Winter sleep, p.1
Winter Sleep, page 1
Copyright © 2004 by Kenzo Kitakata
All rights reserved.
Published by Vertical,
an imprint of Kodansha USA Publishing, LLC
Originally published in Japanese as Fuyu no nemuri by Gentosha, Tokyo, 1996.
ISBN 1932234136
Ebook ISBN 9781647292478
Kodansha USA Publishing, LLC
451 Park Avenue South, 7th Floor
New York, NY 10016
www.kodansha.us
a_prh_6.0_142549201_c0_r1
CONTENTS
Chapter One: The Guest
Chapter Two: The Colors of Fall
Chapter Three: Tearing
Chapter Four: Cutting Lines
Chapter Five: The Visit
Chapter Six: The Color of Ice
Chapter Seven: Chrysalis
Chapter Eight: Buds of Spring
Chapter Nine: Far Flames
Chapter One
The Guest
1
The colors were floating. I had that same thought every day, looking out the window, running on the mountain path. Every day, the same.
They were the colors of fall. In another month, they would disappear. Then would come the colors of winter, which would not float, but stab. Somehow, I couldn’t get used to the fall colors. When I looked at the Japanese larches in the full, clear light of a fall dusk, I was gripped by a fear I couldn’t put my finger on. I felt as though I had stumbled into a place with no way out. It was like listening to fingernails scratch across smooth hard glass. Or worse—it was like grasping at emptiness.
I kept telling myself these were not real colors. But they existed, created by the slanting sunlight. They were the colors of living trees, just before the sleep of winter, colors of a season that enveloped the mountains.
I hadn’t seen fall colors in such abundance for a long time. For the past three years I had only known fall from the morning and evening chill, from the color of the sky and the look of the flowers in the garden.
After running up the mountain pass, I stretched for three minutes, then headed back down to the cabin where I was staying. Fifteen minutes up, ten down. At first it had taken me an hour and half, stopping again and again for breath. Now I didn’t think about increasing the distance or shortening the time. For the past four days I had been running at the same pace.
When I ran, I tried to look only at my feet. I knew I was surrounded by the fall colors, but the colors of the earth put me more at ease. The colors of the earth never changed with the seasons.
In front of the cabin I stretched again, then went in the door, which was never locked. The owner called it a “cabin,” but it was bigger than the name indicated. The bath, especially, was large—three adults could fit comfortably inside. It was filled from a hot spring, and when you turned the tap, hot water came out.
I soaked in the hot springs bath in the evening. After my morning run I only took a shower. I threw my bath towel and sweaty running clothes into the washing machine. My clothes for the day were all ready, washed and neatly folded.
Having put on corduroy pants and a turtleneck sweater, I slipped on a jacket and got in the car. Eating lunch after my run was part of my daily routine.
The car was a used subcompact that I had bought for 300,000 yen. It was perfect for the narrow mountain roads. About once every four days I went shopping for breakfast food. Breakfast was the only meal I made.
I usually ate soba noodles, spaghetti or curry rice for lunch. I decided to go with curry rice. Only ten minutes from the cabin by car were several restaurants on the highway where I could get a light meal.
“Will you shut yourself in all winter too?” asked the manager of the curry shop, by now an acquaintance. He seemed to believe that I was a resort villa owner, and probably had some notion as to my occupation as well.
“You’d better put your chains on pretty soon. You never know when it’s going to snow in the mountains,” he added.
“I’ve already got some that fit my tires,” I said. “All I have to do is figure out how to put them on.”
My driver’s license had expired. I had bought the car from a guy I knew, but I hadn’t bothered to change the registration. Legally, it was still his. I just used the car to drive in the mountains. I hadn’t yet been stopped by a cop and asked for my license.
The car had been expensive for something that had 350,000 or 360,000 kilos on it. The guy sold it to me knowing I didn’t have a license. In short, he took advantage of me. He was an acquaintance, not a friend. When I decided to hide away in the mountains, I had about 300,000 yen in cash. I’d used it to buy the car.
“You’re a painter, aren’t you?”
“How did you know?”
“You always have paint on your fingers.”
I was a painter who was going to seclude himself in a mountain cabin for the winter, there was no doubt about that.
I dug a spoon into the curry rice that had been set in front of me. The place looked like what it was—a cheap restaurant in a small town—but the curry wasn’t bad.
I had long dreamed of living this sort of life. Ten years before, I had been a struggling artist. I had just returned from New York and still wasn’t readjusted to life in Japan.
I had lived in New York for seven years. During that time I painted, but didn’t make my living as an artist. I was the New York representative of a small company my father ran. We sold parts for precision machinery, but I never understood why we needed a New York representative. I never thought about it too deeply, but I had probably been assigned the New York job because I could speak English.
After taking over a machine parts shop from my grandfather, my father had gradually moved into the precision machinery business and doubled the size of the company. My mother died when I was sixteen. A year later my father remarried and his new wife came to live with us. I acquired a new brother and sister, the brother five years and the sister eight years younger than me. It was the sort of thing that happened quite often, and I never took offense. I got on well with my stepmother and new siblings. But that was when I started to paint.
When I was thirty I returned to Japan. By that time the company was under bank management and the post of New York representative had been eliminated. Back in Japan, I had no job waiting for me. Even our house was gone. My father was living with his family of three in a small apartment. He had grown old and all he could do was complain. A year later he died, or rather, withered away.
After that, I never saw my stepmother or step-sib-lings again.
I started painting seriously, but I had to work to support myself and buy painting supplies.
I dreamed of secluding myself in a mountain cabin and just painting, without thinking of anything else.
After finishing the curry rice, I went down the street to the supermarket. I bought some groceries and returned to the cabin.
A white Mercedes-Benz was parked beside the gate. A woman got out from the driver’s side. She was wearing a white suit—perhaps to match the color of the car—and a half-coat with a sable collar. She had probably thought it would be cold so high up in the mountains. The Mercedes made me think she had money.
“Mr. Nakagi?”
I nodded, holding the bags from the supermarket. She didn’t have the conceited air of the rich. She also looked to be several years older than me. I’d rarely been wrong in guessing a woman’s age.
“My name is Kosugi. I’ve come at the introduction of the President.”
Her office address was on the business card she handed me, but I couldn’t tell what sort of office it was.
“Would you like to come in? If you’re not afraid to.”
Natsue Kosugi smiled and shook her head no.
I brought her into the living room, where I rarely went. Still carrying the grocery bags, I extracted two cans of beer from one and set them on the table.
“Care for a drink?”
“No, thank you. Didn’t you promise to give up drinking?”
“Promises are made to be broken—especially promises to quit drinking.”
The owner of the cabin pretended to be my patron, but he had never done much to show it. All he did was rent me the cabin, which he used only in the summer, let me take meals at the company villa, which was not far from the cabin, and have his caretakers do my cleaning and laundry and generally look after me.
“What are you here for?”
“Is this your studio?”
“The studio’s on the second floor. I use the room because the light is good, but it’s in bad shape now, after the children finished with it. I promised the owner I would only paint there. The room needs work done anyway. He said it didn’t matter how dirty I got it.”
“So that’s one promise you’ve kept.”
“Just because it’s a hassle to move my painting stuff somewhere else.”
I pulled the tab on the beer can.
I had been drinking constantly for the past four months. I had come into six million yen and had spent it all in four months, nearly all of it on drink and women.
I still had a one-room condo in Nerima, Tokyo; the gallery had lent it to me. I had almost nothing I could call my own.
“I came to reserve a painting.”
“You mean you want to buy a blank canvas?”
“I hear that you’re painting a size hundred. I’d like you to paint another one for me.”
“I can’t give you a firm delivery date. I don’t even know if I can paint the first picture. Should I make a promise I’m going to break?”
“I’ll give you any amount you want as an advance.”
“You can’t put a price on this sort of thing.”
“I’m serious.”
“You should put your money into real estate.”
“I want a painting.”
“Then buy it after I’ve finished it and after you’ve seen it. I can’t say when that will be, though.”
“You don’t like the idea of my buying a painting without seeing it first. You’re saying I shouldn’t disrespect your work?”
“I’m not that important.”
I gulped down the beer. After dark I would drink five or six shots of whiskey.
“You lack the confidence?”
“No artist feels confident in front of a blank canvas. Unless he’s a genius.”
“Is that what you think, that you aren’t a genius?”
Until I was in my late twenties, I had just made copies and sketches. Every time I painted, I exhausted myself, but I was still young enough to recover quickly. When I was twenty-seven I suddenly wanted to paint my own pictures. I painted whatever I saw around me, whatever came to hand. New York cityscapes. The windows of buildings. My apartment door and walls and ceiling and bed. My own hand. I did that for three years and then returned to Japan.
“I saw the two paintings you made after your release from prison.”
“Oh those.”
The cabin owner had bought both, for one million yen each. It was the money I was still using to live on and buy painting supplies with. I spent almost nothing on living expenses.
“I like them. I asked the President to sell them to me, but he refused. He said I should reserve your next one.”
I was painting a size hundred in the cabin and was to sell it to the cabin’s owner through a gallery. Selling through a gallery was standard practice in the art world. The gallery would take half of the sales price.
Through the gallery, the owner of the cabin had also bought my time.
I had been sent to prison for killing a man, early one summer, when I was thirty-six. I served three years. I was hardly a model prisoner, but my sentence was reduced by three months.
“I don’t mean to be rude, but you’re a better painter now than before you went in.”
“Buy through the gallery.”
“Of course. I was told, though, I couldn’t reserve your work through the gallery. I could only buy a painting from them after you finished it.”
“And they get fifty percent. Hard to believe, isn’t it?”
“The gallery sold your paintings while you were in prison and even prepared painting supplies and a room before your release. They were conscientious, weren’t they?”
“I suppose.”
The gallery had paid me the six million yen upon my release. They also told me which paintings had been sold and for how much.
“Just as I thought.”
“What?”
“Most painters would have been upset with me for taking the gallery’s side. You have more common sense.”
“That’s not something to be complimented for.”
“You’re sensible about the small things. You don’t get upset over details. But you’ll go all out for the big things, the basic things.”
“Maybe.”
“In any case, I’d like to reserve the second size hundred canvas.”
“Do as you like. There are no contracts in this business.”
“May I see the one you’re painting now?”
“All I have is a white canvas.”
“I intend to be a pest.”
“I see.”
“I’ll do anything to get what I want, become a snake, a demon.”
“That’s not being a pest. That’s being scary.”
“That’s what I am.”
Natsue Kosugi took out a cigarette and lit it with a Cartier lighter.
“I heard that before you switched to abstracts, you painted still lifes. Why abstracts all of a sudden?”
With a cigarette in her mouth, Natsue Kosugi began speaking in a more familiar, intimate tone. She now showed me the woman beneath the business suit, as though she’d been carefully timing her move.
“A painter tells the truth only on the canvas.”
“An abstract artist has to be able to draw well—precisely because he’s painting abstracts. Even so, your switch to abstracts was sudden. When I look at your earlier paintings I’m amazed by your drawing talent. Why did you stop painting still lifes?”
“I also painted landscapes.”
“I’ve always thought it strange that you didn’t try figures.”
Natsue Kosugi dropped her ashes in a crystal ashtray. Her fingers were long and slender. Her nails were perfectly manicured.
“What business are you in?”
“I have a design office. We’ve got something of a reputation. We get a lot of work from the President’s company too.”
“Using your sex appeal?”
“However I get it, a job is a job.”
“You’re really something, you know that?”
“That’s how a woman gets through life.”
“You have confidence in your beauty. I admire that. That’s what I meant to say.”
Natsue Kosugi smiled wryly.
I took a cigarette from the pocket of my jacket and lit it with a Zippo.
“I’ll come again.”
When she put out her cigarette, Natsue Kosugi reverted to her former self. I put out the cigarette I had just lit.
I showed her to the door, then went to the kitchen and put the groceries in the refrigerator. I took out another can of beer and went up to the second floor.
The room was the size of eight tatami mats, with a canvas hanging on one wall. Against the other wall was a bed you’d find in a hospital. The only other things in the room were painting materials scattered here and there.
I took my eyes off the canvas, flopped down on the bed and stared up at the ceiling.
I saw many small cracks, but they didn’t resolve themselves into a pattern, no matter how long I stared. Instead, they began to take on colors. The colors of the cracks kept changing, like living things. I watched the changes.
I had discovered a new way to kill time. When I first came to the cabin, I would go outside and look at the colors of the ground. I would also go downstairs, to the fireplace in the living room. I observed how the flames changed shape, since they didn’t change color.
I used the studio, the living room with the fireplace, and the bedroom, as well as the kitchen and bath. I’d been living in the cabin a month, but had yet to enter several rooms.
There was almost too much space for me. Too much, that is to say, for the needs of the body, of the flesh-and-blood human being. I wasn’t sure how much space my spirit needed. I kept trying to narrow my perspective for I didn’t know what reason.
After finishing the beer, I felt loggy. There is a nude by Renoir whose title means something like “drowsiness.” The model is not fleshy, like the ones of his late period, but slender. I’d copied the painting twice and come to hate Renoir. But when I was about to take a nap I always thought of the time when I copied the painting.
The ringing of the telephone woke me up.
The phone seldom rang and I had no need to call anyone, so when I moved into the cabin, I put it in this room.
“I’m in the neighborhood.”
It was Nomura’s voice.
“I can’t say that I’m busy.”
“That goes for both of us. Anyway, here I am. Why don’t we get together for dinner? You’re just eating in the villa, aren’t you?”
“You’re treating?”
“Who says I’m treating? I don’t want you to treat me either. I’m just asking if we can get together.”
“If I say no, you’re going to come here.”
“The article is finished. The article about the murdering artist.”
I had been convicted of, not murder, but deadly assault in the course of a fight. Even so, I had killed someone, so I suppose I qualified as a murderer.
