PM 030

‘But once you got the door open, the apartment was filled with light at any hour of the day. The kitchen and dining area immediately inside had a red floor, which made the aura all the brighter. Entering from the dimness of the stairwell, you practically had to squint.

‘Ooh, it’s warm! It’s pretty!’ My daughter, who was about to turn three, gave a shout the first time she was bathed in the room’s light.

‘Isn’t it cosy? The sun’s great, isn’t it?’ She ran around the dining-kitchen as she answered with a touch of pride, ‘Yes! Didn’t you know that, Mommy?’ I felt like giving myself a pat on the head for having managed to protect my daughter from the upheaval around her with the quantity of light.

The one window that caught the morning sun was in a cubbyhole beside the entrance, a kind of storage room less than two tatami mats in area. I decided to make that our bedroom. Its east-facing window overlooked platforms hung with laundry on top of the crowded neighbouring houses, and the roofs of office buildings smaller than Fujino No. 3. Because we were in a shopping district around a station on the main loop line, not one of the houses had a garden; instead, the neighbours lined up on the platforms and rooftops all the potted plants they could lay their hands on and even set out deckchairs, so that the view from above had a very homey feeling, and I often saw elderly people out there in their bathrobe yukata. There were south-facing windows in every one of the straight line of rooms – the two-mat, the dining-kitchen, and the six-mat. These looked over the roof of an old low house and on to a lane of bars and eateries. For a narrow lane it saw a lot of traffic, with horns constantly blaring. To the west, at the far end of the long, thin apartment, a big window gave on to the main road; here the late sun and the street noise poured in without mercy. Directly below, one could see the black heads of pedestrians who streamed along the pavement towards the station in the morning and back again in the evening. On the footpath opposite, in front of a florist’s, people stood still at a bus stop. Every time a bus or lorry passed by the whole fourth floor shook and the crockery rattled on the shelves. The building where I’d set up house with my daughter was on a three-way intersection – four-way counting the lane to the south. Nevertheless, several times a day, a certain conjunction of red lights and traffic flow would produce about ten seconds’ silence. I always noticed it a split second before the signals changed and the waiting cars all revved impatiently at once. To the left of this western window were just visible the trees of a wood that belonged to a large traditional garden, the site of a former daimyo’s manor. That glimpse of greenery was precious to me. It was the centrepiece of the view from the window. ‘That? Why, that’s the Bois de Boulogne,’ I answered whenever a visitor asked. The name of the wood on the outskirts of Paris had stuck in my mind, like Bremen or Flanders, some place named in a fairy tale, and it was kind of fun just to let it trip off my tongue.

Along the northern wall of the dining-kitchen were a cupboard, the toilet, and the stairs to the roof. The toilet had its own window, with a view of the station and the trains. That little window was my daughter’s favourite.’