The mid-afternoon sunlight stuck, pure white, to the vertical and horizontal washing on the lines as an old man, walking through a large apartment complex in the airless, clammy heat, suddenly stopped in the middle of the road to look back over his shoulder and froze that way, and a brick-red car ground to a halt beside a mailbox as if its strength had petered out, though no one got out into the stillness of a July day at two o'clock, silent except for a distant drone that might have been either a dying cicada or the hum of a machine in a school-lunch factory.
In a six-mat room beyond the railing on her balcony a housewife was making tea, stopping now and then to frown at the blank TV screen as she picked at a scab on her knee; her neighbor, who had gone to the local Culture Center, had closed her kitchen curtains but not all the way, so you could see a half-eaten apple with lipstick stains on top of the refrigerator. In one corner of this apartment complex in a modern residential area, so dull it seemed dead until the children came home to get ready for cram school, there was a large, dirty homemade sign that had been clinging to a telephone pole for a year or more, always seeming about to fall off but somehow stubbornly managing to stay on. The rain had blurred the words “Kitamura School,” written with a pink magic marker in Mitsuko Kitamura’s handwriting, and the telephone number was half torn off, and there was so much yellow pigeon shit stuck to the map you could hardly read it, but since all the mothers in the complex with children of elementary or junior high school age knew where the Kitamura School was this didn’t pose a problem, and although the poster had outlived its usefulness no one bothered to dispose of it, either because it was too filthy to touch, or out of loyalty to the tradition, firmly established in the thirty years since the complex had been built, of not worrying about how dirty things outside were as long as the area around your own apartment was clean, which meant that when a pigeon was hit by a car and lay splattered all over the street or some drunk left a pile of turds somewhere, people just waited for City Hall to clean it up, so naturally no one could have cared less about this sign, which would probably stay there until the wind ripped it to shreds and blew it away.
Anyway, the children all loved the Kitamura School, which they nicknamed the “Kitabooboo School”; in fact, so many wanted to go there it had become something of a fad, and even if it failed to improve some kids’ grades, with all the stories these days about youngsters enrolled in cram schools they hated but actually spending the time in Game Centers, it was a relief to mothers, knowing they didn’t have that to worry about with the Kitamura School, so most didn’t let the strange rumors bother them, and when someone occasionally was heard saying she’d never send one of her children to a place like that, the others would tell her not to get so excited about some idle gossip which was only a kid’s imagination to start with, blown out of all proportion, and since children can’t really tell the difference between a little dirt and downright obscenity and tend to get things mixed up anyway, it was best not to believe everything they said, etc., etc.