Upon moving in, however, she found that a lot of the owners had purchased their units as an investment. They had never moved in, and by now most of the units had been transformed into offices. Inevitably, the building almost emptied out at night. Some five or six single people lived there as tenants, while the only family in the entire building lived on the fourth floor—in Yoshimi’s unit, number 405. The super had told Yoshimi that a family with a daughter the same age as Ikuko used to live on the second floor, but had moved away the year before due to some tragedy. From then on, the apartment building had seen no children until Yoshimi and Ikuko moved in three months ago.
Yoshimi surveyed the deserted seventh floor for a stairway leading to the rooftop. There it was, immediately to the right of the elevator; the roof would be only a floor above. Holding her daughter’s hand, Yoshimi climbed up the steep concrete stairs. Next to the elevator engine room, there stood a heavy-looking iron door. It didn’t appear to be locked, and when Yoshimi tried turning the knob and giving it a push, it opened with surprising ease.
It wasn’t spacious enough to be called a rooftop. It was a cramped place measuring no larger than forty square feet, fenced in with a waist-high handrail, with concrete pillars rising up from the four corners. Yoshimi would have to keep her eyes on her daughter if she approached the edge—the weight of your own head seemed enough to pull you over if you dared peer down.
In the gentle breezeless dusk, on this pier into the air, Yoshimi and Ikuko lit their fireworks. The red jets stood out in the deepening darkness. Below them to the right, the dark waters of the canal flickered with light reflected from the streetlamps, and opposite was the nearly completed Rainbow Bridge to link Shibaura with Daiba. The top of the suspension bridge, outlined with red signal lights, sparkled like real fireworks.
Yoshimi took in the view from on high, and Ikuko held aloft her little sparklers and cried with delight. It was when the score of sparklers had all turned into charred cinders, and the two prepared to go back down, that they discovered it, both at the very same moment. They had had their backs against the wall of the penthouse, which housed the stairwell and atop which sat the building’s water tank; but in the small drain that ran at the bottom of this wall was what looked like a handbag. It didn’t look like it’d been dropped, but rather, placed there on purpose. After all, who’d come to a place like this and lose her bag?
It was Ikuko who picked it up. No sooner had she let out a faint cry of surprise than she’d dashed over to it and grabbed it. ‘It’s Kitty,’ she noted.
It was hard to see in the dark, but against the glow of the street lamps from down below, the Kitty motif was indeed visible on the cheap vinyl bag. The bright red vinyl surface squished and changed shape in her hands.
‘Give it to me,’ scolded Yoshimi. She reached for Ikuko, who was trying to unzip the bag to see what was inside, and succeeded in taking the bag away from her.
Yoshimi’s mother, when she was still healthy, used to take Ikuko on walks in the hills around Musashino, often to come home with some discarded item. It was only natural for a woman of Yoshimi’s mother’s generation to feel that modern folks threw things out too soon. That was that. What Yoshimi couldn’t stand was the thought of her own daughter scavenging through garbage, and she had frequently gotten into arguments with her mother about it. In bringing up Ikuko, Yoshimi never tired of hammering into her a simple rule about picking things up. Whatever it was, you didn’t take it if it didn’t belong to you. Every time Yoshimi said this with a solemn look, her mother would react with a grimace: ‘Now don’t be such a stiff…’
Having taken the bag away from her daughter, Yoshimi didn’t know what to do with it. Through the surface came a lumpy feel of its contents. Yoshimi, something of a hygiene freak, decided without even opening the bag that the best course of action was to go talk to the superintendent about this. She was going to his ground-floor office right away.
The superintendent, Kamiya, was a long-time widower who’d been the building’s live-in super for ten years, ever since he’d retired from a hauling company. Although the job didn’t pay well, the accommodations were free, and it was an ideal arrangement for an old man living on his own.
No sooner had Yoshimi handed him the bag than Mr Kamiya unzipped it and emptied the contents on top of the office counter. A bright-red plastic cup bearing the same Kitty motif as the bag. A plastic wind-up frog whose legs were designed to flap. A little bear with a beach ring. It was clearly a three-in-one bath-time toy kit.
Ikuko cried out and started to reach for the toys, but yanked her hand back when her mother glared at her.
‘How very odd,’ the superintendent mused. What puzzled him was not that someone had left a bag on the rooftop, but that a toy set that obviously belonged to some child was found on the premises of this building.
‘You could display a notice and try to find the owner,’ Yoshimi suggested. Perhaps the owner would see the bag and claim it.
‘But the only child in the building is little Ikuko—right, Ikuko?’ the old man sought the girl’s assent. She was gazing intently at the Kitty bag and red cup from where she stood beside her mother. It was only too obvious from her expression what outcome Ikuko desired. She wanted it: the bag, the toys. Annoyed by her wistful look, Yoshimi grabbed her by the shoulder and forced her to step back from the counter.
‘You did mention that a family used to live on the second floor…’ ventured Yoshimi.
Kamiya looked up in surprise and said: ‘Ah, yes.’
‘Didn’t you say they had a little girl of five or six?’
‘Indeed. Yes. But it’s been two years.’
‘Two years? I thought you said they moved out last year.’
The super hunched his back and began to scratch his ankle audibly. ‘Well, yes. They didn’t move out until last summer.’
Yoshimi remembered being told by the super, when she moved in three months ago, that the family who’d been living on the second floor had moved out of the building the previous year because they’d experienced some misfortune. Yoshimi was guessing that it was they who’d somehow left the bag up on the roof.
Yet, neither the bag nor its plastic contents looked like they’d been exposed to the elements for a whole year up on the roof. The Kitty bag—which was without a speck of dust or grime, as brand-new as if it had just been purchased from the store—refuted the idea that it could’ve been abandoned for so long.
‘All right then. I’ll try displaying it on the counter for a while to see if we can find the owner.’
In this way, the super sought to end the conversation. After all, it was only some cheap bag, and he couldn’t care less if they found the owner or not.
Yoshimi, however, did not move from where she stood in front of the counter. Instead, she fingered her curly chestnut hair, debating whether to come right out with what she had on her mind.
‘If the owner doesn’t turn up, Ikuko, then you could have the bag, couldn’t you?’ Mr Kamiya offered and smiled at Ikuko.
‘No, that wouldn’t be right. If the owner doesn’t turn up, please dispose of the bag.’ Yoshimi turned down the offer with a resolute shake of her head. She then left the super’s office, pushing Ikuko from behind as if to get her away from some contagious object.
Yet something troubled Yoshimi as they rode up in the elevator. She had avoided the subject of the so-called tragedy that was supposed to have befallen the family. After all, she did not want to appear the kind of person who entertained herself by talking about other people’s misfortunes. But the question needled her and she longed to know the exact nature of that family’s misfortune.
The next day was a Monday. Yoshimi spent longer than usual combing her hair that morning. From the living room she could hear the theme song of a children’s television program. This melody served as a time signal, indicating on this particular morning that she still