The Lake (11 page)

“What do you mean?” I said. “I’m not interested in Pasteur. All I know about him is that he did something with silkworms and invented the vaccine for rabies. And maybe that his grave is under that institute you mentioned or something? Is that right?”

“That’s a pretty impressive array of useless trivia.”

“I learned it all on TV. A documentary on public television.”

“Ah, that explains it. It’s funny, though—don’t these things interest you at all, like what school I go to, and what department I’m in, and what I work on?”

“Not really. Even if you told me, I wouldn’t remember. It’s all DNA and human genomes and that stuff, right? And you’re in med school but you aren’t going to be a doctor? And you do research, I know that, but it’s not like you’re working on Ajinomoto or brewer’s yeast or anything else I’d know about, right? Rice bran and stuff?”

“No, nothing like that, it’s true. Listening to you talk, Chihiro, I really get a sense of how lopsided ordinary people’s knowledge of science is.”

“You think?”

“You really aren’t interested, huh?”

“I do remember that you wanted to do research on blue-green algae. That’s why you went into a department of agriculture, right?”

“I didn’t want to study blue-green algae, I was interested in doing an experiment that used them. I’d cultivate the algae and then investigate the conditions that make it possible to inject certain genes into them. And I didn’t graduate from a department of agriculture—well, I guess maybe it used to be called that, but the actual name was the Department of Biological Resources, and I was in the Biotechnology Program. It’s totally different, right? And now I’m in medical school, in the Graduate School of Medicine.”

“I’ll never remember those things, you know—I mean, as soon as I hear blue-green algae I immediately assume it’s got to be the department of agriculture, that’s just the image I have. Besides, it’s not like you’re interested in the program I graduated from, are you?”

“The Program of Scenography, Display, and Fashion Design in the Junior College of the N. University of Arts, right? And you majored in the scenography thing, not design?”

“I can’t believe you remember. Even I’d forgotten.”

“I don’t usually forget things like that. I only have to hear them once.”

“So anyway, what was the question? What I’d do if you left?”

“I’m sure there must be tons of art schools in Paris,” Nakajima said.

“Yeah, there are.”

“Some half-year programs, some yearlong programs.”

“I’d imagine so.”

“Well, go to one! Let’s go together!” Nakajima said. “I’ve decided I’m going to live with you like this for the rest of my life.”

“What do you mean you’ve
decided
. Are you proposing to me?” I said, feeling suddenly heavy, not at all pleased.

“No,” Nakajima said crisply, shaking his head.

“Then what do you mean?” I asked.

And Nakajima answered. “That’s just how it has to be. Because I can live with you, even though I can’t live with anyone else. And I’m tired of always being by myself. I’m tired of sleeping alone, with that wire rack under my arm. Now that I know what it’s like not to be on my own, I can’t go back to living the way I was before.”

“Somehow it’s not much fun when you lay it all out like that,” I said. “Paris, huh? I would like to go sometime, only right now I’m really enjoying my work a lot, you know?”

“You don’t have another job scheduled yet, do you?” Nakajima asked.

“No. There are a few possibilities, but none of them seem to be in a rush.”

“What’s the problem, then?” Nakajima said. “Do you really need to be in Japan now, at this moment in your life, at this exact moment in your life?”

He had a point. I wasn’t particularly interested in Paris, but I did like the idea of being able to spend several days going through the Louvre from start to finish, since I’d only been there for about an hour once with my mom. I hadn’t seen Versailles yet, either.

And now that my mom was gone, there was nothing to keep me in Japan.

A flood of loneliness hit me the second I realized that.

I wanted my mom to be alive, tying me down. To be showing her disapproval, telling me,
I don’t know, going abroad?—it’s so far, and we won’t be able to see each other
. I yearned to hear those words, to hear her saying them. But I never would again.

“That’s true, I guess.”

“This idea that you have to stay—that’s how people think when they have a family, and it’s located in some fixed place, whereas you and I …”

Having said this much of something huge, Nakajima fell silent.

The way he broke off suggested he had said as much as he could, as much as he wanted to. I was used to this by now. I didn’t know where it came from, but I had grasped the outlines.

After a long pause, he continued. “I think it’d be great if we could share an apartment, and meals. Since this is my idea, we don’t even have to go halvsies. I’ll cover what you can’t.”

“Halvsies. I haven’t heard that word in a while,” I said, changing the topic for a moment. Then, “I have the money my mom left me, so I think I could probably afford it. I’m sure my dad would help out, too.”

Nakajima nodded. “After all, when your mom passed away, your dad inherited that club of hers, right? You have every right to ask him for a little money. Sometimes asking a favor is the best way to show your love, don’t you think?”

He had a point there, too, though I’d been trying not to think about that.

“You’re too cavalier about money, Chihiro. Just not in the usual way.”

It tickled me to have Nakajima lecturing me on practical matters. I grinned.

Lately, he was starting to speak more and more freely, in words that came from deep inside him. And that made me happy.

I’d do anything to help him keep moving in that direction.

I was even willing to go see my dad, and be pleasant.

One afternoon, my good buddy Yotchan came over to the wall with his friend Miki to bring me a snack. Rice crackers, potato chips, and chocolate.

“See, with all this color they’re not ghosts anymore, are they?” I said.

The design was almost finished, and I spent my days staring at it, adding a bit of color here and there and redoing parts to make it more balanced. I was at the stage when all the different parts gradually begin to come together, to form a world of their own.

“Poor ghosts,” Yotchan said. “They still look lonely.”

“Don’t talk like that! You’re scaring me!” Miki cried. “I hate ghosts.”

“Even if they’re monkeys?” I asked.

I guess even with the color, their loneliness still shines through
.

“Yeah.”

“I’ve never seen a real lake,” Yotchan said.

“I have. I saw Lake Ashi,” Miki said.

I listened to their conversation, marveling at its novelty. At the same time, I was thinking to myself that I had failed, they still looked like ghosts. The kids could see that somehow they were different from the other monkeys. Although if I was able to express those kinds of things, maybe I wasn’t such a bad painter after all.…

After that, Yotchan and Miki started talking about some TV show, and I went on painting in the colors. They were in the way, but even so I was glad they had come.

When I glanced back, they were squatting down eating the snacks they had brought, along with some
manjū
Sayuri had handed out, chattering back and forth. I took a swig of hot herbal tea from my thermos and tried to think of some way I could capture the brilliance of their exchanges, the colors that glittered in their words.

My butt felt cold from sitting on the ground and my sides hurt from having my arms up in the air for so long, but I couldn’t stop painting.

With each color I added, another rose up before me, and I would keep chasing them, one after the other, until the sun set and I couldn’t paint anymore, and then I’d go home and sleep like a log.

Now when I thought of home, Nakajima was part of the picture. He was always studying, and always stayed in my apartment, whether or not I was there.
I guess he really must want to be with me
. He came over because he wanted to. I could believe that, I felt, more than I ever could have with anyone else.

Wherever Nakajima is, that’s the place I go home to. That’s what lets me go all day without thinking about anything. About what I’m going to do with my life, stuff like that.

Eventually the kids left, and I was taking a break, pleased with the progress I’d made today, when Sayuri appeared, making a beeline for me, her expression glum.

She’d always smiled and waved when I saw her before, so I waited, wondering what was up.

“Do you have a minute, Chihiro?” she said.

“Doesn’t look like it’s good news,” I said.

They must have decided to tear down the center, I thought, even with the mural here.

In fact, it was a somewhat trickier problem. Something that gave me pause.

“We got a call from the district mayor, he says they’ve got a sponsor.”

“A sponsor? But I thought the district was paying for this!”

“The thing is, they were talking things over, and apparently this sponsor says that if it will help energize the district he’s willing to assume the entire cost.”

“That’s odd. It doesn’t seem necessary at this point,” I said.

Sayuri nodded. “I know. The catch is that he wants you to work his company’s logo into the picture somehow, as big as possible. You know that sign on the roof of the huge
kon’nyaku
factory near the turnoff for the highway? That’s it.”

Sayuri showed me a picture. It was the most bizarre logo you could imagine: an incredibly ugly combination of colors, mostly gray, with the company mascot in the middle. The mascot was a block of
kon’nyaku
with a smiley face.

“Oh, my god!” I laughed. “You’ve got to be kidding!”

Sayuri burst out laughing, too.

We were both well aware that in this society, things you’d think could only be bad jokes actually happen all the time. And so, wiping away a few tears after my laughter had subsided, I told her, “There’s no way. I mean, I’ve practically finished the design.”

Even as I spoke, I was trying to think of some way to incorporate a humorous take on the logo into the mural, but it really didn’t seem possible.

And I had a sneaking suspicion that even if it were possible, the sponsor wouldn’t like it if I made a joke of his logo.

“At any rate, I’ll try and negotiate,” Sayuri said. “Don’t lose hope.”

This sounded like it could get annoying.

“Listen, why don’t I just quit, someone else can finish it. With the logo,” I suggested. “Or you can find someone to design a whole new picture around the logo.”

“Why do you always have to be so absolute about things?” Sayuri said, stunned.

So I had to try again. “How about this, then: I’ll have to put the name of the district in as a sponsor over my signature, so why don’t just we add the logo there, too, very small?”

“The president of the company wants it bigger, as part of the picture,” Sayuri said. “But if it’s going to end up being an ad, there’s really no point in having you paint it. Right now I’m threatening them, telling them it will cost a million yen to redo the whole picture.”

Sayuri grinned.

I like her when she’s like that, so I tried to be as gentle as I could, so that I wouldn’t sound like I was just being picky. “To tell the truth, I don’t think my pictures are particularly great. And I’ve been painting this one knowing that it might well be destroyed sometime in the not-too-distant future. But there’s a huge difference between
not
saying you
won’t
paint anything because it might be destroyed and saying sure, anything goes because it might be destroyed. I may not be much of a painter, but I don’t just do any old thing, like someone doing hand-painted movie posters. Whenever someone offers me a job, I only take it under the condition that I can paint what I want—and I think I’m able, maybe only barely able but still able, to create murals that justify that freedom. So for someone to come along, just like that, and … it doesn’t matter what it is, no matter how cute the
kon’nyaku
character is, or if it’s Pikachu or Gandam or Hamtaro—I don’t care, if someone is telling me to put something like that into a mural of mine, it means they didn’t understand my work when they hired me.”

“I understand that, I really do. That’s the whole reason I wanted you to take this on, and I take full responsibility for everything that’s happening, so you don’t have to worry. I just came to fill you in, not to try to persuade you.”

Like the good teacher she was, Sayuri kept calm and inspired trust.

“At any rate, if this turns out to be an inflexible demand, I can’t do it, I can’t work in a system like that,” I said. “It’s totally wrong. They’re asking the wrong person. Tell them they ought to ask a sign-painter for stuff like that. I’m not disrespecting sign painters, by the way—it’s just a different profession. I know I’m only a step or two above an amateur, but I can’t switch professions for something like this.”

I looked at the mural. Poor monkeys. You may end up being painted over, painted out of existence. But who knows? Maybe Yotchan and his friends will remember that you were here, even if only for a short time.

The thought liberated me. I felt as if the things I’d been clinging to were crumbling, blowing away in the wind, dispersing. Leaving me free to go anywhere I wanted.

This is nice, I thought, really nice.

I figured I might as well take a picture, anyway, and snapped a shot with my digital camera, with the sky as the background. To preserve the joy of this special stage in the painting.

“I’m sure there’s a way,” Sayuri said. “For starters, I’m planning to show the video of that TV program you were in to the people in the mayor’s office, and from the company. I’ll try and make them see how valuable this is as art.”

“Kind of embarrassing, considering the quality of my work,” I said.

For the first time, though, I was beginning to take what I was doing a tiny bit seriously.