What's the fascination of the sky-blue house?

Taro, who grew up in Osaka and formerly worked in a hair salon, now works in a Tokyo office at a five-person company that manages PR for other firms. He is divorced and lives alone in an eight-unit apartment building, the View Palace Saeki III, in Setagaya Ward that is scheduled to be demolished. He has one friend, a co-worker who moves to Hokkaido during the course of the novel. Ten years ago his father died and Taro keeps the mortar and pestle in which he ground his father's bones in a kitchen cabinet:

"The mortar and pestle never got moved," Tomoka Shibasaki writes in her novel Spring Garden. "Taro was a disorganized person, and he worried that if he moved it, he'd forget where it was. He also worried that if it wasn't somewhere visible, he would forget that his father was dead. Sometimes he got the feeling that he'd already forgotten—about his father's death, and about his existence too."

Taro's building has eight units, four on the first floor, four on the second; these are identified by the Chinese zodiac: Pig (which is Taro's), Dog, Rooster, Monkey on the first floor, Sheep, Horse, Snake, Dragon on the second. Taro therefore thinks of the woman who lives upstairs in the last apartment as Dragon Woman who seems about his age, a little over thirty. Taro spots her on the street: 

"She was wearing a creased T-shirt and jogging bottoms, with a beanie that he guessed was to cover unkempt hair. It was not the sort of look you would go for if you were expecting to be seen by anyone. In fact, the combination of the hat and her black-framed glasses made her look pretty suspicious."

Her surname is Nishi, and she tells him "my kanji looks a lot like the kanji for the Rooster." She is an illustrator and a comic-strip artist. "Her main jobs are "making comic strips out of readers' stories submitted to a job-seeking portal and a cooking magazine site, and individual commissions for magazines and adverts." She is single and independent and also apparently has no friends or family.

Nishi is obsessed by a sky-blue house and its garden the View Palace Saeki overlooks. The house "looked like the sort of grand, Western-style mansions that had sprung up in certain areas of Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The horizontal wooden planks were painted a vivid sky blue, and the roof tiles in terracotta, was a flattish pyramid, with a decoration at the top shaped like the tip of an arrow."

The house was built in 1964 by a Taro Gyushima, an advertising director, and his wife, Kaiko Umamura, a stage actress. They had produced a coffee-table book of photographs titled Spring Garden about the house that Nishi first encountered in high school. That couple moved out years ago and are divorced. A young family now apparently lives in it.

I've lifted three quotes from the novel to give you a sense of Polly Barton's polished translation and because Taro, Nishi, and the house are the novel's three characters. The book, which has no chapter breaks, flows smoothly from Taro's point of view to Nishi's. Confounding reader expectations (this reader's anyway), there is no romance between Taro and Nishi. They have meals together, they drink together (Nishi drinks far more beer than Taro), the eventually are able to visit the house's interior together, but there is no romantic spark, and Nishi eventually moves away from Tokyo.

Tomoka Shibasaki was born in 1973 in Osaka and began writing fiction in high school. She graduated from Osaka Prefecture University and worked in an office while writing fiction. Her first novel, Kyō no dekigoto (A Day on the Planet), was published in 2000. In 2003 the book was adapted by  into a film of the same name. In 2006 Shibasaki won a MEXT Award for New Artists for Sono machi no ima wa (Today, in that City). In 2010 she won the Noma Literary New Face Prize for Nete mo samete mo, a first-person story about a woman who falls in love, loses her boyfriend, then meets a man who looks identical to her disappeared boyfriend but acts completely differently. In 2014, she won the 151st Akutagawa Prize for Haru no niwa (Spring Garden). 

Spring Garden is an interesting novel because there is no conflict—unlike what they teach you in writing class. Taro does not seem to want anything, not even a closer friendship with Nishi. Nishi wants to see for herself the bathroom in the sky-blue house, but that does not feel like much of a goal and she hardly has to overcome real challenges to eventually reach it.

Nevertheless, the book held my interest all the way through. (Pace, writing class.) As much as anything, it is a lament for a passing time. The sky-blue house will be torn down. The View Palace Saeki will be torn down. The neighborhood will change. Spring Garden turns out to be surprisingly moving.