The Lake (12 page)

It was hard to say for sure since the president of the company hadn’t seen the mural yet, but I had to acknowledge that some of the responsibility for what might happen lay with me. I just wasn’t good enough to paint a picture no one would want to mess up with a logo.

It’d be nice to study painting more, to see all kinds of really, really incredible artworks and realize just how minuscule I am.… All on its own, the path to Paris was opening up before me. I pictured Nakajima in profile, engrossed in his studies at home.

I wanted to be able to have that same look on my face when I painted. Not to run away from everything that had happened in a day, but to turn it all into another form of energy, make it part of myself. That’s how I wanted my painting to be.

But first I’d have to finish what I had started here.

“Okay, and I’ll do my best to get featured in a magazine or something, to make myself at least a little more visible,” I said. “Middle-aged men are impressed by that kind of thing, right? And I can ask the professor who advised me on my thesis project to write the mayor a letter—she’s a pretty well-known artist, and she’s from the area, so I bet her opinion will carry a lot of weight. She’s the one who did that weird bronze sculpture in front of the train station, I think. And on top of that, I’ll send a letter to the president of the company, along with some materials about the mural, making it as conciliatory and pleasant as possible, to try and bring him around. If that doesn’t work, we’ll just have to give up.”

I thought it was a splendid plan. Unless he were incredibly wealthy and eccentric, the president probably wouldn’t want to pay to have me erase a mural I had gone to all the trouble of painting and then do another one. I felt confident it would work.

“I bet that’ll do the trick,” Sayuri said. “I’m sorry, putting you to so much trouble.”

“That’s okay. I’ll give it a try.”

After all, I thought, maybe this will be my last job in Japan. I wasn’t necessarily determined to go on working as a muralist, so I really had no idea what the future might hold.

Things like this were bound to happen no matter what kind of life I ended up leading, and whether they turned out well or badly, I’d just have to do my best, the way I would this time. And inhale the sweet scent of the freedom I’d earned when it came wafting over.

“Let me know when something’s been decided,” I said. “I’ll take a break until then, once I get to a stopping place. It’s okay, I know it’s not your fault.”

I had things to do, and I needed to cool down, and it made me sad to look at the picture when it was so close to being done, so I hurriedly packed up my stuff.

Of course I wasn’t angry. I felt bad for Sayuri, actually.

It was only natural that they felt entitled to order me around—it’s not like I was a famous artist or anything. And I’m not a particularly imposing person, either: they probably assumed I’d just go right along with their request that I work an ad into my painting. I saw that.

In a way, it really made sense. That kind of willingness to give in is rampant in this society of ours. From banks to
ponzu
sauce … well, those are just examples. The point is that people have found a gazillion little opportunities to profit in questionable ways, all over the place. I’ve seen tons of cases, all across the board, where in order to grab on to those tiny profits people studiously adopt another perspective, keeping their true opinions to themselves, and no one takes responsibility, everyone just huddles together on some middle ground, and it all gets less and less clear, yet in the end everyone ends up being crammed into a rigid, unyielding framework. I’ve seen the same story play out over and over again.

But I couldn’t take it. The whole dumb setup just bored me to death.

Here I am playing nicely with the world, trying my best to leave things the tiniest bit better than they were, trying to fly even a little bit higher—how annoying it would be to have to go along with this crap. That was my take on it.

If I were Sayuri, for instance, and the Infant Development Center mattered more to me than anything else, and if I were part of the organization, I’m sure I could have found all kinds of solutions to their problems, and I would have gone with the policy that was best for everyone.

But in the current situation, going along with this new proposal would have gone against the essence of my profession. If I were a stranger passing through this district and I happened to see this wall and the ad were part of the mural, I’d think it was pathetic. Besides, I have to say I don’t think much of a company that feels it has to have its name plastered all over the place simply because it’s shelling out five hundred thousand yen.

Right now five hundred thousand yen is a huge amount of money to me, but that doesn’t mean I’ll just do whatever it takes to be paid. Especially not something like abandoning my professional standards, because that would throw the rest of my life out of balance.

All this reminded me of an incident involving a sculptor I respect.

This sculptor had been asked to create a sculpture for a plaza in a certain town in Europe. In the place where the plaza then stood there had once been a forest inhabited by gypsies, large numbers of whom had died during some war. So he suggested he make a statue showing gypsies. He was thinking of all the terrible discrimination gypsies have suffered. An open area like the plaza was, he thought, the perfect place to commemorate a population that had been subjected to the evils of the human spirit, whose true story had always been concealed, consigned to oblivion. But the mayor and the citizens of the town refused to go along—there were still gypsies, they said, who grabbed purses and picked pockets and generally made themselves a nuisance to tourists—people like them didn’t deserve to be celebrated with a statue. And so the whole project was indefinitely put on hold.

That’s how it goes. Things look different depending on your perspective.

As I see it, fighting to bridge those gaps isn’t what really matters. The most important thing is to know them inside and out, as differences, and to understand why certain people are the way they are.

My job was to insist on my own perspective, right to the end, and in order to do that I needed to brush up on my technique. However famous you may be, these disagreements are bound to continue, and ultimately it doesn’t really matter that I’m not that much of a painter.

Well, maybe it does. If I had more confidence, it’d be easier to hold my own.

That’s the crucial thing.

The truth, sad to say, is that I still can’t declare with any real conviction that the people of this town would be better off with my mural on the wall rather than that goofy logo. That’s the problem, I thought with a twinge of shame: I’m still too young, too green.

Returning early to the apartment, I found Nakajima studying madly, his PowerBook open and a dictionary in his hand.

“Early, aren’t you?” he said.

“I got stuff for dinner,” I said. “No need to make anything.”

I didn’t particularly need to say that, but that’s what came out.

“Oh? I was looking forward to making dinner again today. It’s a nice way to take a break,” Nakajima said. “How about I go and get us some coffee from that place where they roast the beans themselves? It would be nice to talk a walk.” Then, looking me in the face for the first time, “Oh, looks like something bad happened today.”

I nodded and told him what had happened.

“Yeah, it’s not surprising, given your low level of celebrity and how unsophisticated people are in that part of the city,” Nakajima said.

“You don’t mince words, do you?” I said, impressed.

“If you don’t say what you’re thinking, you end up lying when you really need to speak up,” Nakajima said.

“Anyhow, I can’t draw a stupid
kon’nyaku
logo into my picture. I just can’t.”

“Did you see what it looks like?”

“I did. It’s this
kon’nyaku
mascot with a weird blob of words above it.
Very
uncool.”

“Could you stick it in a corner somewhere, really small?”

“That would be fine with me, but the sponsor said it has to be big.”

“That’s something they would have had to make clear from the beginning.”

“You’re telling me.”

“And even if your picture is still a work in progress, it’s like a sapling that will eventually grow into a huge tree or something—it has that kind of glow. They’ve got to see that.”

“More plain speaking from Nakajima … I mean, even I don’t see that kind of value in my murals yet. That’s why I have no problem painting in a place that could be torn down.”

“I know, but your modest assessment of your own worth and the decision to treat your work like a billboard are two totally different things.”

“I’m with you there.”

“Besides, they hired you to do a job. They can’t keep changing their minds about what that job is.”

“Exactly.”

“How about telling them you’ll quit unless they agree to have the logo at the edge, very small?”

“That’s what I thought.”

“Do you have any connections? Professors at the art school, say, or some famous art critic?”

“A few.”

“Have them say something. It helps to fight authority with authority, I think. And if you could get someone to come do a story about your work, write an article that would give meaning to your mural or something, that would make your position stronger, too. And if you should end up in court or something, who cares? Sayuri can decide for herself where she stands.” Nakajima paused a moment, then continued. “See, people like us are never at the center of things. We’re always on the margins, and I generally figure it’s best not to stand out too much. Most of the time we see things in exactly the opposite light as the majority does, and people don’t look kindly on you if you stand out. When push comes to shove, though, you’ve got to have something you won’t cave in on. Otherwise, you end up like a recluse or something, cut off from the world.”

Our opinions were so close I felt as if he were reading my mind.

The amazing alignment of our perspectives made me forget how annoyed I’d been at the prospect of having to stop painting and go to all this trouble doing irrelevant things. That feeling faded so quickly it was like magic.

When something unpleasant happened during the day, I used to come home and pet my cat to cheer myself up. Being with Nakajima seemed to have a similar effect, neutralizing the poison that had accumulated inside me.

My old self would probably have come in without saying a word and tried to forget it all by having sex with whoever I was sleeping with just then, not talking to him about what had happened, keeping everything bottled up inside. That shows you how much respect I had for my lovers.

But Nakajima was different, I thought. This time it was for real.

At this very moment, I was truly beginning to fall in love. It weighed on me and it was sometimes a pain in the ass, but the payoff could be big, too. So big it felt like gazing up into the sky. Or like looking out an airplane window at the ocean, with clouds shining above it.

It was so gorgeous it almost felt like sadness.

Like the feeling you get when you realize that, in the grand scheme of things, your time here on this earth really isn’t all that long after all.

There was one other thing I had to do.

“Hey, Dad, I’m at the station now. Do you have some time today?”

I didn’t want to call him at work, so I’d called his cell phone.

“Wow, this is sudden,” my dad said.

“Well, the job I had scheduled sort of stopped unexpectedly,” I replied. “It’s hard for me to get out here unless something like that happens.”

“I can get away for a while in the evening,” my dad said. “We could have dinner in about two hours.”

The restaurant my dad chose was this incredibly mediocre Italian place, and whenever he went there his Prominent Local Personage thing went into high gear. I couldn’t stand it.

But I’d asked to see him without any warning, and of course he’d be treating me, so I figured I had no right to complain.

With a family as stable as mine had been, my heart certainly wasn’t scarred, or if it was, the scars were ones I’d made myself—now that I was comparing myself to Nakajima all the time I could see that. I thought I was pretty tough, too. Still, I cried a bit at the station.

The days I’d passed with my mom before she died were still there, it seemed, seared into the corners of my heart.

The atmosphere of the station brought it all back. I could see myself running to the hospital, glad to be seeing my mother again. You never know you’re happy until later. Because physical sensations like smells and exhaustion don’t figure into our memories, I guess. Only the good bits bob up into view.

I was always startled by the snatches of memory that I saw as happy, how they came.

This time, it was the feeling I got when I stepped out onto the platform. The sense of what it had been like to be on my way to see my mom, for her still to be alive, if only for the time being, if only for that day. The happiness of that knowledge had come back to life inside me.

And the loneliness of that moment. The helplessness.

The fact that now when I came to this station, I could go see my dad, but not my mom. I’d always done that in the past, but now I couldn’t.

“You know, the chef in this place spent four whole years in Italy! Seriously. Hey, kid, do me a favor and ask Sugiyama to come say hi when he has a moment, will you? I want to introduce him to my daughter.”

Just as I expected: he’d said it. In my heart I was thinking,
Please, I’ve already heard that story, and how could he “have a moment” when he’s got a restaurant full of customers?
But I kept quiet.

Before long a man in a tall chef’s hat came out and talked for a while with my dad, and he said hello to me, too, so I just kept smiling away.

I’d be leaving Japan soon, after all, and probably wouldn’t be seeing my dad for a while. When I thought about that, I felt kind of attached even to his preening.