All the Houses in a Quiet Neighborhood (Part 2)

This piece is my practicum translation for the Spring 2026 semester. Because I liked the story and wanted to translate more, this is a continuation of my Fall 2025 practicum, a translation of 「つまらない住宅地のすべての家」 (which I've tentatively titled "All the Houses in a Quiet Neighborhood") by Kikuko Tsumura (津村記久子）. If you haven't read it yet, please click here to read part 1.

Disclaimer: I don't own the rights to the original story. While I plan to reach out to the author and publisher to see if they would like me to continue translating it publication, I make no money off of the translation published here. The translation is my own, but is unofficial. The purpose for this translation is for me to practice translating techniques and processes, to provide potential partners/employers a sample of my work that demonstrates my creative and technical abilities, and to share my work with my friends and family that are curious about my translations.

~~~~~~

The local news is on, broadcasting a story about an escaped convict on the run. Takahiro thinks that Atsuko seems unusually interested in the story as he peers over her head to see the screen. As if suddenly remembering something, Atsuko picks up the remote and changes to a channel playing cartoons from overseas.

“I took out the garbage, is there anything else you need me to do?”

“Nope. That was everything.”

Hearing Atsuko’s voice, Takahiro is somehow comforted. She does not seem to have any obvious complaints, but he thinks that her mind is wrapped up in several different things. When the mother of their neighbors to the left had come home one evening for the first time in a long time, Atsuko had asked her if the her oldest daughter was doing the laundry and other chores. The girl’s mother became irate, yelling at Atsuko for some more than 10 minutes (“Who do you think you are?”, “Stay out of it!”, “You think you can understand my situation without having children of your own? There’s no way you could!”). On top of this, Atsuko had been looking after a girl who had switched to a different advisor when she entered her senior year. This in itself was nothing unusual, but it seemed having to do so much for the girl was a shock to Atsuko. She had various meetings with the girl when she had needed advice and invited the girl over to Atsuko’s place for when she had said that she had no money for food. Atsuko had been a newspaper reporter for 20 years but is still in her early days being a college professor. She seems like she has complicated feelings even with regard to things that would not be a big deal for someone who had more experience teaching.

Between the matters of the mother of their neighbor to the left and living too close to the university they work at, Takahiro is beginning to think that they should move. This house is just a rental. The house itself is neither good nor bad and it would be fair to say that the surrounding neighborhood was boring, so Takahiro had no lingering attachments to the place, but moving in the middle of the school year would probably be tough. If they could, maybe moving during spring break would be a good idea. Even though that was still a ways away.

Atsuko’s phone begins ringing from atop the dining room table. Takahiro checks who is calling, the name of Atsuko’s problem student is displayed.

“It’s Nashiki,” Takahiro calls over to Atsuko.

“Ugh, fine.” She shakes her head as she gets up and comes over to the table. Her phone suddenly stops ringing and she begins to play the voicemail Nashiki left. Then, she receives a text. Atsuko reads the self-centered message from her lock screen. Professor Koyama, I have something I’d like to discuss. Please answer your phone.

“I don’t want to go to school.”

Takahiro accidentally laughs aloud at Atsuko’s honesty. He thinks she sounds like a kid.

At their university, Atsuko teaches writing and Takahiro teaches literature. It’s a small school and it’s not like the two of them have any sort of prestige, but they feel they have a stable reputation. Takahiro has been a professor ever since graduating from graduate school. Atsuko was formerly a reporter, but when the year came around that she was supposed to get promoted, she quit. They are both the same age, meeting when Atsuko switched her career to being a professor and later married when they were both 42 years old. In the two years since, Atsuko had been undergoing fertility treatments, but the treatment was a large physical burden on Atsuko and they were not blessed with a child.

Being professors, they agreed to just focus on teaching their students. Just when they had, the problem student came into Atsuko’s life, constantly asking things of her. After Atsuko had met the student’s demands, she had transferred to a different advisor who had become a professor at their university last year after retiring from his position as a chief editor at a famous magazine. Takahiro had told Atsuko to stop helping the student out, but Atsuko had lent this student rent money, and while Takahiro didn’t know the details, there was even a time when she took over some of the student’s debt. Even though Takahiro knew that this sort of thing happens often, he thinks it was still hard on Atsuko. Even now, although the student seemed to be planning on maintaining a reasonable distance from Atsuko, Takahiro thought that the student wasn’t doing a very good job at conducting herself. He could feel how frustrated Atsuko was with the situation and he thought that Atsuko was being too much of a push-over. Nevertheless, that was also something he loved about her, a reason that he married her.

Around that time, Atsuko had been yelled at by the mother next door and seemed to lose her spirit. Seeing her sat there at the table, dispassionately eating half of her rice ball that she had bisected with her chopsticks, Takahiro begins thinking that maybe they should not wait for spring break to move after all. They are only renting this place because it is close to where they work, and he is coming to feel as though their opinions did not match those of the other residents in the area to begin with, living in their old houses.

Residential areas with identical houses that continue on as far as the eye can see have no vitality. The only thing in the vicinity is a supermarket ten minutes walking distance from Takahiro’s house where everyone in the neighborhood goes to buy all their groceries. Walking ten minutes in the opposite direction, he can finally reach a convenience store, but he recalls visiting it once on a holiday and how he was shocked at how in-demand the place was, with the line for the check-out wrapped all the way around the store. And no one ever does anything here. He cannot say that the residents have a bad quality of life, but he feels that they have a sort of stubbornness where they would not step a single step outside of their neighborhood. Perhaps it was to cut their electricity bills, but many houses did not leave their gate lights or their front lights on at night. Of course, that’s a decision each house can make for itself, but even in areas of the neighborhood that don’t have streetlights, they don’t turn on their lights. Looking at the houses with their curtains left shut, Takahiro has come to think that for the people of each house, their home is an isolated island, that the passersby and houses around them are far off countries. If someone were to be starving or collapsed outside, surely no one would lift a finger. Naturally, this wasn’t the case for all the houses, but it was something that caught his eye often in this area.

“Hey, I’ve been thinking that maybe we should move.” He tags on, “Even if it’s close to work, this neighborhood is so out of the way of everything.”

“But we haven’t even lived here for three years yet.” Atsuko looks up at him.

“Would it be a hassle to move?”

“I don’t know…let me think about it.” Atsuko’s gaze falls back downward. She mumbles, “Wow, this rice ball is so good, I like the pickled plum.” She takes a sip of tea. “That reminds me”—she lifts her head again— “A little while ago, I heard a huge bang come from the house on the corner.”

“Really? I wonder if the husband has been drinking even in the morning.”

“Does he seem like that sort of guy?”

“He doesn’t.”

Takahiro knows that there are a lot of people that usually seem sensible that are actually strange, but still, he doesn’t think that is the case here.

Compared to the mother of the house to their left, their neighbors to the left—the couple living in the big, old house on the end—seem very sensible, but sometimes the unsettling noise of something colliding with or someone hitting the wall comes from that house. The noise sounds similar to someone falling out of bed, but even so, hearing it once every few days is still pretty frequent. Not that it was really much of a bother hearing it in the quiet night.

Once, Takahiro had brought up the matter to the husband.

“Do you fall out of bed often? I heard a sound last night… I’m not trying to complain, I was just wondering if you were alright.”

“Sorry, I occasionally run into the wall when I’ve been drinking and what have you,” the man said, bowing apologetically. He bowed so many times that Takahiro did not pursue the topic any further.

“The kid next door is so cute, don’t you think?”

“Do you mean the sisters?”

“Well, them too, but I mean the boy in the house at the end of the ally. I sometimes see him out walking when I’m coming home from school. He sort of reminds me of a sumo wrestler.”

“He does, doesn’t he.” Frankly, Takahiro was shocked to see such a large child being raised by a father that was probably around 5’2”. And his mother is short, too. The two of them are polite and always so timid.

“What should we do? If it’s weighing on us so much, should we try asking about it again?” tagging on, “I can be the one to bring it up this time.” Takahiro doesn’t want to add any stress to his wife right now.

Atsuko shakes her head. “No, it’s alright. It’s not like it’s a that big of a problem.”

“I mean, they aren’t especially bad people, right?”

“If there comes a day when we really get sick of it, let’s say something.”

They say this, but Takahiro also feels like that day will never come. Apart from that couple being really discreet, he is able to intuit that there is some sort of complicated situation that the couple is dealing with. At not wanting to get involved and not wanting to help, Takahiro feels like he’s becoming the same as the people that makes him feel so out of place by leaving their curtains shut, but more than that, he gets the feeling from the couple in the house at the end of the street that they don’t want people meddling in their personal affairs. Thinking of this, you could say that the mother in the house to their left that yelled directly at Atsuko is easier to deal with, in a way. In the mother’s case, if anything were to happen, without hesitation, Atsuko and Takahiro could just give child services a call.

“But if your reasoning is that they aren’t bad people, most people aren’t bad people, right?”

“I mean, until they do something bad.” Atsuko says this as she gulps down her seaweed soup and claps her hands together thanking Takahiro for the meal. “I saw the photo of the escaped embezzler that might be headed our way, she didn’t seem like a bad person.”

With that, Atsuko gets dressed and heads out for the university. As Takahiro washes the dishes from this breakfast-for-two, the buzzer rings. “Who the heck is calling at this hour,” he mumbles to himself as he goes to check the monitor of the doorbell camera. He finds half of the face of Mr. Marukawa, his neighbor living kitty corner to the front of them, displayed on the screen.

“Good morning! Since he’s the vice president of our neighborhood watch, I was hoping to speak with Mr. Aihara about the fugitive that’s on the run and possibly coming towards our neighborhood…”

Vice president? Takahiro thinks to himself for a second. Now that he mentions it, he does recall the role of vice president coming around to him at last month’s neighborhood watch meeting. Having moved here a little over two years ago, he wasn’t sure if he should take up such a post, but there were very few people that participated in the neighborhood watch, so he had little say in the matter.

“I’ll be brief.”

Takahiro thinks a moment at Mr. Marukawa’s words, then responds, “As long as you’re very brief,” and heads towards his front door.

***

“Since her name is Mizuki Yajima, her name is Midookie! All the guys in our class call her Midookie!”

At her little brother’s story, their mother turns to him and responds to him in a sweet tone, “Shou, don’t say such rude things.”

Knowing that of course their mother would never really admonish him seriously, her little brother Shourin argues further. “Midookie is always taking out the garbage so she always smells like garbage.”

“Oh, come on…” their mother responds, laughing as she pours orange juice into his glass. And you’re a dumb cow, Chisato wanted to say back to him.

Apparently, Shourin had opened the window as soon as he got up that morning and happened to catch sight of the eldest daughter of the family two doors down, the Yajimas, taking out the garbage. It seems to Chisato that in his small, extremely entertainment-starved world, even his classmate taking out the garbage on garbage day was big news.

Shourin, five years younger than Chisato, is always making fun of someone, not just the eldest Yajima girl. Chisato tries to recall whether or not she had ever been scolded by her parents when she had made fun of someone in front of them, but nothing comes to mind. Perhaps it was because she hadn’t ever thought she could really make fun of anyone before since she was scared of her older brother and sister.

A news report about the fugitive that could be headed their way is playing on the TV. A map of the path the fugitive has taken to run away from jail appears on the screen. Sure enough, it seems to Chisato that the fugitive is coming closer to this area—the fugitive’s hometown—little by little, but Chisato isn’t sure if that is looking into things too much. Maybe the fugitive would just pass through the area, Chisato tries to think.

“If I find that lady, I’m gonna sock her one and capture her!”

“You better not! She could be dangerous. If you see her, don’t get near her, just ignore her…”

Ignoring his mother, Shourin doubles down, “I’M GONNA BEAT HER UP!”

“Aw, shut up…” Chisato mumbles into her cup as she finishes off her orange juice and sets the glass down hard on the table as if in protest.

Chisato’s sister Maya, a senior in college, says in a low voice, glaring at Chisato’s hand gripping the glass. Chisato wants to respond What the heck! Say that to HIM too! But this whole morning she absolutely did not have the energy to argue with her older sister, so she held her tongue.

“Be quiet,” their dad finally reprimands them, but her little brother continues on with growing excitement.

“I’LL PUNCH HER!” he responds vehemently.

Having reprimanded his son once, their father looks away from Shourin and turns towards the TV. “It looks like this lady was one of our close neighbors, huh?”

“SHE’S A BAD GUY!”

As their father’s comment is drowned out by her brother’s assertive voice, news of the fugitive finishes and the next segment comes on. Come to think of it, Chisato remembers that she and her brother had watched news stories together like a man shooting up a school in the U.S. and a man killing his mistress, unable to accept that she wanted to end things with him. During those stories, her brother never said that he would “punch them” or that they were “bad guys”.　But it seems that a female embezzler that has escaped from jail is fair game to him. Her little brother isn’t concerned with consistency. He instinctually separates people into groups like people that he has a connection to and people he doesn’t, and people he could win against and people he couldn’t. This annoys Chisato to no end even though she is a child herself. Or perhaps it is precisely because she is a child herself that her brother’s childishness is such a nuisance.

Although she doesn’t particularly like school either, she figures that it will be better to be there than home, so she quickly finishes what is left of her breakfast. It is still a little early to be headed to school, so she decides she can go back to her room and listen to music for a few minutes.

She says thanks for breakfast and heads into the hall, running into her father who is about to leave for work. She suddenly remembers what he had mentioned about the fugitive.

“Is she really one of our neighbors?”

Her father responds that she was from a particular neighborhood that he had heard from a client.

“That’s pretty close, isn’t it?”

“I even know the name of the high school she went to.” Her father says the name of a trade school as if it is not strange that it is the high school Chisato wants to get into. He says bye to her and heads out for the neighborhood construction company that he runs.

“See you soon,” Chisato says as she enters the hallway that leads back to her room which connects this house to her family’s house next door.

Their house is complicated and big. Chisato’s grandfather on her mother’s side had bought the building behind their home when the previous owner had moved out after which he connected it to his own house, and she had heard from her mother that he was able to buy the house next door for a cheap price at auction. Chisato knows that her family is reasonably wealthy, but she doesn’t understand why her family, had taken root here rather than moving into some other new house, continuing to expand their territory by buying houses in the neighborhood that they could get their hands on.

Chisato’s room is the room farthest from where the family has their meals, so going to and from her room is annoying, but it also means she can spend more time alone. As she walks up the stairs, she thinks about the news about the fugitive that she had seen earlier. Why did she run away? They reported that she had always been well behaved while she was in jail. Apparently, some kind of riot had broken out during a mealtime in the facility and she had taken advantage of the confusion to escape. Her crime had been corporate embezzlement; she had been pocketing funds from her workplace for 10 years.

Up in her room, tucked away in a corner of the second floor, Chisato listens to a song by Adele and then goes back downstairs. With her school bag over her shoulder, she crosses the hall. When she tries to go to her mother’s room, her grandmother is standing there. Chisato wonders whether they had run into each other by coincidence or if her grandmother had been waiting for her. As Chisato casts her eyes down and tries to pass in front of her, her grandmother stops her.

“You were asking Hiroshi about the fugitive, right?”

“I did, why?” Chisato raises her head to see that her grandmother is opening her mouth like she wants to say something, but Chisato remembers that it is already time to go to school. “Sorry, I can’t talk right now,” she says as she slips around her grandmother’s slender frame.

“Hey, would you like to go together to visit your grandfather soon?”

“I’ll think about it.”

Chisato is puzzled by why her grandmother had suddenly brought up a topic completely unrelated to the fugitive. Is her grandmother that sort of person? Chisato had lived with her since she was born, but still, she did not really know her all that well. For Chisato, grandmother was grandmother. Chisato assumes that if she had ever called her “Gramma” or “Gran”, her grandmother would not have responded. In general, her grandmother is a person that keeps this sort of distance from people. Though her grandmother had made Chisato her apron that she used in kindergarten instead of her not-so-dexterous mother and her grandmother makes her lunches that are much more aesthetic than those her mother makes her, they never go out to places together or spent time hanging out together. They don’t even watch TV in the same room. For her grandmother, this was the sort of relationship grandparents had with their grandchildren, even though her mother clings to her grandmother.

Her grandmother highly values family and pays close attention to appearances, but Chisato has thought before that if she had not been her family member, she would be like a bug that had gotten into the house to her grandmother. Once, when a delivery person had come to deliver a package to one of the houses in the neighborhood, the delivery person had stopped to use the light coming from the bathroom of Chisato’s house to check the address on the package. Her grandmother happened to see him doing this from inside the house, and even though he was still checking the package’s label, Chisato saw her grandmother turn off the light. At the time, Chisato had been glad that she was a member of her grandmother’s family, but all the same, she also became afraid that her grandmother would treat her just as coldly if she had not been.

“Your grandfather had wanted to see you, you know.”

“Oh, really? Well, I’ll see you after school.” Chisato notices her grandmother starting to make excuses. Her grandmother seems to have forgotten that three months earlier when they had gone to visit him in the hospital, he had already grown senile and mistook Chisato for a nurse. Looking at it from a different angle, this is all Chisato was to her grandmother as well. And while he did not dislike Chisato, her grandfather had also never fawned over her. It seems that he had felt that he had done enough cooing over Chisato’s two older siblings, her brother and sister, so after Chisato’s father took over the company, her grandfather had taken to going out.

Chisato wonders why her grandmother had struck up a conversation with her, but even just thinking about it feels pointless. As she leaves the house, her mother is watering the flower beds that envelop the house on either side. The flowers bloom in profusion as if trying to appease her mother. As if to say that such a large house made of three homes attached together with so many blooming flowers could not possibly be unhappy.

“Have a nice day!” her mother calls to her.

“You too,” Chisato replies.

There are hydrangeas planted in a pot at the corner of the ally entrance, their overgrown stems and leaves obstructing the view around the corner. Once, Chisato had almost gotten hit by a bicyclist riding on the shoulder of the road, but when she told her mother about it, she had only responded saying “Oh, really?” Her sharp-eared brother had overheard this and had laughed at her, saying that it was her fault for being such a klutz. When Chisato had told him to shut up, her mother had scolded her to not use such language.

~~~

Again today, the toast tastes like a dust rag, even on such a bright and sunny day. Nozomu surveys the mountain of parcel boxes that have begun encroaching on the kitchen area. He had wanted to open all of them by today, but he couldn’t. It feels like that is someone else’s problem. What would she think if she came over? Would she think that he just had a bunch of cardboard boxes?

The reason he just can’t bring himself to open the boxes is that he might have bought two of the same things. He feels scared knowing this. He was scared that he might come to his senses and think I have no money, what am I doing? Unopened Cushion covers and sheets, posters and tapestries, he buys two of the same things so that he could use one and store one, but he keeps himself from buying multiples of anything else. He displays unopened figurines, leaving them in their original packaging. For his online shopping deliveries, he leaves them in their cardboard boxes or the shipping company’s brown envelopes, telling himself that they are preserved if he leaves them the way they came.

After finishing his dust-rag-flavored toast, he sets out to go rent a car. He still can’t decide between a minivan or a smaller car. His target has class until 5^th period today, so by his calculations she would be leaving school around 2:30 p.m. That way, he would stop in front of the park that is at the half-way point on the route she takes to school. She likes animals, so when she walks by the park, he will call out to her, “There’s a rare mallard in the pond, come see! Could you take a picture of me with it? All I need you to do is push the shutter button.” Nozomu’s research had concluded that a pair of mallards come to this park every day at 2:30 p.m. She knows this and may think them to be a regular pair of mallards. This will depend on how convincing his opinion of “rare” is. He had talked with her once a while ago about herons she had seen near the park. She had taught him that the herons that come to the park are gray herons. His cute target had happily explained to him that her not-so-cute older sister had shown no interest in birds so the girl was happy she found another human that would listen to her talk about them.

Nozomu rents a car in as far away a place as he can. He chose a target location that has no logical connection to his job or his normal behavior. He covers the seats in the back with a pink plastic sheet, covering any areas his target might leave DNA. I want you to take my photo at a pond in another park! You’re really good at taking photos for being in elementary school. It’s at a park where the gray herons are that we saw the other day. But it’s a bit far away, we should probably go there by car. He doesn’t know if they are the ones they saw the other day, but there are gray herons in a park in the neighboring town.

When returning his rental car, he will throw away the plastic sheet at the garbage collection area of an apartment near the dealership. The garbage there will be collected the next day at 10 o’clock and will be pulverized right there in the garbage truck, so the remanence of any evidence is unlikely.

He had thought up this whole plan while he was at work. He had come to not be able to bear his work just by listening to Eriza Nunomiya songs, looking at photos and watching videos during his breaktimes. “You must be listening to something lame, I can tell without even asking what crap you’re listening to; Quit watching videos, you should be thinking about work. How to improve productivity. You’re the only one that is behind,” Sekiguchi, a full-time employee at the company and Nozomu’s superior, would pester him. Shut up—how dare you disparage me while having a picture of such an ugly daughter on your desktop background? Why don’t you just go home and make love to your pig of a wife? You piece of shit…

Sitting there with his eyelids half closed, Nozomu thinks this as he listens to Sekiguchi’s sermons without raising an eyebrow. Always.

Sekiguchi’s ugly daughter looks like she’s about a second-grader. The same age as his target. If a girl her same age goes missing, surely word will get around at this ugly girl’s school as well. You mustn’t go anywhere with strangers. But, she doesn’t need to worry, no one would ever lay a finder on such an ugly kid. If Sekiguchi were to even mention at work that his daughter is worried, Nozomu would tell him that his daughter was in the clear since she was no looker. He would spit this at him.

Nozomu just wants to think of his target, but the photo of Sekiguchi’s ugly daughter rolling a large ball at a track and field day event that is displayed on Sekiguchi’s desktop keeps incessantly coming into his mind. A girl that he has never even heard the voice of, a girl that he doesn’t even know the name of.

I’ve got a right to sweep away a little girl just because you’re scum and it would hurt you. But this target not being your daughter would be ironic enough.

Every time he thinks this, Nozomu gets a feeling like something inside his head is shifting. One could call it a thrill. Like the feeling you get at the beginning of a rollercoaster ride. At this, Nozomu would get a sensation like dizziness. He feels like his disdain for something is increasing exponentially. In the sense that he reproached the misfortune surrounding him, he thinks that he should take a more rational course of action.

After finishing his toast, Nozomu downs an energy drink and takes out the garbage.