“Three years! Wow.”
“Yeah, that’s how it is with us. We sometimes email each other and stuff, but that’s about it.”
“Really! Wow, gosh, I can’t imagine. Wow.”
Nishi had suddenly become very friendly, no doubt owing to the drink. But Taro decided that stoking her enthusiasm further would only mean bother, so he resisted telling her that he shared a first name with the guy who’d lived in the sky-blue house, or that he’d grown up in a municipal estate like she had. It hadn’t been a four-storey one, but a fourteen-storey one—cutting-edge, at the time it had been built. Taro’s flat had been on the twelfth floor. He had slept in a bunk bed by the window that led onto the balcony, and from the time he’d started school, the bottom bunk had been his sister’s, and the top bunk his. Every night, before going to sleep, he had looked out at the city. There was the bridge going over the canal, the factories with their bare metal scaffolding, and the chimneys rising above the rubbish-incineration plant. The incineration plant had flashing red lights, and when he breathed in and out three times in time with them, he would get sleepy. That was something his sister had taught him.
The restaurant bill was so cheap that Taro wondered if there wasn’t some kind of mistake. Nishi paid, as she’d promised. As they headed towards the station, she announced that she was going to visit a friend. Taro accompanied her as far as the ticket gates, where Nishi removed her copy of Spring Garden from the cloth bag, and split it into two—or so it seemed until Taro figured out that there had been two books all along. Nishi held one of them out to him.
“I was in such a rush to get it I ended up ordering two copies. So here, you have one.”
Taro accepted his copy of the book and thanked her. Then holding it in one hand, he wandered towards View Palace Saeki III. When he passed the shopping arcade and found himself on the residential streets, everything around him was dark and quiet, and he didn’t see a soul.
Taro thought about how different the place he now lived was from the place he’d grown up—the size of the buildings and the gaps between them, the number of people living there, the general feel of it, everything. His home town as it existed in his memory seemed distant to him, like something that belonged to another person. It was almost as though he’d mistaken a place he’d seen on TV or in a film for a thing of his own, or else that the sights seen by someone in one of the thousand or so different flats on that estate had somehow snuck their way into his mind and still remained there. That was how it seemed from time to time.
The next morning, when Taro opened his door, he found a paper bag, inside of which was a twenty-centimetre-square cardboard box and a slip of paper with a note in green ink:
My friend’s gift shop is closing down, so she gave me this. It’s a cuckoo clock. I thought I’d give it to you as a thank-you present. Nishi.
Taro found it hard to see appeal in anything that made a noise every hour. He lifted the lid of the box just far enough to glimpse the wooden top of the clock, then closed it again immediately, and put it away inside his closet.
At some point not long after that, Taro began to pass along the side of the Morios’ house on his way to work. It was a little bit of a detour for him, but not too much.
Occasionally there would be a German car parked in front of the house, alongside the small family car. He’d heard from Nishi that the husband drove this second car to work. It was dark navy, an unusual sort of colour for a car. The walls of the house and the second car were both a light shade of blue, so Taro assumed that at least someone in the family must be keen on the colour.
Sometimes he would hear high-pitched children’s voices, but he had never actually seen the Morio kids. He felt sure that Nishi, passing by the house several times a day as she did, would come to be known to the inhabitants as someone to watch out for, if in fact that hadn’t happened already.
After a few days, Taro noticed it wasn’t just the Morios’ house that he was examining carefully, but all the houses on his way to work.
Taro’s immediate neighbourhood was said to be a posh part of town, but it wasn’t as though the posh and less posh parts of town were divided up by street, or anything so obvious. To be sure, there was a kind of slow shift taking place, so the large houses and low-rise blocks of high-class flats gradually gave way to more blocks of single-room flats, narrow houses, and multi-purpose buildings with restaurants, shops and offices the closer you got towards the station. Still, there were places where a block of flats older and more cramped than View Palace Saeki III stood right next to a great big detached house with security cameras affixed to the walls, and at the end of an alley off the shopping arcade that led up to the station was a grand house with an impressive set of gates, of the sort that typically belonged to families who had owned the land for generations.
Buildings that had stood the test of time rubbed shoulders with newly built detached houses; flats with all kinds of modern conveniences found themselves alongside those whose wear and tear stood out for a mile. There were houses where celebrities lived and there were also, as Taro had discovered from the listings online, flats that didn’t even have baths in them.
The people who constructed these buildings must have had some kind of mission they wished the buildings to fulfil, some form of hope for them, but looking at the area in general, it was hard to see any kind of communality or purpose at all. It seemed more like the place was the result of everyone’s individual ideas and contingent circumstances commingling, all their little details then driving them further from one another over time. Somehow the thought put Taro’s mind at ease. It made him feel better about the fact that, somewhere in the midst of all that, he spent entire days just lolling about on the floor and napping.
Taro began to get better at spotting empty houses. Just like Nishi had said, houses that were empty gave off a fundamentally different feeling than those with people living in them. Even vacant houses that were well looked after, so that it might appear at first as though they just had nobody at home, he came to be able to recognize quickly as actually uninhabited. There were so many different types of empty houses, flats and offices, too. The train he took to work ran along an elevated rail track, and from it he could see into the rooms on one floor of all the office buildings and blocks of flats that the train passed.
Taro found it peculiar that there should be so many homes without people living in them. Across the country, far away from here, there were areas losing the vitality they’d once had, and there were shopping arcades close to major stations that now lay deserted, their shutters permanently down. The shopping arcade close to the flat Taro had grown up in was the same, dark during the day. But that was vacant property in places where whole areas were in decline. Compared to those, the vacant houses in this city, which people were still flooding to from all across Japan and whose rent prices now beggared belief, didn’t carry with them such desolation or gravity. Rather, they seemed more like hidden caverns he’d happened to stumble across. All around, enormous buildings and blocks of flats were being constructed day by day, and yet, hidden away on the inside, there were secret caves. It brought to mind the cracks that formed inside daikon radishes when you left them out for a while without eating them, although then Taro thought about how those vacant houses would be lived in again some day, and how buildings could be demolished and built again, so they weren’t really so similar to daikon after all. He tried thinking of them instead in terms of sponges, or holey cheese, but couldn’t quite seem to land on the right metaphor.
Taro wondered what would happen if someone were to sneak inside one of those vacant houses and begin living there. Would they be found out? For sure there would be no running water or gas or anything like that, but then he also had come across a few houses with signs alerting people they had well water they could provide to others in the case of an earthquake. As long as you had water, you could manage somehow. These were the places his thoughts carried him to, though he had no actual intention of testing these ideas out.
Behind the shopping arcade that led away from the station, to one side of a road he passed on the first of his three routes to work, was an uninhabited house with a reasonably sized garden. The smallish car parked inside the gates must have been there for years; there were weeds growing inside it. How did that happen? Had the bottom fallen out, or what? The evergreen trees in the garden had grown so high that they were wound around the utility pole, and their foliage was now dangling towards the houses on the other side of the street. From the gaps in the wooden fence in the front of the house, he could see the sunroom attached to the single-storey house. The sunroom had no storm shutters, only regular windows, and then, on the inside, latticed paper screens, which were shut. Some light was making its way through the paper of the screens, so the inside of the house wouldn’t be pitch black. The tatami would be mouldy, and there would be a few bits of abandoned furniture, in the same way that the bike and laundry rack, now rusted, had also been left. Time inside the house was a cycle of murky days and nights of total darkness. You’d sometimes hear the sound of rats echoing through the ventilation shaft. For some reason Taro could imagine the scene inside the house vividly, could picture it in as much detail as rooms that he’d actually seen.
Then, one day, all that was left of it was an empty lot. In the place where it should have been, unchanged from the week before, there was now, quite abruptly, nothing. The overgrown trees, the single-storey house, the small car and the weeds were all gone, and Taro found he couldn’t remember what else had been there to begin with.
There was another plot of razed land diagonally opposite from that house. Taro could not remember what had been there before either. In yet another plot, which had been vacant for as long as he could remember, construction work had now begun. He suddenly began paying attention to signs announcing demolition, or announcing who had commissioned forthcoming construction on the site.
He realized that next year or the year after, a similar sign would appear outside his own block of flats, and tried picturing it. There would be nobody moving into the empty flat next to his or the one next to that. He had peered through the window of the flat next to his, and at the back of the dim space, a closet with its fabric door was ripped and left wide open. Everything awaited demolition. Taro was suddenly visited by the thought that he better start thinking about where he was going to move to.
When he saw Nishi, she would greet him in a way that seemed friendly, but there was something a bit distant about the way she acted. She didn’t drop by his flat, or start conversations. Perhaps, he thought, she was embarrassed about having drunk too much and spoken more than she meant to.
When Taro returned home from work in the evening, he could always see from the street that lights were on in the Dragon Flat, but he never caught sight of her on the balcony. Sometimes he saw Mrs Snake sticking her head over her balcony railing, seemingly looking in the direction of his flat.