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.
Midway into June was supposed to be the time when the rainy season came. That year there wasn’t a great deal of rain, but it was always overcast.
Every day, the sky was slathered with a layer of low, thick clouds. Taro’s cloud daydream didn’t get triggered on days when it was so cloudy that there was no sky in sight, or on rainy days either. At these times, he stopped being able to imagine that there was anything above the clouds at all. Beyond them, he imagined, was neither blue sky, nor dark cosmos, but just see-through space, stretching on and on with nothing to fill it.
The first time Taro had been in an aeroplane, it had been raining. The aeroplane had risen through the rain-clouds, their insides like dry-ice vapour, and then emerged above the clouds, into a bright blue sky. Taro was flabbergasted. He felt quite unnerved, thinking that he might have moved into a different world from the one he thought existed. But the tops of the bright white clouds that he peered down on from the double-paned windows, with their fierce brightness and their overpowering mass and scope, were just like the ones that had appeared in his visions. It seemed uncanny that he could have known about them, could have pictured them with such clarity, when he had never once seen them before. He kept scanning the tops of the clouds for people walking about, but couldn’t spot anyone. Frost spread its way like snowflakes between the two panes of glass.
When the plane passed over gaps between the clouds, Taro saw the ocean and the land beneath. He saw coast-lines with the same contours that he knew from maps. As his mind made these connections, he had a visceral realization that the world as it existed in his head and the ground that he walked on every day were actually the same place. From that time on, he had been a fan of aeroplanes.
Taro’s father had died without having once boarded a plane. He had rarely been on holidays of any kind, except for his fishing trips. He would talk about America a lot, declaring that America was such and such, or saying that in a situation like this one, the US Government would do such and such, but he had never once left Japan, let alone visited the States.
Last New Year, his mother had gone to Hawaii for the third time, and he was pretty sure his sister had been to both New York and San Francisco, but Taro found all the preparation for going abroad such a hassle that the only time he’d been overseas was on his honeymoon to Italy. His clearest memory was the ruins of an old market he’d seen there.
When he had time to kill between coming home from work and going to bed, Taro would look through Spring Garden. He tried comparing the pictures in the book to the house that he could see from his balcony.
The fact that he shared a first name with the man who had taken some of those photos and who appeared in others, though, didn’t give rise to any real interest on his part. Nishi had gone on about how much she liked the unpretentiousness of Kaiko Umamura’s expression, and how the couple’s intimacy seemed to radiate naturally from the photos, and how the feel of the house seemed to be connected to their relationship, but Taro wasn’t struck by any of those things especially.
For sure, these were the sorts of natural expressions you’d expect to see in people’s private photos, but when you looked at a whole book’s worth of them, they came to seem a little too natural. The exquisiteness of all the aged furniture and the low table with exactly the right amount of clutter seemed to Taro too perfect to be trusted. That was especially true of Taro Gyushima—the expressive look on his face in each photo, his long, dishevelled hair arranged to look as if he hadn’t laid a finger on it, his white shirt intended to seem like it was his everyday attire. Even the angle at which he turned seemed calculated to look casual. Taro didn’t like men like that, who were always thinking about how they were coming across. It was maybe that feeling that prevented him from being able to simply enjoy looking at the photos.
Nevertheless, when he thought about how these rooms actually existed inside the walls of that sky-blue house over the wall, he could at least understand Nishi’s desire to go and see it with her own eyes.
On one of the last pages of the book was a shot of Taro Gyushima in the garden. He was standing over to the right, in front of the plum and the pine, digging with a spade. He wore the same white shirt even when gardening, but in this shot alone he was paying more attention to what he was doing than to the camera, or at least, so it seemed to Taro. The hole was about one metre in diameter, and twenty or thirty centimetres deep. When Taro compared this to the other photos, the shrubbery around looked different, so he guessed that he might have been transplanting something.