The Graveyard Apartment

by Mariko Koike

Reiko had left behind a suicide note, addressed to Teppei. In it, she wrote that she harbored no ill feelings whatsoever toward him or the woman he was having an affair with. She was just tired. Life no longer offered her anything to enjoy, and all she wanted was to go to sleep, forever. Good-bye, she concluded. Please be happy.

Misao had just turned twenty-seven when she discovered she was pregnant. At that point Teppei was still living in the house he had shared with Reiko, but he moved out and came to live with Misao in her small, sunless apartment, bringing Reiko’s memorial tablet with him. They got married in a low-key civil ceremony, and the following year Tamao was born. And then …

An ancient cemetery, right in the middle of the city. It was just as the man from the real estate agency had said in his obviously rehearsed pitch: “This area is no longer merely a place where the dead find their final resting place. Instead, it is being transformed into a haven where the living can relax and enjoy themselves.” Whatever you say, Misao had thought sourly. The graveyard was directly in front of the apartment, with only a narrow driveway between them. If Misao stood on the balcony, craned her neck, and peered off to the left, she could see the Buddhist temple with its lustrous black-tiled roof, and the tall, spooky-looking smokestack of the nearby crematorium soaring into the sky. When the trees were bare, it was hard to ignore the fact that the apartment looked out on a cemetery and a perpetually active cremation facility, but when summer rolled around and all the trees were lushly leafed out, surely it would be possible to forget about that unsettling proximity.

If the real estate agent could just show them a rental that wasn’t a hellish haunted house, they were in no position to be picky about the particulars.

Instead of offering any details, Mitsue replied only in the sort of nebulous, noncommittal terms that she thought would seem most persuasive. Besides, who would have believed her if she had blurted out something like “Because that building is filled with evil spirits, and living there is a total nightmare! That’s why nearly all the residents have moved out—they realized that something was very, very wrong!”?