Mrs Snake looked between Taro and the Dragon Woman in turn. “You know, there’s only four of us left in this block! Let’s not be strangers now!”
It was back in March that Taro had heard via the estate agent that Mrs Saeki had passed control of View Palace Saeki III, which had been there for thirty-one years, to her son, who had decided to demolish the building, so all residents with renewable leases were being asked to leave when their leases expired. With its cream-coloured exterior, the building didn’t look as old or dishevelled as its years might have suggested, and the plumbing and utilities all worked fine, so it seemed to Taro like a waste. He even felt a bit sorry for the building, being knocked down like that when it was younger than he himself was.
Taro had moved in to the block three years ago, and had renewed his two-year lease last July, which meant he was able to stay on in his flat until July of next year.
Not all the tenants had limited-period renewable contracts like he did. Those with regular, indefinite contracts were receiving a fair sum of money as compensation for their forced eviction, and perhaps because of that, those in the Horse, Sheep and Rooster Flats had all moved out by the first week of May. The person in the Dog Flat, a grumpy-looking man with steel-rimmed glasses, had been living in the building for over ten years. When Taro had bumped into him in the corridor not long ago, the man had told him he was thinking about digging in his heels to get them to raise the compensation, but now he was gone, and without even saying goodbye. The remaining flat, the Monkey Flat, was occupied by a young couple. Neither of them ever acknowledged Taro when they saw him, and the only thing he heard of them through the walls were their arguments.
“Oh, well, in that case, I have another packet of dried fish if you’d like.”
Taro went to fetch the salmon jerky from the kitchen, but when he came back with the packet in his hand, he realized he didn’t know whether he should give it to Mrs Snake or the Dragon Woman.
“Oh, I got some last week, so you take this one,” Mrs Snake said to the Dragon Woman.
“Oh, thank you so much! I just love salmon jerky. It goes so well with saké, don’t you think?”
The Dragon Woman’s oddly animated voice went sinking into the concrete underfoot, damp with moisture from the sticky air.
“If there’s anything at all I can be of help to you with, you must let me know, okay? I really mean it. Don’t be shy. Promise?”
Mrs Snake went on repeating things like this, the Dragon Woman carried on smiling wordlessly, and then the two of them disappeared upstairs.
When Taro opened up the box from Mrs Snake, he found a selection of individually wrapped filter coffee sachets. They would be perfect for the office, Taro thought, and he decided to take them in the following week.
It was fifteen minutes’ walk from Taro’s flat to the closest train station. He regretted not choosing somewhere a bit closer, but his divorce had meant he’d had to leave his previous place in a hurry, and his search had been rushed as a result. To add to that, it had been midsummer and so hot he’d been loath to spend too much time looking. The first flat he went to see roughly met his requirements, and the rent was cheap, so he decided why not, and didn’t look further. The lease was for only two years, after all, so by his thinking, once things settled down a bit in his life, he could easily move on again. But it was Taro’s nature to avoid doing anything that was a bother, and he liked the Pig Flat in View Palace Saeki III well enough since it meant saving on money and effort, so when his lease expired he renewed it. Avoiding bother was Taro’s governing principle. It wasn’t that he was a stick-in-the-mud. It was just that, rather than putting himself out in order to get the more pleasing or interesting things he stood to gain, he always opted for the least bothersome option. Bother still seemed to find its way into his life, however.
The streets of Setagaya Ward, where he lived, were not easy to navigate. Taro had heard the story that GPS was originally invented to help people find their way around Setagaya, though he doubted it. But certainly, there was almost nowhere in the ward that formed a neat grid like the town where Taro had lived until the age of twenty-five, and there were a lot of one-way streets and dead ends. Nor was there a straight route from his flat to the station. Whichever way he took meant some circuitousness. He had three different routes he used alternately, which he’d figured out by studying the map app on his phone, and which all seemed to take about the same amount of time. When going to work, he selected one of the three routes, depending on which caught his fancy on that day.
On the third of those routes, Taro would pass a very narrow alley that ran between two houses, narrow enough that a person could touch both houses if they stretched out their arms. He’d seen someone with a Shiba go through the alley once, and decided to take the path himself. The alley was paved with concrete slabs that sloped in a V in the middle, which he knew had to be covering a culvert. He’d become interested in this kind of stuff after seeing a TV programme that traced the course of an old river that had been filled in. In this very area, in fact, there were a number of tree-lined walkways that he knew had been created by rivers having been filled in. There were other small paths that, from the snaking course you could trace on a map, were very easy to imagine as having once been streams. When Taro emerged from that narrow alley, though, the V-shaped concrete slabs also came to an end. Consulting the map, he could find no indication that there ever had been a river in that area, and concluded that the water he heard running beneath must have been sewage. But then, a few days later, a little way from the alley, he happened upon a road going off at an odd angle from an intersection. He returned on his day off to check it out and found another alley extending diagonally from that point. It curved gently, and was dotted along both sides with old single-storey houses. The somewhat dingy alley led to a house with bags of rubbish and piles of futon in front of it. Directly across was a primary school. Crouching down, Taro could hear the sound of running water from the gutter at the side of the alley. These gutters, too, he’d become aware of from late-night TV.
Once, when he’d left the TV on past midnight, he happened to catch a programme about a person whose job was checking for leaks in underground water pipes. Using a device something like a stethoscope that he applied to the asphalt, the man listened to the sounds that could give him clues where there might be leaks. He would make his way around the residential streets in the dead of night. The footage of him filmed from behind, as he quietly went about his work while everyone was asleep, had something immensely dignified about it.
Sometimes Taro wished that he had that kind of job. He wanted to do the sort of work that drew upon a rare skill developed through experience, and that required the passion of a real artisan—a profession that wasn’t much known about, but that was indispensable in sustaining people’s daily lives.
Until his divorce, Taro had been a hairdresser, managing one of the branches of a hair salon owned by his wife’s father. His father-in-law was a good-natured man and, saying that Taro’s relationship with his daughter didn’t affect his evaluation of Taro’s work skills, had offered Taro a job in a branch in the neighbouring prefecture. But Taro’s back pain had been getting worse, and he had grown sick of the whole lifestyle that was a part of hair salons anyway, so he was keen to be done with it. When he went home to attend the Buddhist ceremony marking the sixth anniversary of his father’s death, he learnt from an old high school classmate that the Tokyo company his younger brother had started was hiring, and decided to apply.