Jason’s house was the biggest, the oldest and the most decrepit I had seen in Tokyo so far. Forming the corner of two small streets, all its ground-floor windows were boarded up, nailed over, padlocked, and tropical creepers had broken through the pavement, coiling up round it like Sleeping Beauty thorns. Tacked to the side of the house, protected from the elements by a corrugated-plastic roof, a staircase led to the first floor, guarded by a little wooden door and a grimy old doorbell.
I remember exactly what Jason was wearing when he opened the door. He had on an olive green shirt, shorts and a pair of battered old desert boots, unlaced, his feet crammed into them so that the backs were squashed down. On his wrist was a woven bracelet and he was holding a silver can of beer, Asahi written on the side, condensation running down it. I had a brief chance to study him in the sunlight – he had a clean, unlined skin that looked as if he spent a lot of time outdoors. The words ‘He is beautiful’ flashed briefly in my mind.
‘Hey,’ he said, surprised to see me. ‘Hi, weirdo. You changed your mind? About the room?’
I looked up at the house. ‘Who else lives here?’
He shrugged. ‘Me. Two of the girls from the nightclub. Some ghosts. Don’t know how many of them, to be honest.’
‘Ghosts?’
‘That’s what everyone says.’
I was silent for a while, looking up at the tiled roofs, the upturned eaves crested with chipped dragons and dolphins. The house did seem bigger and darker than its neighbours. ‘Okay,’ I said eventually, picking up my bag. ‘I don’t mind about the ghosts. I want to live here.’
He didn’t offer to carry my bag and, anyway, I wouldn’t have known what to say if he had. I followed him up the staircase, our footsteps echoing on the cast iron.
‘The bottom floor’s closed off,’ he said, waving the beer can in the direction of the boarded windows. ‘No way into it. We live upstairs and you’ve got to come and go this way.’
At the top of the stairs we stopped. We stood at the corner of the house in a gloomy, shuttered gallery, which led away at right angles to our right and left. I could see about fifteen feet in both directions, then the long dusty corridors seemed to dwindle, as if they ended in the distance, in cool, shaded parts of Tokyo that I could only guess at. It was gone midday, and the house was silent.
‘Most of it’s closed off. The land deals in Tokyo ’ve gone toes up since the bubble burst, but the landlord’s still trying to push through a deal with a developer. If it works they’re going to knock the whole thing down and build another high-rise, so the rent’s like nearly nada.’ Jason kicked off his boots. ‘Course, you’ve got to put up with the place falling down around your ears.’ He gestured vaguely down the right-hand corridor. ‘The girls sleep down there – down that wing. They spend the whole day in bed. They’re Russian. You’ll notice that here – now that someone left the kennel door open the Russians’re running all over the planet. Message hasn’t got to them that Japan ’s face down in a recession. Here-’ He pushed a pair of battered hessian slippers at me and watched as I changed into them, taking off my hard little lace-up shoes and sliding the slippers over my stockinged feet. ‘Don’t they hurt?’ He pointed to the shoes. ‘They look painful.’
‘Yes. I’ve got blisters.’
‘Haven’t you got anything else to wear?’
‘No.’
‘What’s in your bag? It looks heavy.’
‘Books,’ I said.
‘Books?’
‘That’s right.’
‘What sort of books?’
‘Books with pictures.’
Jason laughed. He lit a cigarette and watched in amusement as I got the slippers on. I pulled my cardigan straight, pressed my hands down on my hair and stood up in front of him, and that made him laugh again. ‘So,’ he said, ‘what’s your name?’
‘Grey.’
‘Grey? What sort of a name is that?’
I hesitated. It was so strange to be in a place where no one knew me. I took a breath and tried to sound casual. ‘It’s my surname. Everyone always calls me by my surname.’
Jason took me down the right-hand corridor, stopping to point things out as we went. The house was curiously soft and organic-feeling – the floors were covered in straw tatami matting and each movement released the secret smell of insect cocoons. Rooms led off from one side of the corridor; on the other, battered wooden screens concealed the facing walls, from waist height up.
‘The bathroom’s traditional so you squat. Think you can do that?’ He looked me up and down. ‘Squat? Wash out of a bucket? You know that’s the point of living in Japan – to do things differently.’ Before I could answer he turned away, to the other side of the corridor, and slid back a shutter. Sunlight flooded in through grimy glass. ‘The air-conditioner’s fucked so in the summer you gotta keep these closed all day.’
We stood at the window and looked down at an enclosed garden. It was deep and lush like a jungle, overgrown to above the height of the ground-floor windows, packed with dark persimmon and heavy leaves that cracked the walls and stole the sunlight. I put my hands on the pane, my nose up to the glass, and stared out. At the foot of the garden was the rear of a white skyscraper.
‘The Salt Building,’ Jason said. ‘Don’t know why it’s called that, just got handed on, I s’pose, like the rooms, from one hostess to another.’
I was about to turn away when I noticed, almost a hundred feet away across the tops of the trees, a red-tiled roof basking in the heat.
‘What’s that?’
‘That?’ He pressed his nose against the window. ‘That’s the third wing. Closed off too.’
‘Part of this house?’
‘I know. We inhabit a zip code. The Forbidden Palace. There are maybe twenty rooms in this place that I know exist for sure, another twenty you only get to hear about in rumours.’
Now I could see how much ground the house took up. It covered most of a city block and was arranged round the garden, on three sides of a square. From above, it would look like a bridge with the Salt Building blocking the fourth side. The house was decaying; rot had started in the far wing and Jason said he didn’t like to think what was in the closed-off rooms downstairs. ‘That’s where the ghosts hang out,’ he said, rolling his eyes. ‘According to the baba yaga twins.’
We passed countless sliding shoji doors, some locked, some open. I got glimpses of belongings in the gloom, piled-up furniture, dusty and forgotten – a teak butsudan, an ancestor’s shrine, empty except for a stack of dusty glass jars. My slippers slapped in the silence. Out of the gloom ahead of us appeared the door to the closed wing, padlocked and braced with an iron bar. Jason stopped at the barricade. ‘This is no go.’ He put his nose to the door and sniffed. ‘And, Jesus, in the hot weather the stink.’ He wiped his face and turned back, tapping the last door on the corridor. ‘Don’t worry, you’re cool here – this would be yours.’
He slid back the door. Sunshine poured through grimy sheets tacked over two windows at right angles. The walls had once been covered in pale brown silk and the remains of it hung down, disintegrating in long, vertical slashes, as if a huge clawed animal had been kept locked in here. The tatami mats were fraying, there were dead flies on the windowsill and spiders’ webs in the light fitting.