Excerpt from Territory of Light by Yuko Tsushima, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

THE WATER'S EDGE

During the night, there had been a sound of water on the other side of the wall. In my sleep I was looking out from the fourth-floor bedroom at nearby buildings bathed in rain, gleaming with neon and streetlamp colours. It was a light, tenuous sound. I couldn't say at what hour of the night it had started. It could well have been there when I went to bed; then again, it could have been an illusion as I was on the brink of waking.

In the morning, when I opened the windows wide, dazzling sunlight burst in, together with the thrum of traffic. The sky was pure blue. The streets were dry. Perfectly dry, even in the shade.

Happy to see another fine day, I set about waking my daughter without wondering where the night's rain could have got to, leaving not the slightest puddle. I had a feeling that it was still raining elsewhere, someplace like that spot I couldn't quite reach behind my back. It was a lingering sensation, close at hand, of water in the distance. I had almost dismissed it as a dream, but not entirely.

If the downstairs tenant hadn't kicked up a fuss, I would no doubt have listened to the same splashing again that night, harboured the same not-unpleasant sensation the next morning, and then forgotten all about it.

Just as I bit into a slice of toast, I heard a knock at the door. Who on earth could that be so early in the morning? More warily than necessary, I opened the door. A vaguely familiar face appeared, a portly man in late middle age. I couldn't place him at first. It was a bit of a letdown that it wasn't Fujino, whom I hadn't seen since our separation, over a month ago.

'The water – are you having some kind of problem up here?' the man asked, scanning the room irritably. My daughter stood in front of him and curiously observed us in turn, her head tilted back. 'The water! You've spilled some, or let the bath overflow, haven't you? You'd better do something quick. We've got a real mess on our hands.'

It finally dawned on me that this was the man from the office on the floor below. After hurriedly greeting him properly, I replied, 'How do you mean? Everything's all right here.'

'I'm telling you, there's a flood downstairs. The leak has to be coming from your place. If you haven't noticed it yet, go and have a look around now, please.'

He was the owner of the company that made gold-plated trophy shields. They probably didn't actually produce them in the small office downstairs, but there were always cartons stacked, ready for shipping, in the open doorway. I had seen this man several times, hefting boxes or checking the contents against a ledger. Whether overloaded with work or just a born hard worker, he arrived around eight every morning and then often stayed till near midnight. His presence was rather a nuisance to me, since it was my job, as the only resident in a building occupied by offices, to raise and lower the shutter at the street entrance. It can't have been too convenient for him either to be kept waiting in front of the closed shutter whenever I overslept, or to have to give me a call through the door last thing at night. It had been a month since the company moved in, and after another month of this the landlady would give him his own key to the shutter, a special favour that came as a relief to me too.

The man's wife, who was his only employee, was generally obliged to work late with him. But I had never really gotten a good look at her face. While he was regularly to be seen bustling in the doorway with the boxes, she invariably kept her head down at the desk in the room behind. In her apron, she seemed dressed for scouring pots in the kitchen.

Since the man insisted the leak must be somewhere on the fourth floor, I made a tour of the plumbing just in case, checking the kitchen faucets, washing machine, toilet, and the rooftop bath room that opened off the inside stairs, conscious all along of the fast-approaching hour at which I had to leave for work. I checked the six-tatami room while I was at it. As I expected, there was not a drop of water.

Copyright © 1979, 1993 by Yūko Tsushima
English translation copyright © 2018 by Geraldine Harcourt