Spring Garden

Начало книги

THE WOMAN was looking at something over her first-floor 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 black-framed 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.

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