The Graveyard Apartment (27 page)

“That's right,” Misao said, exchanging a quick, complicit glance with Teppei. “The temple, Manseiji, has been here practically forever. From what we've heard, the land this building stands on originally belonged to the temple. It isn't the most comfortable feeling to be living somewhere when you know there are people trying to figure out a way to reclaim the land beneath you.”

“Oh, now I get it,” Naomi said, evidently taking this implausible explanation at face value. She was the kind of woman who would be on the edge of her seat with avid interest the minute a conversation began to veer in the direction of matters involving money or property. “In that case, it sounds as though the temple will be willing to buy this entire building,” she went on. “So you won't lose your investment, after all.”

“Yeah, but wait,” Tatsuji said doubtfully. “This building only went up last year, and you said new tenants would be coming in over the summer. Your story about the temple doesn't pass the smell test, somehow.”

“Well, of course there's more to it,” Teppei said, scratching furiously at the nape of his neck. “When you look out the window, the first things you see are a graveyard and a crematorium smokestack, and I think most people would eventually start to question the decision to live in that sort of environment. I think that's the reason behind more than a few of the current vacancies.”

“Ah, the truth comes out at last!” Tatsuji crowed. “Isn't that exactly what I've been saying all along? I can't believe you're so dense that you're only just realizing it now.”

“Teppei hasn't gotten fed up with living here, at all,” Misao fibbed, with a disingenuous smile. “I'm the one who's been wanting to move. We've been going back and forth about this for days, and I finally just wore him down.”

“Have you found a new place yet?” Naomi asked eagerly.

“No, not yet.” Misao narrowed her eyes, suddenly on guard against saying too much. “We've told a rental agency what we're looking for, and I'm sure they'll come up with something before too long.”

“Finding a new place really does seem like the best thing to do,” Tatsuji said, looking from Teppei to Misao. He seemed to be struggling to put his thoughts into words. “I mean, let's face it, there's something kind of creepy about living all by yourselves in a building where everyone else has moved out.”

Teppei sensed that Tatsuji had been on the verge of saying something else, something about the unsettling proximity of the graveyard and the temple and the crematorium, but had decided to keep that thought to himself.

“Once you have a moving date, please be sure to let us know,” Tatsuji went on. “We'll be standing by to do anything we can to help.”

“Oh, thank you,” Misao said, and Teppei nodded gratefully.

A short while later Tatsuji and Naomi stood in the entryway, getting ready to leave. As Naomi was scraping some dirt off one of her stiletto-heeled white leather pumps she said, “Oh, by the way, there's something wrong with the elevator in this building. Earlier, when we first got here, I'm positive we hit the button for the eighth floor, but it went down to the basement instead.”

Teppei gave Misao a meaningful glance, then faked a chuckle and said lightly, “Sometimes it acts up like that. There's some kind of mechanical glitch that never seems to get fixed properly.”

“It was pitch-dark down in the basement,” Tatsuji said, reaching back to massage his own neck with both hands. “Oh, and also, it smelled kind of musty or moldy or something.”

“That's probably because nobody really uses it anymore,” Misao said, giving her brother-in-law a painfully forced smile.

“You could open it up and throw a dance party! Wouldn't that be fun?” Naomi said, pitching her voice even higher than usual and somehow managing to affect a childish lisp at the same time. “Apparently that kind of thing is all the rage these days. You know, like staging rock concerts in lofts or warehouses?”

Misao nodded, then said in an apathetic monotone, “Sure, why not? Maybe we'll do that, one of these days.”

 

15

June 20, 1987

“Welcome! Welcome! Please come in!”

The minute the Kanos pushed open the door of the real estate office, which occupied a prime location not far from Shibuya Station, the five or six workers inside erupted in a chorus of robotic greetings.

They sound like they're tending the counter in a hamburger joint,
Misao thought. Every employee's eye was fixed on the door in a collective gaze that seemed to be calculating how much cash the newcomers might have, and how they could most efficiently be pressured into parting with some of it.

The real estate office, which occupied a compact two-room space in a modern building, was one of the branches of a new firm whose ads had been sprinkled throughout the rental-listing magazines. Several customers—a young man who looked like a university student; a dour-faced young couple; and a middle-aged woman who, judging by her appearance, worked in the “water trade” of bars and nightclubs—were engaged in various transactions with clerks and agents. The older woman was carelessly scribbling her signature on a stack of papers. She wore an aggrieved expression, and a lit cigarette dangled from her thick, unpainted lips, which were almost cadaverously pale.

“Hello! Were you looking for something to rent today?” a clean-cut young man asked in a smooth, polite tone as he approached Misao and Teppei.

Teppei nodded, then explained that they had telephoned earlier.

“We're grateful for your patronage,” the young man said automatically, flashing a patently synthetic smile of the sort most often seen on the faces of hosts and hostesses at late-night clubs. “Please, follow me.” He led Teppei and Misao to an inexpensive-looking sofa, and they sat down.

“What sort of accommodations were you hoping to find?” the agent asked. He seemed to be the type who never deviated from his prepared script, and every question he asked, by rote, would be designed to market his company's wares. Before Misao and Teppei had a chance to reply, the young man went and fetched a large list of properties, dropped it onto the glass-topped table in front of the couch with a thud, then fanned out the pages with a hasty, impatient motion that seemed to be characteristic of everything he did.

Well, here goes nothing,
Misao thought. It wasn't as if they had come to this place hoping to find somewhere flawless to live for the next few decades. The truth was—and she wished this were hyperbole—almost any place would do. If the real estate agent could just show them a rental that
wasn't
a hellish haunted house, they were in no position to be picky about the particulars.

Teppei ran through a quick litany of their requirements, which included a reasonably convenient commute to his downtown office and a kindergarten nearby. If possible, he added, it would be great to have a house with a garden, since they were a family of three with a dog.

“And how much were you looking to spend per month?” the agent asked, looking at Teppei and Misao with coolly appraising eyes.

“Well, needless to say, the cheaper the better,” Teppei said with a laugh. “That being said, we do have a pretty good sense of the current rental market.”

The man began shuffling rapidly through the pile of listings with an air of aggravation. “Darn, I could have sworn there was a house rental that came in yesterday,” he said. “It was quite affordable, too. Let me see now, where could it have gone?”

Hastily, the man put the pages back in order, then turned and called over his shoulder, “Hey, remember the listing that came in yesterday, for the single-family house? Has anyone seen the fact sheet for that property?”

A young woman with hennaed hair, dressed in the company's navy blue uniform, got up from her seat with a show of weariness and brought over a handful of photocopies. “Ah, here it is,” the male agent said, offering one of the crisp, new pages to Teppei with a deferential gesture. Misao scooted closer to her husband on the couch, and they studied the fact sheet together.

Two bedrooms, and a combination living room and eat-in kitchen. A small attached garden. The photograph of the property was slightly out of focus, but the house resembled one of those prefabricated storage sheds you sometimes see plunked down in the middle of a field in rural areas. However, the location and the monthly rental fee caught Misao's attention. The rent was only a hundred thousand yen a month, and the place was about a twenty-minute walk—or five minutes by bus—from the next train station after Takaino. There was a bus stop right next to the house, too.

“I realize it doesn't look like much, but considering the location this little place is quite a bargain,” the young agent said as he once again began leafing through his stack of papers. “The landlord lives nearby, and until recently the house was being rented by his son and daughter-in-law. Having a garden like this would be perfect for a family with a dog, don't you think?”

“It isn't bad at all,” Teppei said. “I mean, it looks a bit small, but…”
Small? More like minuscule. I'm sure I can find a way to make it work for us, though,
Misao thought. The two bedrooms were just over a hundred square feet apiece, and there was a living/eating/cooking area of about the same size. They wouldn't be able to cram all their furniture into the house, but it would be easy enough to stash the overflow in a storage unit somewhere.

“Is it ready to move into right away?” Misao asked.

“Yes,” the agent replied with a nod. “It's completely empty at the moment, so you could move in whenever you like. How would you feel about going over and taking a look at the property right now? I'd love to show it to you.”

“Isn't there anything else?” Teppei inquired.

“What, you don't like this one?” Misao asked, nudging Teppei's knee with her own. “The location is good—it isn't that far from where we're living now—and the size seems okay for our current needs.”

“Sure, sure. I just think we should look at some other places as well.”

“We really don't have time to shop around, though, do we?” Misao protested, furrowing her brow in consternation. “I think we should just take whatever we can get, right now.”
It's not as if we were just moving in together for the first time, and we aren't searching for a lifelong home, either. We just need to find a place of temporary refuge so we can get out of that dreadful place …
That's what Misao felt like saying, but she controlled her emotions and held her tongue.

“To tell you the truth,” the agent said, looking from Teppei to Misao and back again, “when people say things like ‘Any place will do,' that can actually make the process more difficult on our end.”

Discretion was part of the man's job description, and he was clearly disciplining himself not to ask any intrusive questions. He wasn't as successful at controlling his face, though. It was alive with undisguised curiosity, and Misao felt a faint flush spreading over her own cheeks in response.

“How about something like this?” the agent asked, leaning forward. “It's close to the same train station as the house.” He began to read aloud from a fact sheet: “Two rooms and an eat-in kitchen. Eastern exposure. Seven-minute walk to the station. Third floor of an apartment building. A hundred and thirty thousand yen a month. Oh, wait a minute—this one is still occupied, but the tenant should be vacating around the middle of July.”

The agent passed the listing page, which was encased in a sheet of plastic, to Misao and Teppei. After studying the page for a long moment, Teppei said, “This one isn't half bad, either.”

“There's a shopping district nearby, too,” the agent said. Telegraphing his eagerness to move on to the next stage of the process, he fished some car keys out of the inside pocket of his jacket and began gently jingling them in the palm of his hand. It was clear that his only desire was to get the Kanos' signatures on a rental agreement as quickly as possible so he could move on to more profitable pursuits. He looked as though he would have liked to say, “Okay, people, let's get this show on the road. Can't you see that dillydallying over low-end rentals that won't bring in much more than a hundred thousand yen a month is a ridiculous waste of my valuable time?”

When the agent did speak, though, it was in a cordially professional tone: “This apartment is a bit more expensive than the house, but I think it might actually work better for you. The building has freshly painted white walls throughout, and everything is nice and bright inside. It's ideal for newlyweds.”

Misao couldn't help laughing. “We aren't exactly newlyweds,” she said. “As we told your colleague on the phone, we have a five-year-old daughter.”

“Well, close enough,” the agent grinned, flashing his teeth and narrowing his eyes. Unlike most people, when he smiled his face became less attractive, rather than more.

“But does that building allow pets?” Teppei asked.

The agent raised one twitchy eyebrow, then made a show of looking furtively around to make sure no one was eavesdropping. “Well, this is just between us,” he said in a confidential tone, “but I think that would be open to discussion. The resident manager has close ties to this firm, so it should be no problem to keep a pet or two there, discreetly. The building has an absentee owner, and he would never need to know.”

It was plain that there was something shady going on with the agency, the resident manager, and renters who wanted to bring in pets—under-the-table payoffs, perhaps?—but at this point Misao simply thought,
If that's the way it's done, then that's the way we'll do it
.

“That's good to know,” she said out loud. Turning to Teppei, she asked, “So shall we go and take a look at those two places right now?”