A Quiet Place Read online

  “No, I haven’t seen that one.” The other man pulled a face, as if to say he had no interest in anything other than the immediate present.

  “Well, in the article it said that there was a strong earthquake on the seventh of March in Tokyo. Do you remember?”

  “The seventh of March?” The man raised his eyes to the ceiling, apparently in an effort to recollect the date.

  “I was on a business trip to Kansai, so I wasn’t here at the time, but according to the article it was a level 3 – strong enough for things to fall off shelves. It said quite a number of people ran out into the streets. Level 3 is pretty strong.”

  “Now you mention it, there was an earthquake,” replied the young man. “I couldn’t tell you the exact date, but there was one around the beginning of spring. This building was fine, but my wife said that a few things fell off the shelves at home. She said that our neighbour’s grandfather clock stopped.”

  “Was your wife frightened?”

  “She said it wasn’t particularly scary. The house creaked and groaned a bit, but it soon stopped. It was cold, so she didn’t bother going outside.”

  In Tokyo, for earthquakes to be a lively topic of conversation they had to be fairly significant. People were never particularly surprised by a couple of lightweight items falling from shelves.

  Asai went back up to his division and entered the reference room. He borrowed a pocket digest of March newspaper articles, and turned to the 8 March morning editions. There was a very small feature on the earthquake towards the end.

  At 3.25 p.m. on 7 March, there was a strong level 3 earthquake in the Tokyo area. Local residents were startled by items falling from shelves. According to the meteorological office, the earthquake was centred off the Boso Peninsula, at a depth of fifty kilometres below sea level.

  Well, not all residents had been startled; that was embellishment on the journalist’s part. Asai flicked through some of the previous pages and came across a weather map.

  From the evening of the 6th and lasting all day of the 7th, a cold front will pass through the Kanto area. Temperatures will be around three degrees cooler than average. There is a possibility of snow in mountainous areas.

  Asai left the reference room.

  “It was cold, so she didn’t bother going outside.” This was what the junior colleague had said. It had been warm in Kansai. By the time Asai had arrived back in Tokyo the next morning, the cold front had already passed on, and he didn’t recall it being particularly chilly.

  Still, he couldn’t connect the 7 March earthquake with Eiko’s heart attack, and the presence of a cold front even less. He decided to banish the magazine article to the back of his mind.

  On 1 September there was no earthquake.

  One Sunday in the middle of September, a member of Eiko’s haiku circle turned up to deliver a copy of the Haiku Association’s newsletter. Mieko Suzuki was the woman who had encouraged Eiko to join – one of her old school friends.

  Written on the cover page of the newsletter was the title “Eiko Asai Memorial Collection”.

  After paying her respects at the family’s Buddhist altar, Ms Suzuki explained about the special collection.

  “Our teacher selected around fifty poems out of the hundred and fifty or so that Eiko had composed,” she explained.

  “Eiko wrote a hundred and fifty haiku?”

  Asai’s lack of interest in haiku meant that he’d never paid any attention to the poems his wife had written. He’d felt the same way about the singing and the painting lessons, and hadn’t realized that his wife had been such a prolific writer.

  “It was a case of quantity over quality, I imagine,” he said.

  “No. Absolutely not. They were true works of art. If only she’d lived longer, she’d have ended up with a body of work that none of us could have held a candle to. Our teacher was truly devastated by her death. It’s not flattery – it’s the truth.”

  “I’m sure Eiko would have been happy to hear that.”

  Asai began to flick through the magazine. The memorial collection appeared right at the beginning, arranged by date of composition, and spanned the last two years.

  Asai stopped at two of the most recent poems: “Solemn Somin Shorai and the spring cow” and “The blossoming light of the golden Yamaga lantern”. He looked puzzled.

  “What do these two titles mean?”

  “Somin Shorai is the name of a god who protects against evil. The haiku was written about a kind of amulet that you can get from a temple. This one is a little hexagonal tower, carved out of wood and bearing Somin Shorai’s name. Apparently it’s hand-painted and very delicate. Depending on the region it comes from, the shapes, sizes and designs of these amulets are different. But they all have a solemn or majestic quality.”

  “Is it a religious artefact?”

  “More like a kind of talisman.”

  “What about the spring cow?”

  “There was a cow in the temple grounds where she got the talisman. The contrast between the solemn talisman and the laid-back cow in the springtime was amusing.”

  “Is there a temple like that in or around Tokyo?”

  Eiko had taken part in tours that visited famous spots, seeking inspiration for her poetry. She’d often wandered around by herself too.

  “Hmm. I’m not sure. I’ve never heard of a place like that, but it might not be real. It might be a landscape that she imagined in her poem.”

  “And what’s the Yamaga lantern in this other poem?”

  “Yamaga is a hot-spring resort in Kumamoto Prefecture. Since olden days they’ve had a custom of making lanterns out of paper and offering them at the local shrine. But these are not just any old lanterns – they’re elaborate palaces and castles, sometimes theatre sets, all made completely out of paper. She wrote ‘golden’, so that particular lantern must have been constructed from gold-leaf paper. I may have heard her mention it was a souvenir from a trip to Yamaga. I believe that’s what she told the teacher when she submitted the poem.”

  “I don’t think Eiko ever visited the Kyushu area.”

  “Then she must have seen it somewhere else. Perhaps she went to a department store when they had a special exhibit of products from Kyushu or something. She saw the gold-coloured lantern with the flower pattern and it gave her the idea of the blossoming light. This particular haiku is rather vivid and elegant. Also perfectly feminine. Eiko always had a very rich imagination. I admit I was a little envious.”

  “Really?” From singing to painting, then on to haiku – she’d had a very creative side, after all.

  “She was such a lovely person, taken from us too soon. I can’t imagine how you must feel.” Ms Suzuki spoke as if she was amazed that Asai could manage alone with no one but the solitary elderly woman from the neighbourhood who came to help out in the daytime.

  At the end of September there was a personnel reshuffle. A new division chief was brought in, and Asai became assistant division chief. A promotion for a non-career-track civil servant like him was awarded on merit. If he could just hang in there, the next step was division chief.

  In the end, Asai never took his summer vacation days.

  The new division chief invited Asai to his home in Harajuku for dinner. At the end of the evening, Asai set off for home in the car his boss had ordered for him, but on the way he suddenly changed his mind; Yoyogi wasn’t far at all from Harajuku. It had been a while since he’d visited the hill where his wife had died, and it wouldn’t take too long by car.

  The driver turned around. They arrived at the top of the hill by a different route from the one Asai was used to. They passed by the Midori and came out by the entrance to the Tachibana. It was after 9 p.m. and the neon sign flickered in the night sky. It had been six months since he’d last seen this view.

  “You want me to take this road downhill?” asked the driver, glancing back at him.

  “Yes, please.”

  Asai, watching the view ahead through the front
windscreen, suddenly lost track of where he was. The road looked different from this angle. There was a tall building ahead to the left, with a neon sign on the roof: HOTEL CHIYO.

  The red of the neon stood out, vivid against the dark background of private homes. It was brand new. Even from this viewpoint, the sign dominated the skyline. There had been nothing like it here before. Asai had lost his bearings.

  As the car continued down the hill, he peered out of the left side window. The building was a brand-new, three-storey hotel, with a very wide facade; Takahashi Cosmetics had disappeared. But the taxi passed by too fast, and in a flash the view was gone.

  “Just a minute!” Asai hurriedly got the driver to stop. “This is fine. I’ll get out here. I just remembered something I need to do.”

  The driver walked around and opened the car door.

  “Should I wait for you?”

  “No, no. It’s fine. I’m going to be a while. Please go ahead and leave.”

  Asai turned and started to walk back up the hill.

  9

  Asai stood opposite the new three-storey hotel, by the house with the bamboo trees and the concrete wall. When he’d first visited Takahashi Cosmetics with his sister-in-law, he’d noted that the house had belonged to someone named Kobayashi. Now, the carved stone nameplate was tinged faintly red by the neon across the road.

  The hotel was built in the latest fashionable style. Part Southern European, part replica of ancient European architecture, it was elegant, but nothing could hide the fact that it was a couples’ hotel.

  And it had just sprung up out of nowhere. It had been only six months since Asai had last been in the area. Somewhere within that short time frame, Takahashi Cosmetics and the next-door house with the bamboo fence and the zelkova tree had been torn down, the ground reworked, and architects and construction companies had moved in to put up this new building. Asai hadn’t witnessed any of that. Right now, all he could do was stand and stare in amazement.

  The name Chiyo obviously came from Chiyoko Takahashi’s given name. The little cosmetics boutique, now vanished off the face of the earth, must once have stood right at the far end of what were now the hotel’s white perimeter walls. Within those walls was a line of European-style cypresses, interspersed with what were probably intended to resemble European chestnut trees but were more likely Japanese horse chestnuts. They were planted close together to give some sort of wooded ambiance. And the tallest tree in the neighbourhood, the big old zelkova, was nowhere to be seen.

  The low stone wall, the bamboo fence lined by azalea bushes: these were all gone and replaced with white concrete. There was a gently sloping terrace where a lawn had been planted, and a broad, sweeping driveway along which cars could enter the grounds. It looked like the entrance to a park.

  What on earth had happened to the original house with its roofed gateway and stone steps? The two-storey house visible behind the trees and shrubs had been a typical old Japanese-style house. That property alone had had over a hundred yards of bamboo fence facing the street. When put together with the plot on which Takahashi Cosmetics had stood, it meant this hotel was built on a very generous portion of land indeed.

  The original house had belonged to someone named Kubo, Asai recalled. When he’d visited with Miyako, he’d been paying attention to the surroundings, and had made a point of reading nameplates. Asai guessed that the Kubo family had bought up the neighbouring property in order to construct a hotel. But if that was the case, why the striking similarity of the hotel’s name to Chiyoko Takahashi’s? Perhaps the characters weren’t supposed to read “Chiyo” at all, but “Sendai”, meaning “one thousand generations”, and it was just a coincidence. He couldn’t imagine how the unmarried female proprietor, who couldn’t even afford to hire staff to run her tiny cosmetics boutique, would have had the means to buy up the neighbouring plot of land and build a fancy hotel.

  Or maybe someone else had purchased both the Kubo house and Takahashi Cosmetics. After all, the couples’ hotel business was extremely profitable. It was a quiet area, and an exclusive neighbourhood to boot. The clientele would enjoy the high-end feel of the place, and after dark there were few passers-by to observe the couples coming and going. The street was poorly lit, too; infinitely preferable to a bustling, brightly lit street in the city centre. It seemed that up at the top of the hill, the Tachibana and Midori were both doing brisk business. Anyone with enough capital would recognize this area as a good investment opportunity.

  According to the president of Yagishita Ham, back when he had visited Asai at the ministry, a lot of these kinds of hotel were popping up in hot-spring resorts. The regular Japanese inns were suffering from a shortage of maids and other attendants, and customer service was falling short. Compared to the traditional Japanese inn experience, a visit to a couples’ hotel required far fewer personnel, and the room turnover rate was much higher. The facilities themselves were generally all that were required to turn a profit. Of course, the top-end villas and inns remained as they were, but the less popular hotels were rushing to convert.

  Yet Asai couldn’t help feel that something was oddly amiss. He was standing at the exact point on the road that his wife had been walking before her death from a sudden heart attack. If the maid at the Midori’s account could be trusted, a brand-new couples’ hotel had now suddenly appeared at the exact same location. It was a strange coincidence: the boutique where Eiko had taken her last breath had now become part of that same hotel.

  After arriving at the ministry the next morning, Asai asked one of his junior colleagues to get him a copy of any documents relating to the ownership of the Hotel Chiyo from the Yoyogi local public office. When he opened the papers, his eyes widened; Chiyoko Takahashi was indeed listed as president. Well, he had half expected it, but it was still a surprise. How was that possible? Takahashi Cosmetics hadn’t exactly been doing a roaring trade. He’d only been inside the boutique once, but after that, every time he’d passed by, the place had been empty. He’d never seen a single customer in there. There was no call for any extra staff – even the proprietor herself had nothing much to do.

  When he’d visited to offer his thanks, Ms Takahashi had admitted she hadn’t much business at the boutique. She dealt only in high-end cosmetic brands for her well-heeled clientele, but had confessed that she hadn’t picked the right moment to invest. In other words, she had let it slip that her business was failing. She was an attractive woman, and Asai had been affected by her enough to feel sorry for the poor state of her business.

  Yet it now turned out that this woman had had the funds to build a hotel. The money clearly hadn’t come from the boutique.

  Asai examined the list of executives on the document. Among them was someone called Konosuke Kubo. He was listed as a board member. Kubo? Oh yes, Kubo. That had been the name on the gate of the house next door.

  You never knew when it came to money. People could appear to be operating in the depths of poverty, but have hidden assets elsewhere. Flourishing businesses might secretly be on the brink of bankruptcy. Sometimes a financial saviour might appear out of nowhere to save the day.

  What about Chiyoko Takahashi? She appeared to be single, but she might well be looked after by a hidden patron, some kind of sugar daddy. Miyako had already pointed out that there was something a little flirtatious about her. And if a woman thought it too, then Asai guessed he was probably on the right track. He recalled that waft of perfume when she’d helped him on with his coat.

  Her inventory was all expensive, brand-name goods, many of them imported. Even though the boutique was tiny, that would all have required a fair amount of capital. Yes, she must have had a patron to help finance the business. Even if she’d been single all her life, at some point she must have caught the eye of a man.

  It was quite a change from cosmetics shop owner to director of a couples’ hotel. But when he thought about it, he could understand why. She’d opened her highend boutique in that neighbourhood with the hope o
f catering to the local residents. Assuming that she had a nose for business and her environment, she would have quickly understood the appeal of those hotels up the hill. Somehow, she’d found a way to persuade her neighbour, Mr Kubo, to part with his house. She must have paid through the nose for it, though.

  The name Konosuke Kubo appeared on the list of company board members. If this was her next-door neighbour, then he must have played a part in the hotel’s construction; for instance, by providing his own land for the location. It was fairly common practice.

  However, if Mr Kubo had been so instrumental in the process, then why didn’t he hold a higher position in the company? He wasn’t listed as managing director. The post of executive director was taken by a Sachiko Takahashi, possibly Chiyoko’s sister. Provision of the land for a project was a substantial investment. Surely he should be the one listed as president, or, at the very least, some kind of director? Why had he been relegated to the lowly role of board member?

  Asai’s train of thought was broken by the arrival of the department director. Three visitors were waiting for him. They presented Asai with their name cards, showing they all belonged to the Yamagata Prefectural Agricultural Cooperative. The director made the introductions.

  “As part of the integrated agricultural initiative, this agricultural cooperative is planning to establish several new food-processing plants. Specifically, ham and sausage factories. Up until now they’ve been in the canned-fruit business, but they’re planning to expand into the meat industry. Accordingly, they have come to ask for advice on both the technology and distribution of these products. Asai, I’d like you to give them a general overview.”

  The leader of the cooperative dropped the name of a politician – “Mr So-and-So has been very encouraging”, or something like that – but it was clear that he was letting the civil servants know that he had the power of an elected official behind him.