When Taro was hanging his laundry out on the balcony, he looked in the direction of the house, but he couldn’t see the garden. The trees and the ivy in Mrs Saeki’s garden were growing wilder by the day, and the branches of the maple that overhung the wall were now poking their way into Taro’s balcony. There were crows cawing at each other. It sounded as if they were having a conversation. Taro suddenly remembered Numazu’s story about burying Cheetah in his garden. The hole Taro Gyushima was digging might have been to bury something, he thought. Maybe that bird from the cage. It wasn’t as though the photographs were arranged in chronological order, so maybe the bird had died, and he was burying it. Then again, he thought, that hole was far too big for burying a bird in.
Taro felt an itch on his foot, and realized he’d got his first mosquito bite of the summer.
One rainy Saturday at the end of June, Taro stepped out of his flat. He didn’t really want to go out in the rain, but he didn’t have any food that didn’t require cooking, and so he’d decided to go to the convenience store to pick up a ready meal. Standing by the bottom of the stairs to the first floor were Nishi and Mrs Snake, chatting and pointing up at the branches of the tree that grew beside the staircase.
Taro didn’t know the name of the tree, but it had thin branches and luminous green leaves. At the beginning of the summer before last, when he had first seen the tiny white flowers hanging on it, he had been surprised that a tree could produce anything so delicate and pretty. He remembered that it had flowered this year too, not long ago. After that, some clusters had formed on the tips of the branches, but the clusters were a strange shape that didn’t seem to fit with the flowers. He didn’t remember having seen them until last year, either. It seemed that it was those clusters that Mrs Snake and Nishi were pointing to now.
“What are those things?” Taro asked.
“They’re galls,” Mrs Snake replied.
“What’s that?”
“A kind of plant tumour. They’re caused by parasitic lice that make the buds mutate and change shape, and then larvae grow inside them. They only form on Japanese snowbells like this one. The ‘cat’s paw’ part comes from their shape.”
“I thought they looked like bunches of mini bananas, actually,” Taro said. “But now that you mention cats, they seem less like paws and more like the tails on nekomata. You know, the demon-cats, with nine tails.”
“It’s foxes that have nine tails,” Nishi corrected him, looking for some reason very pleased with herself. “Nekomata only have two.”
Mrs Snake looked up at Taro, once again with a child-like gaze, and said, “There aren’t any foxes around here, but there are raccoon dogs. Did you know that? There’s a mother and her cub living by the tracks of the Setagaya line. I wonder what on earth they find to eat around here! They look a lot like badgers, but they’re definitely raccoon dogs.”
“And I thought this was supposed to be the city,” Taro said.
Mrs Snake’s eyes were sparkling. Taro had seen her speaking to cats by the side of the road several times, and imagined that she was something of an animal lover. Nishi was standing behind her, nodding silently.
That evening, Taro was eating a dinner of grilled mackerel in his flat when Mrs Snake brought him three illustrated guides: one for plants, one for birds, and one for wild animals.
“I’m sure they’ll come in handy,” she said, pressing them on him.
On a sudden whim, Taro asked her what kind of people had lived in the sky-blue house before. Kaiko Umamura and Taro Gyushima were no longer there when she moved in, she said. That was seventeen years ago. An American couple lived there for ten years, and after that, a family with two sons in high school. Taro vaguely remembered seeing the couple with the two sons at some point, but he had no clear mental image of them.
Mrs Snake said she had known the American couple a little, too. The husband was in Japan for his job, which had something to do with aircraft. The wife was often out tending the garden, and Mrs Snake would sometimes come across her while she was working in the flower beds by the front door. The woman didn’t speak much Japanese, but she was friendly, and would greet Mrs Snake with a pleasant “Konnichiwa!”. Feeling obliged to return her kindness, Mrs Snake would talk for a while, managing to get across in stilted English the fact that she liked Neil Young, and had been born in the same year as he was. She had been invited over to their house three times for dinner, and they played Neil Young for her on the big stereo in the living room. By that point, the tatami had been replaced by laminate flooring, but the pine was still in the garden, and the kitchen hadn’t yet been renovated. Nishi, who Mrs Snake had told this to the other day, had been incredibly envious, she said.
Taro felt surprised to think that his dad, too, must have been born in the same year as Neil Young, but when he thought about it he realized he hardly knew Neil Young’s music. He looked away from the shining eyes of Mrs Snake, who was still stood outside his front door, and said, “My father always had this really stereotypical image of rock music, or any music produced by any kind of band, as being about young people in scruffy clothes making as much noise as possible. In fact, I got told off for buying a guitar. Of course, my father lived until he was eighteen in the mountains in Shikoku, so I guess his way of thinking was a bit behind compared with other people of his generation.”
“Even where I grew up, they thought of me as a kind of rebel, and that was in the suburbs of Tokyo. I really do miss those times, you know. I went to see the Beatles when they came to Japan. I still feel proud about that.”
“Wow, that’s amazing.”
“Is your father in good health?”
“Actually no, he passed away almost ten years ago.”
“Really, I’m sorry to hear that. He must have been young.”
As Mrs Snake spoke, her voice sounded choked up and her eyes grew moist. Taro looked at her curiously. Why would you cry about the death of someone you’d never met, the father of someone you weren’t particularly close to?
Mrs Snake stayed for a while longer in Taro’s doorway, reminiscing about the past. Taro learnt many things: She’d been born in a town called Tanashi, which had become a subdivision of Tokyo, and had been renamed. Until a few years ago, she had taught sewing at a fashion design college. She had been to see the Beatles playing the Budokan, and also travelled to America to see Neil Young. Neil Young was Canadian. When Mrs Saeki, now in a care home, had married into the Saeki family and had first come to live here, the land all the way over to the railway tracks had been fields, and the family had owned all of it (although Mrs Snake thought that might be a bit of an exaggeration). Mrs Saeki’s husband, who had passed away, had been the headmaster of a junior high school, and before Taro had moved into the Pig Flat, there had been a Chinese girl, a student, living there.
At the end of June, Numazu, the colleague of Taro’s who had married a woman from Kushiro and changed his name to hers, left the company and moved to Kutchan, in Hokkaido, to work in a hotel with his wife.
When Taro asked Numazu if he’d be living close to his wife’s parents, Numazu chuckled, and said that Kutchan was 400 kilometres from Kushiro; it was a seven-hour drive, the same distance as between Tokyo and Osaka. Taro didn’t feel particularly happy about being treated so condescendingly, given that until very recently Numazu hadn’t known the first thing about Hokkaido. On Numazu’s last day at work, Taro gave him the cuckoo clock that he’d received from Nishi and that had been stuffed in his closet all this time.