Spring Garden, by Shibasaki Tomoka

Translated by Polly Barton

(2014, translated 2017)

Pushkin Press

(Novella)

Spring Garden takes place on a block in a neighborhood where elites are buying up old properties, tearing them down, and putting up impressive private homes in their place. Taro, a former hairdresser who has been working for the last five years in a small public relations office, lives alone in The View Palace Seiki III, a run-down, two-story, L-shaped set of flats. The only thing unique about the place is that instead of numbers, the apartments are named after characters in the Chinese Zodiac. Taro has been living there for just over ten years. After three years of marriage, he and his wife divorced. His father died; in his closet, Taro still has the mortar and pestle he used to grind the few bones that survived his father’s cremation. He talks on occasion with his fellow residents, but he tends to call them by their apartment names, so we meet Mrs. Snake, who owns the building and has just turned it over to her son, who plans to demolish it. Taro also comes to know the woman who lives in the Dragon flat. One afternoon, Taro notices she is craning her neck in an effort to sketch a large blue building at the corner of the block. Later he catches her trying to climb a fence to get a better view; she even invites herself over to his flat so that she can stand on his balcony railing to see more of what is concealed by the fence. Ms. Dragon is Nishi, a freelance illustrator who is working on publishing her own manga. She is also obsessed with the blue house. She brings Taro a coffee table book, Spring Garden, a collection of large-scale photos depicting two beautiful young people of the period, husband and wife, director and actress. Nishi has been obsessed with the book, the couple, and the house since finding it in college. She and Taro spend hours talking about the book, the house, its garden, and the young couple. The couple divorced just three years after the photographs were taken in the 1960s. Taro and Nishi know that the house has had several owners and imagine that many things may have changed, but they both come to realize that they really need to see the house for themselves. To be sure, Taro’s desire is merely to answer some questions he has about the garden of the blue house, while Nishi’s passion may be edging on a full-blown mania. When a new family moves into the blue house, Nishi wastes no time in making a connection with the new owners. This is a delightful story about home, identity, the psychological impact of “urban renewal,” and those periods in our lives where we seem to be between two places and being in none at all.

“She felt a vague yearning for the sorts of houses she saw on TV or in comics, with flights of stairs or hallways in them. Or maybe it wasn’t exactly a yearning—maybe it was more that she was fascinated by them. She wanted to know what it would feel like to live in a house that had stairs in it, and hallways, and wondered too about the kinds of people who would live in those kinds of houses.”