The Graveyard Apartment Read online

  “Hmm, I wonder,” Misao said. “Maybe try flicking through the other channels again?”

  On Channel One, there was a cooking show. Channel Three was showing a health program that focused on the role of diet in diabetes, while Channel Six had a rerun of a popular singing show. Channel Eight was running an old period drama; Channel Ten featured an art education program; and finally, way over on Channel Twelve, a noisy anime series was in progress. There were no shadows apart from the one on the original station: an image with a featureless face like a silhouette cut out of black paper and a body that suggested a stage actor dressed in black tights and gesturing in an overstated way.

  “It doesn’t seem to be mechanical,” Misao said. “I mean, it’s only on this one station.” Teppei turned off the television. When the screen went dark, the strange shadow vanished, as well.

  “Nah, it must have just been some kind of interference,” he said. He switched the TV set on again. The shadow was still there in a corner of the screen, and now it began executing a curious series of calisthenic movements: placing both hands on its knees, then raising its arms to the heavens, and finally bringing its hands down to cradle its head.

  Tamao had been watching the TV screen intently the entire time, and now she spoke in a voice that barely rose above a whisper. “It’s just like Pyoko said,” she breathed.

  “Huh?” Misao was disconcerted. “What about Pyoko?”

  Tamao cast a quick glance at her mother and then, as if confessing a guilty secret, she said nervously, “It’s just like what Pyoko was saying. He told me the other place is full of people like that. They don’t have any faces, and their bodies are completely dark and shadowy…”

  Misao could feel the color draining from her face. She was seized by an urge to reprimand her daughter for spouting such drivel, and she had to bite her lip to keep the angry words from tumbling out. For an instant, she seemed to see the single white feather she’d found lying next to the telephone floating languidly past her eyes.

  An awkward silence filled the air. Teppei switched the TV off again and said, “Okay, no more talk about that. Everyone here is acting a little bit crazy. It’s just some interference: nothing more, nothing less. All right? Can we agree on that? Some wires just got crossed somewhere. Lately lots of tall apartment blocks have been going up not too far from here, so it isn’t surprising that the broadcast signals would run into some interference from time to time. That’s all it was. The picture will be back to normal before you know it.”

  “But…” Misao began, pushing back a lock of hair that had fallen into her eyes. “You have to admit it was kind of strange.”

  “Hey, anything can happen when you live in an overcrowded city like Tokyo,” Teppei said. “The other day one of the guys at work was saying that late one night when he was listening to music on his stereo, a man’s voice suddenly came out of the speakers. It turned out that my friend’s sound system had picked up a short-wave radio broadcast from a truck that was driving past his house, but he said that he really thought he was losing his mind until he figured out where the disembodied voice was coming from.”

  “No, I know,” Misao said. “You often hear stories about crossed signals or electromagnetic interference and so on. It’s just that in this case, I—”

  “It was just a temporary glitch,” Teppei interrupted. “Shall we try turning it on again, as a test?” Sure enough, when he pointed the remote control at the TV set and hit the on button, there was no sign of the shadow. “There, you see?” he said triumphantly. “Vanished without a trace.”

  Tamao was stroking Cookie’s head, but her eyes were glued to the TV screen. “It went away,” she observed.

  “That’s right,” Misao said. “It’s gone.” Feeling relieved, she went over to where her daughter was standing and took Tamao’s two small hands in her own.

  “Listen, sweetie,” she said quietly. “Could you please tell me exactly what Pyoko was saying to you?”

  “It was about all the, um, people,” Tamao said. “He just said there were lots and lots of people with no faces, and shadowy bodies. They live in a dark place, and there are bad monsters watching over them, or something.”

  “I see. And?”

  “That’s all.”

  “And those shadowy people, or whatever they are—do you think they look like the dark shape that we saw on the TV screen just now?”

  “Uh-huh. Just like that.”

  “How can you be sure they look like that? Have you ever seen them?”

  “No, not really, but…”

  “But what? Somehow, I’m getting the feeling you have seen them.”

  “Hey, that’s enough,” Teppei interjected. “It’s clearly something from Tamao’s dream world, so there’s no point in cross-examining her. Would you please just drop it?”

  “But—” Misao protested.

  “You know, I actually had a similar experience myself, when I was five or six,” Teppei said reflectively, lighting up a cigarette. “I was absolutely convinced that there were monsters living in the ceiling. I’m not kidding.”

  “What kind of monsters were they?” Tamao asked.

  “The soft, mushy, icky kind, like amoebas,” Teppei replied.

  “Uh-mee-ba? What’s that?” Tamao cocked her head.

  “An amoeba is a kind of living organism that looks a little bit like a drop of pancake syrup. It doesn’t have arms, or legs, or a face.” Teppei held up his index finger, as if asking for everyone’s full attention. “This is how it was,” he said with mock solemnity, looking first at Tamao, then Misao. “At night, I used to imagine that while I was sleeping that mushy monster would slowly spread over the ceiling like a giant puddle, and then it would creep down and tickle my face. Here’s the thing. In the old days, ceilings were very thin and flimsy, and you could see the grain of the wooden beams through them. So if you stared at the ceiling for long enough, those patterns alone would be enough to give you the willies. Right? For me, it was very easy to imagine that a hideous, grimy blob of a monster might come oozing out of the ceiling. It was such a disturbing thought that every night I had to burrow under the futon, with the quilt covering my head, before I could fall asleep. I tried talking to my mother about the ceiling monsters, but of course she just laughed. I was scared of plenty of other things when I was little, too. For instance, hangers!”

  “Hangers?” Tamao sounded puzzled.

  “Yes, you know: the long clothes hangers they use for kimonos. There are different kinds, but the ones at my house were bamboo poles, about as long as your arm, with a hook at the top. Anyway, when I used to get up during the night and see one of those hangers in a corner of the hallway, it would frighten me half to death. See, I believed the hangers could move on their own. And I was convinced that very late at night they would get down off the wall and chase after children like me, trying to hit them on the head!”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Misao said with a chuckle.

  “No, it’s completely true. Like sometimes a kid gets up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, right? That’s when I would see the hangers in the hall and be certain they were going to come to life. They seemed to have a kind of unearthly glow, too. I would be so petrified that I could only make it to the john if I covered my eyes and ran past the hangers as fast as my legs would carry me.”

  “And did the hangers run after you, Papa?” Tamao asked with a perfectly straight face. Laughing, Teppei shook his head.

  “No, they never chased me, not even once,” he said. “But that didn’t stop me from thinking they were going to, every time.”

  Misao had a terrible premonition that from now on Tamao was going to be adding stories about being pursued by demonic clothes hangers to her current repertoire of tales about the chatty bird who returned from the dead on a regular basis, so she said emphatically, “When Papa thought the hangers might come chasing after him, that was all in his imagination. A hanger is just a hanger. There’s no way one of
them could even move, much less chase anyone. Do you understand, Tamao?”

  “Yes, I do,” Tamao said, bobbing her head.

  “The truth is, I was a huge scaredy-cat when I was a kid,” Teppei said, turning to Misao. “People who have very active imaginations tend to be easily frightened. If you let your imagination run wild all over the place, you can end up becoming immersed in a realm of make-believe. There are some hazards to a fantasy-driven approach to life, of course, but it can also be very entertaining—if you don’t mind the occasional nightmare! I think that’s why I turned out to be such a superbly creative copywriter, if I do say so myself. I’ve noticed that the people who didn’t grow up with a rich fantasy life never seem to be very good at my line of work, no matter how hard they try.”

  “No, I totally get it,” Misao laughed, fondly draping an arm around her husband’s shoulders. “That was a very persuasive speech. You’re so good at that sort of explanation—I really think you could go on educational television and give lectures. Seriously, you’re a natural!”

  Teppei smiled and gave Misao’s hand an affectionate tap. “Well,” he said as he got up from the sofa, “shall we get to work on the picnic prep? I’d like to hit the road while the sun’s still high, so we can get back by early evening.”

  Tamao’s face was alight with curiosity. “Picnic? Where are we going?”

  “We’re going to pay a visit to a grave, and then we’ll eat some rice balls in a nearby meadow,” Teppei said.

  “Whose grave?” Tamao asked.

  Without the slightest hesitation, Teppei replied smoothly, “It’s a friend of Papa’s—someone I used to be close to a long, long time ago.”

  As he spoke, he caught Misao’s eye and gave her a conspiratorial wink. Misao nodded. When her gaze wandered back to the television set a moment later, she saw that the shadow seemed to have reappeared in one corner of the screen, even though the set was turned off. She closed her eyes and told herself, It’s just interference. She really was worried about Tamao, though, with her crazy stories about conversing with the dead bird. She wondered again whether Tamao’s delicate nervous system had somehow been affected by the move and the subsequent death of her pet.

  “All righty, then,” Misao said brightly. “I guess I’d better go and make the rice balls now.” As she headed into the kitchen, she heard Cookie growling. Looking back, Misao saw the dog hunkered down in front of the blank television screen, arching her back like an angry cat.

  “Cookie?” Misao called. The dog turned and glanced at her, then let out a single brief yelp and went back to staring at the TV screen as if hypnotized.

  “Cookie, come here right now,” Misao ordered. Her tone sounded harsher than she intended, and Cookie responded by slinking into the kitchen with her tail wagging weakly and a penitent expression on her face.

  Misao knelt down and took Cookie in her arms. “It’s all right, girl,” she whispered into the velvety ears. “Everything’s okay. Everything has to be okay.”

  5

  March 30, 1987

  An afternoon in early spring. A busy thoroughfare in the Ginza district of Tokyo. The sudden, frantic honking of a car horn, followed by the screeching of brakes.

  Jolted abruptly back to awareness, Misao looked around and was startled to realize that she had very nearly stepped into the path of a moving car. If she stretched out her hand, she could have touched the hood of the dark blue minivan that had barely managed to skid to a stop in front of her. The driver of the car was glaring angrily at her through the windshield, his features distorted by fury and indignation.

  Glancing up, Misao saw that the pedestrian-crossing light was red. She could hear people behind her murmuring things like “What was she thinking?” and “Whoa, that was close.” Her heart was pounding a mile a minute, and her armpits were drenched in sweat. The driver stuck his head out of the side window and shouted, “You stupid idiot!” Misao stared at the ground in embarrassment, unconsciously running her tongue over her parched lips.

  It wasn’t that she had been lost in thought or fretting about something in particular. No, her mind had simply gone blank. In that nearly fatal instant she wasn’t thinking about anything, and although her eyes were open, she wasn’t seeing anything, either. She felt as though she’d been sleepwalking, or hypnotized, or in a trance of some sort.

  What just happened? Misao took a deep breath. True, she hadn’t been to the Ginza in ages, but had she really turned into a country bumpkin in the interim, lacking even the most rudimentary urban-survival skills?

  When the light turned green, Misao waited until everyone else had surged ahead, then started across the broad boulevard. Two young men who looked like university students glanced back at her from amid the pack of pedestrians and began to snicker. Misao gave them a dirty look. The odd thing, she thought, was that they didn’t seem to be reacting to her absentminded behavior; rather, she got the distinct feeling that they were laughing openly at her appearance.

  Was there something funny about the way she looked? Once that thought took root in her mind, Misao became consumed by an obsessive desire to figure out what the young men had found so amusing. Maybe she had torn a hole in the back of her jacket along the way.

  There was a large department store on the other side of the street, just a few feet from the end of the crosswalk. Misao went through the revolving door and rode the escalator to the ladies’ room on the second floor. Inside, a quartet of middle-aged women was monopolizing the mirrors. When Misao walked in, every gaze slid to the door and gave her the once-over. The look in those eyes was undisguisedly appraising and judgmental. Ignoring the women, Misao sauntered over to the only open patch of mirror and looked at her reflection.

  She was wearing a black-and-white glen plaid jacket over a pair of fitted black slacks that hugged the curves of her derrière. The back of the jacket was intact, with nary a rip in sight. Her glossy black shoulder-length hair fell in soft waves around her face, and while she could see two or three white hairs, as usual, they were barely noticeable. A partially visible pair of gold earrings gleamed behind the curtain of hair. The anti-aging cream she had been using faithfully every night must have been doing its job, because there were no crow’s feet around her eyes. As far as Misao could see, there was nothing unusual or ludicrous about her appearance whatsoever. That was a distinct relief. Maybe the students had just been reacting to her spacey behavior, after all.

  The headline of an ad for a woman’s magazine she had seen somewhere—“Thirty-two is the peak of womanhood”—drifted across her mind. As it happened, Misao was thirty-two years old, and she would certainly have liked to think of herself as a woman in full bloom. “Start preparing for your later years, strengthen your relationships with mates and friends, try to become your best and most fulfilled self, then add just a dash of love,” the copy had gushed. “That’s the recipe to make you shine. And now just for you, a woman in her beautiful prime, there’s a new magazine!”

  All the women’s magazines are basically the same, Misao thought. Leaf through any one of them and you’ll see that they’re either encouraging their readers to pursue an impossibly elevated ideal that bears no resemblance to everyday reality, or else tossing out sensationalistic scraps of other people’s trials, tribulations, and triumphs—which, again, have very little in common with most readers’ own daily lives.

  Taking her makeup pouch out of her handbag, Misao dabbed on a quick coat of blush. The middle-aged women were still primping in front of the mirrors, and she glanced at them out of the corner of her eye. They appeared to be on their way home from a movie matinee. A couple of them were holding rolled-up pamphlets, and the print was so large that Misao was able to deduce right away that they had been to see a well-known romantic melodrama, which was currently ruling the box office.

  “Shall we go have tea somewhere, before we call it a day?” one of the women asked, and her companions all responded in the affirmative. Laughing in a way that sounded shrill and
artificial to Misao’s ears, the giddy foursome trooped out of the restroom.

  When Misao looked down at her wristwatch, she saw that it was three o’clock. She had gone to the Ginza office of a business acquaintance to talk about a possible illustration assignment, but they had gotten to chatting over a cup of coffee and the time had flown by. Misao had left Tamao with Eiko Inoue, promising to return no later than half past three, so if she didn’t want to be late she would need to catch the next available train.

  The meeting had gone smoothly. The editor Misao met with had been unfazed by the five-year gap in Misao’s résumé, and it was encouraging to see that this past connection was likely to yield some freelance commissions. To start, Misao had been asked to provide an illustration for a monthly visual design magazine targeted at women.

  If she could just generate a steady stream of small-scale assignments like that, she should easily be able to meet the deadlines, even with her weekdays broken up by having to escort Tamao to and from kindergarten. And now that the preliminary discussions were out of the way, it didn’t sound as if she would need to go to the Ginza more than a couple of times a month. In truth, though, Misao would have welcomed an excuse to go into town more often than that. After all, someone who spends her time cooped up at home can end up forgetting the most basic life skills—for example, how to negotiate a big-city crosswalk without nearly getting run over!

  Misao passed a telephone booth, and stopped. She thought briefly of giving Teppei a call to let him know she was in the neighborhood, since his agency’s main office was in the Ginza area, but then it occurred to her that if he had stepped away from his desk and one of his colleagues were to answer the phone, that could be awkward. After what happened with Reiko, Misao didn’t feel that she would ever again be able to face (or talk to) anyone at the office where she, too, had worked.