A Quiet Place by Seicho Matsumoto Page A

particular haiku is rather vivid and elegant. Also perfectly feminine. Eiko always had a very rich imagination. I admit I was a little envious.”
    â€œReally?” From singing to painting, then on to haiku – she’d had a very creative side, after all.
    â€œShe was such a lovely person, taken from us too soon. I can’t imagine how you must feel.” Ms Suzuki spoke as if she was amazed that Asai could manage alone with no one but the solitary elderly woman from the neighbourhood who came to help out in the daytime.
    At the end of September there was a personnel reshuffle. A new division chief was brought in, and Asai became assistant division chief. A promotion for a non-career-track civil servant like him was awarded on merit. If he could just hang in there, the next step was division chief.
    In the end, Asai never took his summer vacation days.
    The new division chief invited Asai to his home in Harajuku for dinner. At the end of the evening, Asai set off for home in the car his boss had ordered for him, but on the way he suddenly changed his mind; Yoyogi wasn’t far at all from Harajuku. It had been a while since he’d visited the hill where his wife had died, and it wouldn’t take too long by car.
    The driver turned around. They arrived at the top of the hill by a different route from the one Asai was used to. They passed by the Midori and came out by the entrance to the Tachibana. It was after 9 p.m. and the neon sign flickered in the night sky. It had been six months since he’d last seen this view.
    â€œYou want me to take this road downhill?” asked the driver, glancing back at him.
    â€œYes, please.”
    Asai, watching the view ahead through the front windscreen, suddenly lost track of where he was. The road looked different from this angle. There was a tall building ahead to the left, with a neon sign on the roof: HOTEL CHIYO .
    The red of the neon stood out, vivid against the dark background of private homes. It was brand new. Even from this viewpoint, the sign dominated the skyline. There had been nothing like it here before. Asai had lost his bearings.
    As the car continued down the hill, he peered out of the left side window. The building was a brand-new, three-storey hotel, with a very wide facade; Takahashi Cosmetics had disappeared. But the taxi passed by too fast, and in a flash the view was gone.
    â€œJust a minute!” Asai hurriedly got the driver to stop. “This is fine. I’ll get out here. I just remembered something I need to do.”
    The driver walked around and opened the car door.
    â€œShould I wait for you?”
    â€œNo, no. It’s fine. I’m going to be a while. Please go ahead and leave.”
    Asai turned and started to walk back up the hill.

9
    Asai stood opposite the new three-storey hotel, by the house with the bamboo trees and the concrete wall. When he’d first visited Takahashi Cosmetics with his sister-in-law, he’d noted that the house had belonged to someone named Kobayashi. Now, the carved stone nameplate was tinged faintly red by the neon across the road.
    The hotel was built in the latest fashionable style. Part Southern European, part replica of ancient European architecture, it was elegant, but nothing could hide the fact that it was a couples’ hotel.
    And it had just sprung up out of nowhere. It had been only six months since Asai had last been in the area. Somewhere within that short time frame, Takahashi Cosmetics and the next-door house with the bamboo fence and the zelkova tree had been torn down, the ground reworked, and architects and construction companies had moved in to put up this new building. Asai hadn’t witnessed any of that. Right now, all he could do was stand and stare in amazement.
    The name Chiyo obviously came from Chiyoko Takahashi’s given name. The little cosmetics boutique, now vanished off the face of the earth, must once have stood right at the far end of what