2023 | 8 min read
What is a neighbourhood? Georges Perec, that dramatist of everyday places, described it as “that part of the town you don’t need to go to; precisely because you’re already there.” It used to be the place you left in order to go to work, but even that’s now changing. I see a lot more of my neighbourhood these days.
The neighbourhood of Yoga gets its fame from traffic reports. Yoga is home to the Tokyo Interchange, where the Tomei Expressway arriving from Nagoya becomes the Shuto Expressway No.3 to Shibuya. This makes Yoga a kind of metropolitan edgeland, a flyover neighbourhood, where the expressway deposits some of its traffic onto an outer ring road, but otherwise vaults scornfully over the rooftops.
Yoga is what an urban planner might call low-rise high-density, an ordinary person would call a jūtakugai, or residential area, and I just call the view. It’s a dense one of detached homes and the occasional low-rise apartment building. Tall trees sway above the roofline, signifying a shrine nearby. (In neighbourhoods like these, there’s aways a shrine that you promise you’ll visit but never do.) In the distance, hovering above the train station, is the area’s one tall building: the glitchy sci-fi folly of Setagaya Business Square.
The pleasure of dating the houses. White stucco and colourful tiling for homes built in the 1970s, ancient dwellings by Tokyo standards, mingles with the black, white and beige prefab exteriors of more recent builds. The modern Japanese house projects a kind of Scandinavian or Cape Cod fantasy. But look closely and the houses still mirror the yashiki style favoured by the samurai class in the Edo period. The street-facing side gives little away: narrow windows, carport, modest aluminium nameplate. The lived-in rooms are at the rear, the secure and inner oku. Though built to template, each house seems different and reflects the owner’s unique posture towards the world, their preferred balance of open versus closed.
Before it was swallowed by the metropolis, Yoga would have been a rural settlement of large villas connected by narrow lanes. Only the lanes remain. All Tokyo neighbourhoods become progressively denser over time. When elderly homeowners die, the heirs sell a portion of the land to pay the inheritance taxes and rebuild on the reduced plot. Subdividing creates L-shaped “flagpole lots” of one house nested behind another, with a narrow driveway connecting the new property to the street. This pattern, which has been going on for three generations, gives Tokyo neighbourhoods their signature chaotic clutter.
Nature is the loser in all this. Gardens must necessarily shrink, sometimes to a purely symbolic or imaginary realm: a display of flowerpots, the name of the building itself. Trees become a luxury item. They must also shrink, sometimes to pot-size. However, trees or no trees, there’s still the problem of invisible leaves. Every morning and several times during the day, bored housewives are out in the street doing the busywork of sweeping up these invisible leaves, all the while looking around in case any invisible leaves might have drifted onto nearby properties.
Large gardens or trees growing above roof height can only signify that elderly residents are stubbornly refusing to pay death taxes. There’s a house like that on one side of my building. It’s a rickety wooden structure nestled under a small copse of trees. The house has escaped demolition for many years, no doubt delaying someone else’s suburban dream. It’s home to a widow, in her eighties perhaps. She has a son and two teenage grandchildren. I know this because they sometimes visit on weekends, always arriving on foot. It’s impossible to know if the family lives nearby or if they’ve walked from the coin-operated parking lot around the corner.
On fine-weather mornings, the old woman makes an appearance at a second-floor window. The window slides open and she clambers out onto a small, sloping roof at one end of the house. Her hair is pulled back in a silver bun and she wears a cardigan and cut-off pants, let’s call them kung-fu pants, well suited to her sprightly movements. I can easily imagine her foraging eggs from the nests of seabirds in harder times. But today the widow lays out a single futon on the roof, weighs it down with small objects, and climbs back through the window. I’ll see her again in a few hours when she retrieves her bedding.
This futon ritual has origins in the far distance. First, turn right at the end of the street. Then go straight on a slight elevation for 147 million kilometres. You may want to avoid the local train. Right in front of you – you really can’t miss it, though don’t look too closely – you’ll see a runaway nuclear fusion object that we call the Sun, el Sol, Sooraj, Taiyo, or the Big Yang. It’s one of our failings as a species that we can’t even agree on this. But anyway, if you’re reading this from another star system, you probably have a similar set-up in your neighbourhood. What do you call yours?
Our own local star throws out a quadrillion gigawatts of energy per second. That’s enough to heat a bento for every man, woman, child, pet, cute jumping spider and microscopic organism in Tokyo AND charge Godzilla’s phone. Solar energy is more or less evenly radiated into space, and something would certainly be amiss if at least some of that fine, sunny radiation didn’t land right here in this neighbourhood. Indeed, some of it warms my legs under the desk, for which I give thanks. Some of it causes the tatami mat to fade from a lush green to a grey straw. Another thing I’ll have to pay for, I suppose.
Some of that solar radiation also lands on the futon next door. It passes through the thin cotton exterior and causes tiny dust mites inside some consternation. Disappointingly for allergy-suffering old ladies, the Sun’s rays don’t burn the mites to a smoking crisp. They’ve lost too much energy on the way. Instead, they cause moisture inside the futon to evaporate, which in turn causes the moisture-loving mites to collectively think “Today is not a good day” and put the colony expansion plans on hold.
We live, the widow and me, in a very quiet neighbourhood. You make your own excitement here. What if, I think, the widow were to fall from the roof? I would be the only witness. I let the scene play out in my mind. A sudden gust catches the futon. The widow is momentarily confused and loses her balance. She tumbles down the roof in a polyester blur. For a second, it looks like she might save herself by grabbing onto the gutter. But no, her strength has gone. As she rolls over the edge, our eyes meet for the very first time. She gives me a look that seems to say “So this is how I go” and “Take this futon in for me, will you?” before she drops into some bushes behind a low concrete wall.
It’s my daydream, so I might as well be the hero of it. I dash downstairs and jump over the wall to find the widow lying there. She’s conscious, but her leg looks like it might be broken. This is my signal to turn away and face the wall. I could make her more comfortable, I suppose, but then I’d have to look. Better get on the phone.
In Japanese, using the level of politeness appropriate to an emergency call – respectful but skipping certain formalities – I give the address to the emergency operator along with some information about my nationality, some foods I can’t eat, and the weather back home. Then we wait. “Is the ambulance really coming?” asks the widow. “It’ll be here very soon,” I say to the wall.
The ambulance finally arrives to shatter the peace of the neighbourhood with its mournful wails and screamed apologies. Two medics ease the widow onto a stretcher. “It’s lucky you didn’t move her,” says one. “These elderly folk can’t take much strain.” The widow touches my arm gently as they wheel her past. “Don’t forget about the futon,” she says.
While I’m here, what other tragedies could befall this old woman? This time I conjure up an earthquake. It’s what you might call the best kind of earthquake: strong enough to become an interesting anecdote, but not strong enough to cut off the gas or seriously delay any trains. Only after the shaking stops do I see that the old house next door has slipped from its foundations and is tilting dangerously to one side. Again, I seem to be the only person around. Where are all the invisible-leaf sweepers now?
This time I force an entry to the house. I hope I’m not committing a crime. “You again,” the widow says from under the kitchen table. Before I can evacuate her from the teetering house, the old woman clutches my arm and her gaze travels across the room. “The manuscript,” she says. After a quick look around, I grab the thick binder that contains the unpublished writings and not the thick binder that contains the complete archive of supermarket flyers.
“Let’s go, grandma,” I say, warming to my role. I hoist the widow over one shoulder, step through the wreckage and leap over the outside wall, just as the first aftershock rolls through the neighbourhood. The house behind us groans and collapses in on itself with a splintering of wood, a great noise of smashing crockery, and the final one-note death squeal of a fax machine.
“That was a close one,” I say. The old woman’s family has just arrived on the scene. It turns out they do live nearby. After taking the old matriarch into their care, they dust her down vigorously while telling her off for causing so much trouble. “I’m sorry for causing so much trouble,” she says.
“It’s lucky you were in the neighbourhood,” says the son, turning to me.
“It’s lucky you managed to save my homework,” says the granddaughter, taking the binder from my hand.
Suddenly the neighbourhood is boring again. The house next door is still standing. The futon has disappeared indoors. Meanwhile, I’m behind on my work. If I see the widow again, I think I’ll nod a greeting. I’ll tell her to watch her footing. I wonder what she’d say if she knew that the foreigner next door daydreams violence upon her person.
Next: East Side Story