The Lake

  “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.

  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.”