Beautiful Town: Stories and Essays

A Window Opens

A Window Opens Mado Hiraku, 1924 On an alley some twenty-five or thirty feet back in from the streetcar line there is a block of seven or eight houses like a bunch of birdcages. My house is closest to the front of the block. A tiny rented house in the middle of town like that gives no reason to expect a garden. No more than an excuse there in the back, though, is an area about ten feet square. It adjoins the residence of a well-to-do person. There is a high brick wall and, as if that were not enough, extending above it is a galvanized iron fence, completely shutting out the sunlight from my garden. Thanks to that, there had been two withered azaleas and a dead pomegranate tree. I pulled out the azaleas and hid them in a corner, but the pomegranate tree remains a problem. It is too big a tree for me to do anything about. It could not be pulled out easily. Even if I did pull it out, there is no place to throw it. I could not take it away if I tried, because my house stands so close to the neighboring houses on both sides that there is barely enough space for a man to squeeze through. Unless you chopped the tree with its spreading branches into fifty pieces there would be no way you could carry it out. I was only living there temporarily to begin with, and there was no need to go to that much trouble. So the tree stands there, dead. It shakes furiously every time a car speeds by the front of the house. The twigs touch the galvanized iron fence on top of the brick wall, making an intense noise. The framework of the house was loosened in the recent earthquake, and the sounds of shaking make unknowing guests think it is another tremor. Besides the troublesome tree there are some worthless shrubs that the landlord must have bought at a temple festival and planted. A Window Opens 203 Strangely, they are not dead. This is my garden—without color, without fragrance. Now and then I recall our big garden back home in the country. That often causes me to curse my residence in the city. I have come to pity people who live in the city. As of now four people live in the house. . . . Each one has better than four mats of floor space, or more than eight-by-eight feet. Of these I am the first. Then there is A. Then there is R. Then there is T. Let me introduce the last one. She is my common-law wife. She’s been here for half a year. In general you can say I am happy. That means that things ordinarily go well. But then there’s this recent thing. . . . Hardly ten days have gone by. It was a beautiful morning after the rain. I looked out as I was brushing my teeth. R had gone out behind the toilet, carrying a garden broom and dustpan to sweep the small open area. . . . “Hey! Excuse me. I’ll sweep it later.” The voice came suddenly from the old man in the tofu bean-curd store that backed up to us. His head stuck out from an unexpected place. My goodness! What a strange place to poke a hole. That was the first I had noticed it. Directly facing the window of my toilet a new window had been cut into the tofu store. No, it wasn’t finished yet. It was just being installed. There was no carpenter or anything. Two men had simply sawed a hole in the back wall of the house. It was about two feet square. We were late sleepers in my house, and most of the work was done before we noticed. Now they were just finishing up the details. I went back to my room without saying anything in reply to the man in the tofu store. The rather taciturn R didn’t appear to say anything either. “Was that fellow talking to us?” T asked. “Seems so.” “Why didn’t you answer?” 204 Stories I didn’t like that window. I couldn’t complain about the man’s opening his own window in the back wall of his own house, but it was too close to my toilet. There wasn’t even...