“I’m really not up to anything underhanded, I promise. It’s just such a wonderful building. I’m an artist, I mean, that’s my job, and there’s something I want to check out. For my drawings.”
“For your drawings.”
“I promise I won’t cause you any trouble.”
“Okay,” Taro said. He found these kinds of conversations a real pain. He could see that giving in to the woman now would most likely lead to greater trouble in the future, but his tendency was to do anything he could to avert the bother that lay immediately in front of him. As it happened, that personality trait was one of the reasons his ex-wife had given for wanting a divorce.
The Dragon Woman thanked him, then brought over the two blocks she’d been using before, placed them at the foot of his balcony, and began to climb up. Making it clear he wanted nothing to do with the whole thing, Taro went back inside his flat and stood a step away from the balcony. He’d thought the Dragon Woman was about the same age as he was, a little over thirty, but close up in broad daylight, her face looked tired and somehow lacking youth, and he suddenly wondered if she was a fair bit older. It was the sort of face that made it impossible to judge her age with any accuracy, though. He could have heard she was forty and accepted it as the truth as readily as he would if he heard she was still in high school. On that unmade-up face, her black-framed glasses stood out even more.
“That window is where the landing is, on the stairs.”
The Dragon Woman was sitting on the railing of his balcony and was pointing again in the direction of the sky-blue house. There was a small stained-glass window, with a design of two red dragonflies, exactly halfway between the ground and first floors. Taro had the feeling he’d seen that window lit up from the inside quite recently, but he didn’t have a clear memory of when it had been. The Dragon Woman got herself to the corner of the railing, placed her hands against the wall, then carefully stood up. From that position, she pointed to somewhere beyond where the sky-blue house met the concrete vault house. Taro stepped out once more onto the balcony and peered in that direction, but it was too dim to see anything clearly.
“That window down there must be the bathroom window. But you can’t see as well from here as I thought. Sorry for the imposition,” the Dragon Woman said, then clambered down from the railing and set her feet on Taro’s balcony.
“Well, hello!” Taro heard a voice say from above. He looked up to see Mrs Snake leaning over the top of her balcony towards them. She smiled meaningfully and bowed, then stayed put, looking down at them. When Taro bowed back in her direction, she disappeared from the balcony edge.
The Dragon Woman’s face registered no particular emotion. She brushed away the dust on her hands and knees, then, taking off her trainers and holding them in one hand, entered Taro’s flat without the least hesitation. “Is it okay to go out through the front door?” she asked.
Then she added, “The high school I went to was next to a police station, and if one of the policemen ever saw a girl and a boy alone together in one of the classrooms, they’d call up the staff of the school right away. Can you believe that? I think they must have had overactive imaginations.”
Taro had no idea why she would come out with that kind of thing in this situation, but he didn’t want there to be silence between them, so he said, “How old do you think Mrs Snake is?”
“Mrs Snake?”
“The woman in the Snake Flat.”
“Ah, I get it!”
The Dragon Woman told Taro both Mrs Snake’s age and her real name, and also that Mrs Snake was a Scorpio. Taro found the name unexpected, somehow, and felt that Mrs Snake suited her much better. Hearing her age, Taro determined right away that she had been born in the same year as his father. It was the year that the Second World War had ended, so come the summer, the number of years that had elapsed since then would pop up here and there in the media. Since Taro’s father had died of a subarachnoid haemorrhage, those figures that appeared in the media each year had been the age he would have been if he’d still been alive. Taro’s mother was exactly ten years younger than that, but she’d soon overtake the age his father had reached. His father’s birthday was February, which meant, if she were a Scorpio, Mrs Snake had been born nine months after him. But his father’s age would now never go beyond fifty-nine. During his father’s life, Taro had just assumed that his father would go on to become elderly, but now he couldn’t imagine his father as a typical old man at all. A vision of the mortar and pestle in his kitchen cabinet came to mind. Now, that was the closest thing to his father that he had, at least here in Tokyo, and yet his father hadn’t even known of its existence.
“In that case, my flat should have been on the ground floor. My surname’s Nishi, and my kanji looks a lot like the kanji for the Rooster. It would have been easy to remember me that way, right?”
“Hmm.”
“This flat has a different layout from the others. I was thinking this is how it might be. Is the bathroom on this side?”
Carrying her trainers, Nishi walked slowly towards the front door, looking around her as she went. Taro ended up following behind.
“I think the floor area itself is the same.”
Taro’s Pig Flat in the protruding section of the building was longer and narrower than the flats in the block’s main section, but all of the flats were the same in that they had kitchens of ten square metres, tatami rooms of just over thirteen square metres, and a separate bath and toilet.
“This layout feels more spacious somehow, though. A kitchen facing this way seems like it’d be easier to use, too.”
“Really?”
“I think so.”
Apparently satisfied with her investigation of the flat, Nishi stood in the entranceway and slipped on her shoes. Then she said, “Can I buy you dinner as a thank you for this?”
Nishi and Taro walked to a restaurant on the other side of the level crossing, one station away from the station where Taro caught his train every day. It was a small station and express trains didn’t stop there, only local trains, so Taro had never had reason to set foot there before.
Nishi told him that the restaurant’s deep-fried foods were a speciality. It was hard to say which was better, she said—the octopus or the chicken. They ordered a plate of each, and two beers.
Sitting opposite Nishi, Taro realized that although the paleness of the skin on her face suggested she rarely went outside, she was surprisingly muscular. The arms and neck emerging from her T-shirt were well toned, and looked like they’d be firm to the touch.
When he asked if she’d used to play some kind of sport when she was younger, she answered, unexpectedly, yes, she’d played baseball. It was only when she was in primary school, though, she said, and she’d never actually taken part in games, just practised. Nishi polished off her first beer before the food had arrived, and ordered another straight away.
Then she brought out a bag made of fabric with a beetle pattern, and removed a book from it.
“This book is that house,” she said.
It was a large, thin book with the title Spring Garden. Each page contained four to six photographs, much like a family album. They were mostly black-and-white.
“See? It is, right?”
Nishi opened the book to a page with a photo of the house’s exterior. It was one of just a handful of colour shots. With its sky-blue wooden walls, terracotta roof tiles, and the pointed decoration at the very top, there was no doubting it was that house. The photograph had been taken from the garden, and it was the first time that Taro saw the ground floor of the house on that side. There was a large sunroom, with sliding glass doors to the outside.