The weather was beginning to get hot and sticky, and Taro took to leaving the glass door to his balcony open, and just pulling the screen door shut. The mesh had started to fray, however, and the screen door itself would often come off the track. One day, while Taro was trying to fix a hole in the mesh, the screen door came off its track again. He was considering just leaving it to spare himself the annoyance when he noticed a round stone wedged in the right corner of the track. He crouched down to pick it up and found that, instead, it was a tiny, round vessel about one or two centimetres in size, about the same as the tip of his finger.
Taro got a torch, and tried shining it on the thing. It seemed to be some kind of miniature urn or vase, the upper section tapered, like the neck of a saké flask. It was grey in colour, and as evenly and exquisitely shaped as if it had been formed on a potter’s wheel. It was as hard as cement. Taro had never seen anything like it before, and assumed that it was the egg sac of an insect, or else some kind of nest.
Feeling a little creeped out, Taro closed the glass door gently, then realized that where the tiny vase had been wedged, in one of the grooves in the track, was exactly the place where it would not be crushed by the door.
Taro regretted that there was no illustrated guide to insects among the books that Mrs Snake had given him.
He tried an internet search on his phone, entering terms like “vase”, “insect” and “nest”, and found several images that looked quite like the thing that he’d discovered. It seemed to be the nest of a “potter wasp”. The wasp would lay an egg inside the vase, deposit the larvae of other insects as food for the wasp larva, then seal the vase. The wasp supposedly made a separate vase for each of its larva. Taro checked his balcony and window frames for other tiny vases that might be lying around, but he couldn’t find any.
The article went on to explain that when the potter wasp larva emerged from its egg and developed into an adult, it would break open the lid of the vase and emerge. The vase that Taro had found was without a lid, which meant the wasp that had been born inside must have already flown its nest. Taro examined the tiny vase again. The inside was pitch black, and he couldn’t see a thing. That tiny bit of darkness seemed bottomless to him.
Taro then tried doing a search for “cat’s paw gall” and “Japanese snowbell”. The site he found had plenty of details and many close-up photos of the galls, tightly packed with squirming insects. Overcome by disgust, Taro quickly closed the page.
With the tasks that he had to take over because of Numazu’s departure, as well as the training of the new staff member assuming Numazu’s role, Taro had a very busy summer. It was an especially hot summer, too, and every time he left the office to visit a client, the rays of the sun and the body heat of everyone crammed on the trains sapped his strength. On his way to work, he had to transfer at Shinjuku. Just when he’d been thinking that the engineering works that had been going on there forever had finally been completed, he noticed that new engineering works had now begun on a different set of tracks. When Taro had visited Tokyo for the first time thirteen years before, to attend a training course for the first hair salon he’d worked at, there had been engineering works ongoing then, and they had been going on ever since, in some part of the station or other. In the last few years, it had been large-scale engineering works that had affected the entire station.
Now the realization struck Taro: the works would never come to an end. They would finish only when the station had ceased to be used. Every day, Taro got home late at night and went straight to bed, turning the air conditioning on so he’d be able to sleep in that stuffy apartment, not bothering to open the windows. The air-conditioning unit had to be over ten years old. It certainly produced plenty of noise, but it didn’t do much in the way of making the room comfortable. It was either so powerful that he would feel chilled, or it did nothing to cool the room at all. It was like it had sensed the fate awaiting it in a year or two, and had stopped caring about its job performance. The rumbling from the fridge, too, had become more frequent, and it sometimes woke Taro. It sounded like a motorbike engine revving up.
Mrs Snake would come over from time to time, bringing souvenirs purchased from places she’d been, or sharing presents that people had given her. When Taro received some cookies that a colleague had brought back from a holiday overseas, he took them over to Mrs Snake’s flat, hoping to repay her kindnesses. It was the first time that he’d ever been up to the first floor.
From the doorway to Mrs Snake’s flat, where he stood, he could see that she had very little furniture, and hardly any other stuff either. The only furniture he could see was a cabinet for dishes in the kitchen and a low table in the tatami room. Not even a TV. That kind of minimalist interior, which made her place look a lot more spacious than his flat did, was different from what he’d been expecting, based on Mrs Snake’s clothes and her way of speaking. The fact that it was tidy came as no surprise, and neither did the purple flowers arranged meticulously in the vase on top of the shoe cabinet, nor the cushions laid out, nor the traditional Japanese fabric in navy and maroon, which seemed similar to the kind of clothes she wore. It was that the room went beyond mere tidiness to something spooky. Taro felt that things he would have expected to be there, things that should have been there, were missing. It lacked the feel of being lived in, a bit like a room at a ryokan, or a cheap motel.
The thought crossed his mind that it was already like an uninhabited place. Taro then hurriedly attempted to get rid of that thought. Mrs Snake invited him in for a cup of tea, but he declined. He returned to his own flat, where he began to regret his behaviour slightly.
He ran into Nishi on his way home from work, in the convenience store outside the station. As they walked back to their block of flats together, he mentioned how tidy Mrs Snake’s flat was, and Nishi told him that she wanted to take a leaf out of Mrs Snake’s book, that her own flat was so crammed full of stuff that there was barely space for her, even though it wasn’t long before she’d have to move out.
Taro asked if Mrs Snake had always lived alone, and Nishi told him that she’d been married once, but that her ex-husband had come from a very strict, traditional family. Mrs Snake had moved in with the family, as was convention, but her mother-in-law had been very hard on her, and she had eventually been driven out, forced to leave her two-year-old son behind.
As they reached the front of the block of flats, Nishi mentioned that the bulb in her ceiling light needed changing, but that she was too short to manage it. She asked Taro if he’d mind helping her.
Just as Nishi had warned, the hall, the kitchen and the main tatami room were a cluttered mess. Every available bit of wall space was filled with shelves heaving with boxes and books, the gaps between crammed with trinkets and paper.
“It’s times like these when I think about how handy it would be to have a man around. Like, when I’m trying to open a jar, or carrying heavy luggage. I get over it soon enough, mind you.”
“You could have left that last bit out.”
“You’re right. That’ll teach me for trying to be funny.”
“Yeah, I gave that up a long time ago.”
On a shelf, painted a similar shade of blue as the house, was a single-lens reflex camera. Taro was by no means an expert, but it looked vintage. The top of the camera was raised into a silver triangle, a bit like a pointed roof, and it struck Taro that the shape resembled the roof of the sky-blue house. The large lens had no cap, and the inside of its cylinder was dark. He thought of the darkness inside the potter wasp’s nest. Both the camera itself and all the things around it were conspicuously dusty, and Taro imagined that Nishi probably hadn’t touched the camera since putting it on the shelf.