Sunday book pick: ‘Spring Garden’ is a sobering novel about what uninspiring buildings do to a city

Like everything else these days, even our homes have started to look indistinguishable. Matchbox-sized flats in high-rise apartments, beige-pink-white interiors “inspired” by Pinterest, sturdy wood and metal have been replaced by plywood and plastic, and handcrafted furniture have given way to mass-produced fixtures which outlast in neither years nor trends. A disinterest in locally-made handicrafts and cheaply-made decorative items are creating homes that not only look like exact replicas of each other but say nothing about the inhabitants or reflect their personalities in any way. This in turn is creating a crisis where the spaces we inhabit do not inspire us, and the growing trend of revamping the house every few years puts us in a flux where we are unable to have long-lasting visions of creativity and indeed, the intimacy that makes a house a home.

As old houses are razed and replaced with plain-looking apartments built by corporations and small-time promoters, we see the very face of our neighbourhoods and cities changing. Architecture is not a mute feature – it adds a distinct character to a city. Most major cities around the world are known for their unique buildings and city planning. To me, a beautiful house is a piece of art. In a country as diverse as India, the houses we build are reflective of not just the climate and topography of the place, but also of the population’s aesthetics and history – a complex culture that is not taken into account when high-rise buildings are constructed.

A house of one’s own

Tomoka Shibasaki’s Spring Garden, translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton, mourns a similar loss in Japan’s architectural heritage. Neighbours Taro and Nishi live in an apartment building in Tokyo but neither of them owns their flats, in some ways, they are nomads who hope to move to better, bigger houses when circumstances allow them. Taro is a recently-divorced man and Nishi draws Manga online. From Nishi, he learns that the only house in the neighbourhood – rather, the last surviving one – is the subject of the famous photography book, “Spring Garden”. Painted sky blue on the outside with elegant interiors, the house used to be owned by a famous artist called Taro Gyushima and his small-time actor wife Kaiko Umamura who extensively photographed their house from every angle and in each season. The couple divorced two years after the book was published. The house, long abandoned by the tasteful couple was now inhabited by the Morio family – young, wealthy, and unaware that their house is Nishi’s object of long-hold curiosity

Nishi’s desire to see the house, especially its green-tiled bathroom, makes her strike a friendship with Mrs Mario with the hopes of being invited inside one day. Taro reluctantly joins her but soon, he is taken with the house too. However, close and repeated examinations of the photographs suggest that not everything is as rosy as it looks.

The delight is in the details

Shibasaki’s novel about a house delights in the details. The intricate descriptions of the trees, flowers and insects that populate the apartment building’s garden rethink what home and shelter mean for different species. Taro has a keen eye for nature – and his obsession with a certain insect inspires curiosity and disgust in both him, and the reader. A feeling not all too different from what we feel as we wonder what lies behind glass windows and closed doors of the homes we walk past every day.

The author chooses to focus on the mood instead of the plot to show how relationships are formed in our urban jungles and what the motivation for those might be. The rapid and uniform urbanisation of homes have deeper effects on our psyche than we perhaps realise. Coming to terms with something as solid and (seemingly) infallible as a house ceasing to exist is never easy – suddenly our memories are not anchored anymore and the fundamental unit of the family feels compromised.

The last section of the novel, narrated by Taro’s elder sister in the first voice attests to this. The short section ruminates on how our very perception of life is shaped by the physical spaces we grow up in, with the childhood home becoming a mythical place where everything was fine and you were the happiest.

And yet, Shibasaki eases the readers into changes that are inevitable in their lives. Everything that humans build – and our lives too – is slowly fading into time. The house of Nishi’s desire will be knocked down and converted into another nondescript building. The original residents of the house are gone, and so will Nishi, Taro and the Morio family when the house disappears. They meet briefly only to be thrown apart again by the city’s modernisation projects.

We are in the middle of change even when our lives feel suspended in time. Taro’s post-divorce existence is sparse and slow, yet the constantly evolving city makes it impossible for him to linger long on the new changes in his life. As buildings and bridges keep popping up on our skylines, the realisation hits that contentment is no longer a practical goal – we’re on an infinite chase for an impossible, unachieavable dream.

Spring Garden, Tomoka Shibasaki, translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton, Pushkin Press.