I started to run. It was a morning like any other. My footprints from the day before still remained in the snow. Looking at them as I ran, I quickly came to the end of my course.

  When I returned to the cabin a familiar-looking car was parked nearby.

  As I climbed the stairs to the terrace, the car door opened and two men got out.

  5

  They had been waiting patiently for me. After taking a shower, I returned to the living room and opened a can of beer. Though they were watching me, the detectives remained standing on the terrace, as though reluctant to disturb me. When our eyes met, the younger one bowed slightly.

  I didn’t go outside until the logs in the fireplace were blazing. The logs gave off a crackling sound but the room didn’t warm up right away. In mid-winter I’d needed to turn on the fan heater while the fire was getting to go.

  On the terrace and in the cabin the temperature was still about the same.

  “Sorry. We hate to disturb you.”

  The cops weren’t disturbing me. I was even feeling a little twinge of familiarity, seeing their faces.

  “Koichi Oshita has a younger brother who’s been looking all over for him. He’s got what you might call a brotherly intuition. He’s also got an almost abnormal interest in you.”

  “I met him—once.”

  “That’s what he said.”

  The older detective was doing all the talking. The younger one was just standing silently by.

  “This intuition relatives have—it’s turned out to be right in a lot of cases, so we’d like to see if it’s right in this case as well.”

  “And what does it have to do with me?”

  “We’d like your permission to stake out your cabin for a while.”

  “I don’t want anybody inside. I don’t like to see too many people around. That’s why I live here. If you can stay out of sight, fine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  They no doubt wanted to see how I would react to the words “stake out.” If they meant to lie in wait for Koichi Oshita, they’d simply have gone ahead and staked out the place so I would never be the wiser.

  The detective had nothing else to say. He just stood there, twisting his neck and looking blank.

  I glanced at the dirty snow around the cabin. If more didn’t fall, the snow would just get dirtier and finally disappear. I had heard, though, that early spring snowfalls were rather common in the area. If it snowed for just one night, the dirt would vanish and the world outside would become white again, almost too much so. I had already scraped paint off the canvas again and again. What if I did it one more time? Perhaps I’d end up with an all-white canvas I could call “Spring Snow.” Now, however, the canvas was thickly covered with crimson.

  “You spend all winter in a place like this, the city is going to feel noisy, I guess. I’m afraid it’s not the sort of life I could even wish for.”

  “I don’t like people—or rather, I didn’t use to.”

  “Looking at your pictures, I get the feeling you don’t especially need scenery or a model. Nothing more than an amateur’s opinion, of course.”

  “Well, I paint alone—always.”

  “Koichi Oshita bought a whole pile of painting supplies. I don’t know what sort of pictures he wanted to paint, but I do know he’s a great admirer of your work.”

  When I put a cigarette to my lips, the detective lit it with a disposable lighter. His fingers were a little chapped, like a man who works around water.

  “Even if Oshita hasn’t visited you here, he’s watching you. I get the feeling he’s out there somewhere, watching us as we speak.”

  “So maybe coming here wasn’t such a great idea. It might backfire on you.”

  “If he were an ordinary criminal, yes.”

  “So he’s a criminal who enjoys danger?”

  “No, he’s a criminal who doesn’t think of danger as danger. When we do arrest him, it’s not going to be easy getting him behind bars. It all depends on how the so-called psychiatric evaluation turns out.”

  Whether or not Oshita was charged with a crime, he would be sent to a hospital, I was certain. There he would die. Even if his body lived, his spirit would die. Yet, given a little more time, Oshita might gain something that could keep him from dying.

  I hadn’t made Oshita paint because I wanted to make him normal. It was probably for myself that I did it. I wanted to see, in Oshita and Akiko, how the heart paints.

  I glanced at the puddle on the balcony that drops of water from the icicles were forming. When a drop fell, the surface of the puddle was disturbed by a small wave, but soon became calm again. It looked like a clear pane of glass. I felt like the cycle would repeat itself forever.

  “It’s depressing when we arrest a guy, but can’t send him to prison. It’s like setting him free. And there’s the chance he’ll do the same thing again. We think the one in danger from that, now, is you.”

  “Is that so.”

  “We want to catch Oshita before something happens.”

  I found it hard to believe the cops were worried about my safety. I had a very loud guardian in the form of a lawyer, and the cops had come up with “safety” as a way to force a hard-case informer to come around.

  “We’ll be in the neighborhood. But you’ll never know we’re here.”

  I nodded silently, my eyes still on the puddle made by the icicles.

  Going back to their car, the detectives started it up quickly and drove off.

  The living room was beginning to warm up. I changed from my bathrobe into my usual sweater and went up to the second floor studio.

  The canvas was covered with crimson. I didn’t feel like scraping it off. I also didn’t want to add a new color.

  After standing in front of the canvas for an hour, I went downstairs, put two logs on the fire to keep it from going out, then went outside.

  Starting up the subcompact, I drove down to town.

  After I had been driving a while, I noticed another subcompact following me. I didn’t know if it was the cops; there was only the driver in the car.

  After starting to melt, the snow on the road had frozen following a cold snap. It was now melting again and had the consistency of sherbet. Even places where I had never slipped on the snow before were now slippery, and occasionally the steering wheel was jerked out of my hands. I had to keep my speed low.

  Stopping at a small roadside restaurant, I ordered beef curry and read a sports paper while I waited for my food. I didn’t see any sign of the detectives.

  I quickly ate the beef curry and drove into town. After buying a few vegetables and canned goods at the supermarket, I went to a cutlery shop, where I bought a new whetstone to replace my worn-out old one.

  I returned to the cabin. The subcompact was still following me, while trying to stay out of sight. I spent the afternoon sharpening my knife.

  I used it for spreading paint on the canvas. It lacked the flexibility of a palette knife, but I had used it to whittle hundreds of wooden sticks. It was still basically a good tool though its edge had become dull. Would a knife with a good blade be good for spreading paint on canvas? I wouldn’t know until I tried it. At the same time I wanted to use a knife so sharp that if I made a mistake handling it—if I let it slip just a little—the canvas would tear even if I wasn’t using a lot of strength. A dull knife was nothing but a kind of steel plate.

  I put water on the whetstone, but it absorbed the moisture right away. I let the whetstone soak in water for a while, then started sharpening the knife on it.

  As I worked, I occasionally sprinkled the whetstone with water. The surface of the whetstone was so slick that I wondered if it would sharpen steel, but the knife’s surface started to gleam with a polished luster.

  I kept at it for nearly an hour. One side was giving off a brilliant sparkle, but the cutting edge was still dull.

  I worked for an hour on the other side.

  The edge was becoming a bit sharper. Half an hour later, I tested the edge. It was sharp now, as though it belonged to a totally different knife. I cut a piece of wood cleanly in half.

  I kept honing like a man possessed. The edge of the blade became thin, soft and finally came off. I kept doing this over and over. The knife seemed to have become one size smaller.

  I noticed that the sun had started to go down.

  When I touched the knife to my skin, it seemed to catch. That, I had read somewhere, was proof of its sharpness.

  I put the whetstone away, went into the cabin, and added a log to the fire. Only a few embers remained, but the new log caught fire and soon flames were leaping up.

  I examined the knife. I touched the blade to the ball of my thumb and moved it. The surface of the skin broke without any resistance.

  Trotting up to the second floor, I squeezed black onto the palette, scooped some with the knife, and slapped it on the canvas. Black could only be erased with black. Black could stab a human heart. I became caught up in my work. The canvas became covered with black thorns, with crimson at its center.

  By the time I wiped the knife with turpentine oil, it was the middle of the night. The edge had become dull. I would have to sharpen it again the next day.

  6

  The phone rang while I was honing the knife.

  “I’m painting, painting, painting. I can’t even stop myself.”

  It was Oshita. He seemed calmer somehow—to the point of depression.

  “So?”

  “I know why Akiko’s shut herself in. There’s something missing in her painting. I can see it. I know it because I can paint again all of a sudden. I know what’s missing and I want to fix it for her. Akiko’s having a fit, saying I’m making a mess of it.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “She’s telling me not to touch her painting.”

  “She’s right. Who wants someone else touching their painting? Anyone would have a fit.”

  “But I know how to fix it. I can’t tell her, but I can show her, if I she’ll let me work on her canvas.”

  “You may know, but you can’t show her. If I had shown you, could you paint the way you do now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You learned to paint by yourself. That’s why you feel like you can paint now.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Leave her alone.”

  “Was I like that?”

  “Until a few days ago.”

  Oshita said he wanted me to see his work and hung up.

  I started sharpening the knife again. The edge quickly returned, perhaps because I had spent so much time sharpening it the day before.

  I stared at the blade, by the fireplace.

  A strange presence nearby—that was the feeling. I tried to see what the strangeness was. It was alive, if the word suffices. Glittering at me with a cold light, the knife had the aura of a living thing that breathed, and tensed, ready to speak to me in a low voice.

  “My hand?” I murmured.

  “My finger?”

  The knife was saying something to me. I tried to hear it with not my ears but something else.

  “You’ll make me paint? You want to move as my hand and fingers? Look, you’re just a knife.”

  My voice echoed hollow in the living room. I shut my mouth, which was trying to mutter again.

  I touched the blade to the back of my hand and drew it back lightly. I felt no pain, but I could see the skin had been broken. The wound was one thread, along which appeared beads of blood, one by one. But they stopped rising and started to congeal.

  I went up to the second floor, taking the knife.

  A black canvas. The core was crimson. Something lapped my heart like waves on a shore. I could feel it in my hand, my fingers—no, in the knife itself.

  I spread on more paint. Not just one color, but yellow, green and white, squeezed from the tube.

  Something that wasn’t form. Something that wasn’t color. Something that I felt to be the voice as such. The knife let out a voice and spread it on the canvas. The voice coming from the knife overlapped with the voice coming from my heart.

  I was painting a picture. I was truly painting a picture, more so than when I had painted Akiko’s naked body. It was the same as being alive. I wondered if I had ever had so much life.

  I noticed it was already light outside. I felt as though the night had passed in a moment.

  I wiped the knife with turpentine oil. Using a palette knife, I scraped the colors off the palette. While doing this, I never once looked at the canvas.

  I was starting to understand, with my body, what it was like to be free of color and form. Painters use colors and form as tools, but they are also bound by them.

  Coming down the stairs, I went out to the terrace and started sharpening the knife.

  For some reason I sensed thick clouds above me. Would snow or rain fall from them?

  I spent two hours sharpening the knife. I touched the blade to the back of my hand. With my forefinger, I drew it back lightly. The knife cut my skin with only its own weight. Blood surfaced, not as drops but as a line. It didn’t run and drip. I could clearly see it harden on the surface, just like paint.

  Returning to the living room I felt hungry for the first time that day. Going to the kitchen, I fried sausages and vegetables together. I listened to them sizzle, and both the sausages and vegetables got burnt. While drinking beer, I slowly ate the charred sausages. The vegetables I threw away. I wasn’t used to seeing the colors of charred and oily vegetables. They had undergone an uncanny change.

  When I had more or less eaten my fill, I swept the room with a vacuum cleaner, stabbing it here and there. At the beginning of my stay, the caretaker at the villa used to come every day to clean, but now I only asked her to do the laundry. I just put my sweat-soaked running clothes in a basket in the entryway and she took them away. That was why I had not seen her face for some time now.

  Once I had started cleaning I couldn’t stop. I swept all the corners with the vacuum, then wiped away the dust with a damp cloth. I then wiped the windows with window cleaner until they sparkled.

  I noticed that I was trying to get myself tired. But I didn’t tire easily; I was blazing with energy from the core of my body.

  I drove off in the car. While I was heading for town a familiar-looking subcompact followed along behind. It didn’t bother me. My license had expired while I was in prison, but the men in the other car probably weren’t thinking about my lack of a license.

  It became dark.

  I still couldn’t sense the passage of time very clearly. I drank in a club that had several Filipinas as hostesses. I remembered I had come to the place with Nomura, but thought of nothing beyond that.

  I went back to the cabin after nine. One of the hostesses had asked me to go to a hotel several times in broken Japanese, but I seemed to be at a place where lust did not exist.

  I built a fire in the fireplace and drank two glasses of cognac. My body grew warm. I slept. When I opened my eyes it was one in the morning. I had woken up when the effect of the liquor had worn off.

  The core of my body was still high.

  After drinking a glass of water, I clambered up to the second floor and faced the canvas. For nearly an hour I reined in the impulse to spread more color on it. Then I realized I was holding the knife.

  The knife was not a knife, but a part of my body. I was trying to express something that was beyond expression. There were moments when I could sense something that was neither color nor form. If the moments endured long enough, I could finish the painting. But I didn’t want that. I simply relished the joy of the moments.

  I was painting myself on the canvas. I had never so clearly felt that way since I’d started painting. Perhaps this was the moment by which I could say: I have lived, because I have painted. The moment had come to me all of a sudden, without any sort of premonition.

  I put down the knife.

  I closed my eyes for a while, then wiped the knife and my fingers with turpentine oil.

  I still felt no fatigue. Squatting on the floor of the studio, I hugged my knees and sat motionless for a while. That helped me come down a bit from my high.

  Getting up, I stood by the window. Outside was white. It looked as though it had been snowing since the crack of dawn. It was still snowing. When I opened the window, chill air rushed in. It was cold, but not as harshly cold as the air in mid-winter.

  Narrowing my eyes, I faced the white world.

  Chapter Nine

  Far Flames

  1

  One painting was finished.

  I didn’t know if I could use the word “finished” to describe it. The passion I had felt facing the canvas was gone, but I continued to burn with the same energy.

  That morning I was already looking at another canvas. Once again, no color yet. Facing the white canvas, I enjoyed my rapture. When I got in such a mood, as though I were in another dimension, I forgot to eat and sleep.

  The rapture continued. Even after finishing one painting, my mind continued to roar.

  But compared with the roars of the past, this one was quieter. There was also something sad about it; I could feel the end approaching.

  I didn’t know how much time passed, but probably after a long time, I started painting again. I had no choice. I needed to paint one more picture, no matter what. I didn’t feel this necessity in any rational way. The finished painting wanted another painting.

  I’d quit sharpening the knife. Once the first painting was finished, the knife was no longer my hand and fingers, but just a knife.

  I wondered now and then what would happen once I finished the second painting. Maybe I would become an empty husk. Or maybe I would cease to be any kind of painter—just a plain human being. Maybe I would self-destruct.

 

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