Chapter 21Michiko walked beneath the raised highway that divided her old neighborhood from the new apartment complexes closer to Kawasaki Station. The matching beige apartment buildings looked like toy boxes dropped at random by a massive child. Newly planted flower beds and trees propped up with struts dotted the fitted-brick walkways and rolled-out grass turf.
Housewives hung out futons over the railings of identical balconies, a patchwork of bedding up and down the buildings. The whomp-whomp of futon-beaters reverberated through the air, the housewives thrashing out dust and sweat and clumps of stuffing along with frustration.
From the other side of the sound-insulated highway, the metallic-sulfur stench from thousands of small factories and foundries, most now abandoned, steered Mich
