この古い家

About month prior to the Great Tohoku Earthquake of March 11, 2011, Jessica and I were frantically searching for a new place to live. Due to some confusing business dealings that we still don't fully understand, we were basically forced out of our cozy little LeoPalace apartment. We decided early on that we were going to use this opportunity to find a house, as opposed to just relocating to another typical cramped Japanese apartment.

One of our good friends (a hapless gaijin like ourselves) put us in touch with the rental company that leases his house. He was kind enough to take us down to their office and help us with translating Japanese landlord legalese, three levels of communication that I possess only rudimentary functionality in. Jess, being the nekomaniac she is, had only a single condition for our new home: they must allow us to have a cat. So, they sit us down with an agent, serve us green tea, and begin to show us currently available properties.

Eight hundred bucks for this one, six-fifty for that one; houses, apartments; no pets allowed, no cat/outdoor dog okay, and finally some cat-friendly locales. A few places were serviceable, but nothing felt perfect. If it was convenient, it wasn't pet-friendly; if it was pet-friendly, it was too small. We had compiled a short list of locations we wanted to visit, including a large studio apartment with only one parking spot. Since we have two cars, the parking was immediately brought up as a problem. The agent we were speaking to asked a colleague for a resolution, in which a covered car park was suggested at a house that was not being rented…

…And it suddenly dawned on the agent that she had not shown us this house. She printed out the listing and passed it to us. What we saw was almost beyond belief. A beautiful Japanese-style home, tiled roof, sliding doors and windows and all.

"It looks like it came right out of a Japanese horror movie," said Jessica.

Three tatami rooms, two toilets, a huge living room and kitchen. And the rent? Five hundred bucks per month. We were dumbfounded.

As we drooled over this black-and-white printout, a bit of trepidatious Japanese was quietly being uttered by our agent. We looked at our friend who slowly began to translate.

"It's a beautiful house, isn't it?," said the agent.

"Oh, yes. We love it," we replied.

"Yes, yes. Unfortunately, something…happened there."

Jessica burst into nervous laughter, realizing her comment from moments before. The agent took this as a bad sign, and quickly snatched the listing up and was about to close the topic for fear of losing a customer.

 "No, no!" said Jessica. "It's totally fine. What happened?"

The agent waited a beat, sat back down and began to speak through our translator.

"A family used to live there for many years. A father, a mother, and a son. The father became very sick and died in the house."

"Well, that's not as bad as I thought," I said.

She wasn't finished.

"Years later, the son killed his mother in the house."

Jess and I looked at each other.

"You know, this is exactly how horror films start," I said to Jessica.

"Oh, I know." Jessica turned to the agent with a single question, "So, are cats allowed?"

We've been living here more than a month at this point, ghosts and goblins be damned.

Some time after we learned about the events that transpired in the house, we finally got some details. Apparently, the son who killed his mother was in his fifties, putting his mom somewhere in here seventies or eighties at least. At this point, it doesn't seem like some act of youthful angst. It may have even been an attempt at euthanizing a suffering woman. In any case, after he offed his mama, the son attempted to commit suicide in the river near our house, but failed, and is now in prison for homicide.