Spring Garden

The woman was looking at something over her firstfloor
balcony, her hands gripping the railing, her neck
craned forward.
From the ground floor, Taro watched the woman. She
did not move. The sunlight that reflected off her blackframed
glasses meant that Taro couldn’t tell which direction
she was looking, but she was faced straight ahead,
towards the concrete wall and, beyond it, the house of
Mrs Saeki, who owned the flats.
It was a block of flats shaped like an L flipped and
rotated so that the short section was hanging down. Taro’s
flat was in the short section. The woman on the balcony
was at the far end of the long section, the flat farthest
away from his. He had happened to catch sight of her
as he went to shut the small window looking out onto
the courtyard—although courtyard was really too grand
a word for that space, three metres wide with weeds
growing in the gaps between the paving stones, and to
top it all, a sign that read no entry. With the arrival of
spring, the concrete wall separating the flats from Mrs
Saeki’s house had suddenly become thick with ivy. The
two trees growing immediately behind the wall, a maple
and a plum, had been left untended, and their branches
now stretched over it. Behind the trees was the two-storey
wooden house belonging to Mrs Saeki which, to go by its
appearance, must have been pretty old. As usual, there
were no signs of anyone at home.
The woman hadn’t moved an inch. From where Taro
stood, he could see only the concrete wall and the roof
of Mrs Saeki’s house, but he assumed that from the first
floor the woman could probably see down to the ground
level of the house and its garden. Still, what could have
been so fascinating about a view like that? The most
striking thing about the house’s red corrugated iron roof
and its dark brown wooden walls was the extent of their
wear and tear. It was now a year since Mrs Saeki, who’d
been living on her own, had moved into a care home for
seniors. She’d looked spritely enough whenever Taro saw
her sweeping the front of her house, but apparently she
was about to turn eighty-six. All this Taro had learnt from
the estate agent.
Beyond the roof of Mrs Saeki’s house, Taro could see
the sky. It had been perfectly clear when he woke up, but
now there were a few clouds—bright white lumps, the sort
that usually appeared in midsummer, although it was
only May. Looking at the tops of the clouds that bulged
right up and towered above the rest, he thought about
how they actually had to be several kilometres above the
earth. The contrast between them and the deep blue of
the sky was so strong it hurt his eyes.
Taro imagined himself standing on a cloud. This was
something he did often. After walking for miles, he would
reach the cloud’s edge. Grasping the edge, he would look
down at the city thousands of metres below. He could see
the narrow little roads intertwined, the roofs of houses
clustered together. Cars the size of insects zipped along
the streets. Small aeroplanes cut across the space between
the city and the cloud. For some reason, in this vision of
Taro’s, the planes alone were cartoon drawings, nothing
else. Behind their glass-fronted noses, the cockpits were
empty. The planes made no sound. In fact, it wasn’t just
the planes that were silent—there was no noise of any
kind anywhere. As Taro stood up slowly, he bumped his
head up against the top of the sky. There was nobody
else around.
Taro had been picturing this exact same sequence of
events ever since he was a child. After it ran its course
this time, he looked towards the balcony at the far end
of the first floor and noticed that, all of a sudden, the
scene contained a white square. Looking more closely,
he saw that the woman had propped a piece of drawing
paper—no, it was a sketchpad—on top of the railing. Was
she drawing the trees, or what? The balcony was southfacing,
and the building did not have much in the way of
eaves. It was two o’clock in the afternoon. Surely too bright
for sketching.
From time to time, the woman would lean her body
forward to get a better view of whatever she was drawing,
and Taro would get a glimpse of her face. She had shortish
hair in no particular style—a fringed bob, at a stretch. Taro
had seen her around after she moved into the block in
February, and he guessed she was in her thirties, about
the same age as he was, maybe younger. She was short,
and seemingly always dressed in a T-shirt and jogging
bottoms. All of a sudden, the woman lifted her neck, and
her head turned in Taro’s direction. Taro realized then that
it wasn’t Mrs Saeki’s house that the woman was looking
at. It was the one next to it, on the side of Taro’s flat: the
sky-blue house.
Right then, the sharp whistle of a bird pierced the air,
and there was a rustle of leaves. In the next instant, Taro’s
and the woman’s eyes met. Before he had time to look
away, she had disappeared, taking her sketchpad with
her. He heard the door to her balcony sliding shut. She
didn’t come out again.