The Graveyard Apartment (2 page)

The entry hall opened into a spacious, airy living room with a sunny southern exposure, which abutted a separate kitchen. Ranged along a corridor were a toilet cubicle, a washroom, and a separate bathroom with a tub lined up along one side; next came the two Western-style bedrooms, each with a single window and both facing north. The master bedroom was about half again as large as the nursery, and thanks to numerous built-in cupboards there was no shortage of storage space.

Heading south on foot from Japan Rail's Takaino Station, it took only seven or eight minutes to reach the Central Plaza Mansion, and another railway stop—the privately operated South Takaino Station—was just a few blocks farther away. From Takaino Station the train took just under twenty minutes to reach the center of Tokyo, and Teppei's daily commute to the advertising agency where he worked was a straight shot, with no need to change trains along the way. As for St. Mary's, the kindergarten where they were planning to enroll Tamao, it was a ten-minute walk from the apartment. Looking ahead a couple of years, the district's public elementary school was even closer; it wouldn't take more than eight or nine minutes to walk there, even for a child.

A convenient shopping area and a large, privately owned hospital were situated nearby, just steps away from the north exit of Takaino Station. Best of all, the apartment building didn't have any bothersome rules against keeping pets indoors, so there was no need to worry about Cookie.

It's pretty close to perfect,
Misao thought. What more could anyone want? Two LDK (real-estate shorthand for two bedrooms, living room, dining area, and kitchen); nearly a thousand square feet, including the balcony; a building that was only eight months old; full-time resident managers, right on the premises. For a family in search of a wholesome, peaceful life, it was really quite ideal. Not bothering with a tablecloth, Misao laid out two coffee cups on the bare dining table, along with Tamao's mug, which was adorned with a picture of a cartoon bear. When she happened to glance toward the balcony, a fleeting wave of misgivings about the location washed over her. Shaking it off, she made a conscious effort to focus on the positives. Beyond the sliding-glass doors, the verdant-smelling March air was whipping around, and there were no buildings nearby to obstruct her field of vision. If only the sublime greenery belonged to a park, and not a graveyard …

Misao gave her head a quick, purposeful toss, as if to banish such futile thoughts, then laughed out loud. There she went again, fretting about minor drawbacks and useless hypotheticals. As if she had time to waste on that kind of nonsense!
Cut it out,
she told herself sternly.

The percolating coffee began to fill the room with a delicious aroma. Misao grabbed a frying pan that had just been unpacked a few moments earlier and gave it a quick rinse under the tap. She heated the pan on the stove and added a splash of cooking oil. When the oil began to sizzle, she dropped in three of the eggs she had brought from their previous place—painstakingly packed to make sure they wouldn't get broken in transit.

As she worked, Misao couldn't keep her eyes from wandering to the living-room windows. The nearly perfect apartment was partially surrounded, from the south to the west side, by a vast graveyard that belonged to an ancient Buddhist temple. To the north were some uninhabited houses, long since fallen into ruin and engulfed in weeds, while on the east side there was a patch of vacant land. Beyond that empty field the smokestack of a crematorium was clearly visible, and from time to time the tall, cylindrical brick chimney would belch out a billow of thick black smoke. Depending on which way the wind was blowing, it wasn't inconceivable that some of that mortal smoke might waft in through the apartment's open windows from time to time.

“We really lucked out, finding this place,” Teppei said when they came to look at the Central Plaza Mansion for the first time. “If it weren't for the proximity to a graveyard, there's no way the price would ever be so low nowadays. I mean, think about it. Do you really believe that a large luxury apartment like this in the Tokyo metropolitan area would be priced so low if the surroundings were different?”

“And look, there's a crematorium practically next door!” Misao said with mock enthusiasm. “That'll be handy for the next step, when the time comes. Talk about a stroke of luck!” Upon hearing this, the agent who was showing the property launched into a spiel that was clearly designed to be persuasive, explaining that sophisticated people in Europe simply thought of graveyards as another type of public park, with no negative connotations whatsoever.

“Yes, I see your point,” Misao said, her voice dripping with sarcasm as she gazed at the view from the balcony. “If only the ground beneath the graveyard weren't full of the decomposing bones of human beings, it would be exactly like a botanical garden.”

Misao had absolutely no desire to live in a place like this. However low the price, however marvelous the accommodations, however sunny the exposure, however close to the center of the city the apartment might be, her initial gut feeling was still:
Uh-uh. Never. No way
.
Surely,
she thought,
nobody in their right mind would intentionally invest in a property surrounded on three sides by a cemetery, a temple where funerals were held, and a busy crematorium.

Yet at the same time, from the very first viewing of the apartment—indeed, from the instant she looked out at the graveyard and thought,
No way
—the truth was that Misao was being inescapably pulled in the opposite direction by the stark numerical realities. She had given up her freelance illustration work when Tamao was born, and that had taken a severe toll on the family's finances. As for Teppei's salary, the advertising business was in an industry-wide slump, and there was no chance of his getting a raise any time soon.

But still, at their current rental—a dilapidated, sun-deprived apartment where even in the midsummer heat, the laundry Misao hung on the north-facing balcony took forever to dry—they were essentially pouring money down the drain every month. Fortunately, they had managed to hang on to some of their savings, and Misao got the feeling that if they were going to use that money for a down payment on a suitable apartment, it was probably now or never.

As Teppei pointed out at every opportunity, you could look all over Tokyo and not find a single comparable unit at this price: only thirty-five million yen for a great deal of space. When you factored in the convenience for commuting, shopping, schools, and so on, it wouldn't be unusual to pay sixty million yen or, more likely, seventy million yen for an apartment of similar size, or smaller. So on the one hand there was the disadvantage of having to look out at a graveyard and a crematorium smokestack, while on the other hand you were getting a very attractive living space for something close to half price.
I need to look on the bright side here,
Misao thought.
I mean, if you need to live within commuting distance of central Tokyo, finding an affordable, family-size home that offers perfection inside and out is the proverbial impossible dream, with no chance of ever coming true. This apartment is gorgeous inside, at least, and (if you don't think too much about the view) the location really couldn't be more convenient.

As for resale, Misao knew the unconventional setting might make it more difficult to find a buyer, but she couldn't imagine that they would want to move out and find another place until sometime in the extremely distant future, and there was no point in thinking that far ahead. She had every expectation that the three of them (four, with Cookie) would enjoy living at the Central Plaza Mansion so much that they wouldn't need to think about selling for many years to come. The dank little rental apartment where they had been living until yesterday was tainted by some exceptionally unpleasant memories, and it was a wonderfully liberating feeling to be making a new beginning here.

“Mama?” Tamao said quizzically, poking her head through the kitchen door. Misao had been absently spreading a piece of toast with butter, and she jolted back to reality with such a start that she dropped the pat on the floor.

“I can make Cookie's breakfast,” Tamao announced.

“Really? You're sure?”

“Yep! I'm sure!”

“Well, that would be a big help. You don't need to add any water, though.”

The moment Tamao took the box of dog food out of the cupboard and rattled it, Cookie came galloping up with her tail wagging at maximum velocity. She wasn't a purebred dog by any means, but her round black eyes and tawny coat were a clear legacy of the Shiba Inu branch of her family tree.

Oh, that's right,
Misao thought, staying positive.
This area is an ideal place to walk a dog, too
.
And even if Cookie barks a bit from time to time, we won't need to worry because there's nobody living next door.

They had bought unit 801; the other apartment on the eighth floor, 802, was still empty. Of course, there was a good chance that someone would move in eventually, but as long as their future neighbor wasn't a curmudgeon with an extreme dislike of dogs, it should still be all right, assuming Cookie didn't suddenly start howling loudly at all hours.

The big front window stood open, and the breeze wafting into the apartment caused the newly purchased white lace curtains to undulate softly. The air smelled like springtime. Although it was only nine a.m., the warm rays of the morning sun had already flooded the entire left side of the living room with light.

“After we finish breakfast, we'll have a funeral for Pyoko,” Misao told Tamao. “Then you can tidy up your room and put all your clothes and books and toys where they belong. All right?”

“How are we going to make a funeral for Pyoko?”

“Well, first we'll dig a grave outside and put a cross next to it, with ‘Here Lies Pyoko' written on it. Then we'll all say a prayer: ‘Please let Pyoko be happy in heaven,' or something like that.”

“That's all?”

“Is there something else you'd like to do?”

“No, it's just—don't we need to make one of those long, skinny sticks, like the one I've seen you and Papa praying over sometimes?”

Oh dear. Not this
, Misao thought, averting her eyes. “You're talking about a memorial tablet,” she said. “No, Pyoko doesn't need to have one of those.”

“Why not?”

“Because those are only for people. Pyoko was a bird, so we don't need to make one for him.”

“Huh,” Tamao said doubtfully, watching as Cookie plunged her snout into the dog food dish and began wolfing down the dry kibble.

Misao hadn't yet talked to Teppei about where to set up their small, portable Buddhist family altar. Last night she had stuck it in the closet of the master bedroom, as a temporary measure, but they couldn't very well leave it there forever. After all, the altar needed to be somewhere out in the open, where the spirit of a certain deceased person could bask in the refreshing breeze that wafted through the new apartment.

Teppei was continually teasing Misao about her old-fashioned insistence on observing traditional rituals regarding people who were no longer among the living. In this case, the person in question was Teppei's first wife, but that didn't stop him from giving Misao a hard time. It wasn't because he was heartless or unfeeling; he just happened to be the kind of tough-minded, strong-willed positive thinker who always found a rational explanation for everything, and refused to be haunted by painful memories or might-have-beens.

The event that changed everything had taken place seven years ago, during the summer when Misao and Teppei were twenty-five and twenty-eight, respectively. They had taken a secret weekend trip to a resort on the Izu Peninsula, where they had spent two blissful days (and nights) swimming in the hotel pool, enjoying poolside barbecues, and later, in bed, making love again and again. Teppei returned to his house in Tokyo late Sunday evening and found his wife, Reiko, standing silently in the unlit entry hall, waiting to welcome him home—or so he thought.

“What's going on?” he asked casually as he slipped out of his shoes. “Why are you just waiting here in the dark?” When Reiko didn't reply, Teppei groped around for the wall switch and turned on the overhead light.

His wife, he saw then, wasn't standing on the landing, at all. She had hung herself from a crossbeam by a silk kimono cord, and the architectural element holding her upright was the ceiling, not the floor.

Reiko had left behind a suicide note, addressed to Teppei. In it, she wrote that she harbored no ill feelings whatsoever toward him or the woman he was having an affair with. She was just tired. Life no longer offered her anything to enjoy, and all she wanted was to go to sleep, forever.
Good-bye
, she concluded.
Please be happy.

Even now, Misao still knew every line of that brief letter by heart, and she could have recited it word for word.
Life no longer offers me anything to enjoy …

Before Reiko's suicide, Misao was just a carefree young woman who had never given any serious thought to the nuances—or the ultimate stakes—of romantic relationships. She hadn't had the slightest intention of engaging Reiko in a territorial tug-of-war, or of trying to coerce Teppei into getting a divorce. She would have been lying if she'd said she wasn't bothered by the fact that Teppei was married, but their mutual attraction (stoked by workplace propinquity) had simply been impossible to resist.

Misao and Teppei had met at the advertising agency where they were both employed, and after Reiko died their coworkers began to say nasty things about the two of them, quite openly. Misao decided that the only remedy was for her to quit her job, so she resigned and became a freelance illustrator.