looked towards the balcony at the far end of the first floor and noticed that, all of a sudden, the scene contained a white square. Looking more closely, he saw that the woman had propped a piece of drawing paper—no, it was a sketchpad—on top of the railing. Was she drawing the trees, or what? The balcony was south-facing, and the building did not have much in the way of eaves. It was two o’clock in the afternoon. Surely too bright for sketching.

From time to time, the woman would lean her body forward to get a better view of whatever she was drawing, and Taro would get a glimpse of her face. She had shortish hair in no particular style—a fringed bob, at a stretch. Taro had seen her around after she moved into the block in February, and he guessed she was in her thirties, about the same age as he was, maybe younger. She was short, and seemingly always dressed in a T-shirt and jogging bottoms. All of a sudden, the woman lifted her neck, and her head turned in Taro’s direction. Taro realized then that it wasn’t Mrs Saeki’s house that the woman was looking at. It was the one next to it, on the side of Taro’s flat: the sky-blue house.

Right then, the sharp whistle of a bird pierced the air, and there was a rustle of leaves. In the next instant, Taro’s and the woman’s eyes met. Before he had time to look away, she had disappeared, taking her sketchpad with her. He heard the door to her balcony sliding shut. She didn’t come out again.

When Taro came home from work on Wednesday, one of the first-floor tenants was standing at the top of the stairs outside his flat. It wasn’t the woman on the balcony, but the woman from the flat next to hers. Taro guessed she was older than his mother; the woman had lived in the building for a good while.

The block of flats Taro lived in had the name View Palace Saeki III, and it was made up of eight flats: four on the ground floor, four on the first. Instead of having room numbers, the flats were identified by animals of the Chinese zodiac. So, starting with Taro’s flat in the short section, the flats on the ground floor had the names Pig, Dog, Rooster, Monkey, and on the first floor, Sheep, Horse, Snake, Dragon. It was common these days for people not to put their names on the nameplates on their doors, or on their letterboxes either, so the flat names were all there was to go on. Since this woman lived in the Snake Flat, Taro thought of her as Mrs Snake. She was a friendly sort who would always strike up conversation with him whenever they ran into each other.

It was Mrs Snake who was standing at the top of the stairs, looking down to the ground floor. She calculated her timing carefully, descending just as Taro got to his door. Mrs Snake always had her hair swept up, and wore clothes of unusual cuts that could have been fashioned out of old kimonos. Today she was wearing a pair of loose-fitting, drop-crotch trousers made of fabric with a turtle pattern, together with a black shirt.

“You haven’t lost your key by any chance, have you?”

“My key?” Without thinking, Taro glanced down at the key to his flat that he was holding.

“This one,” Mrs Snake said, showing him a key with a mushroom-shaped key ring.

Taro recognized it immediately.

“It was lying on the ground here this morning. But you’ve got yours, don’t you?”

“Actually, that’s the key to my office. At work, I mean. I thought I had forgotten it at home. Thanks very much.”

“Oh, now that’s a relief! I was worried what you’d think about an old woman like me suddenly turning up with your key in my hand! I didn’t want you to think I’d taken it, you know. It really was just lying right here, on the ground.”

“Of course. Thank you very much.”

Mrs Snake stepped towards Taro with the key, and Taro took it from her. She really was very short. She looked up at him with an almost childlike expectancy.

“So you were unable to get into work today, then?”