Cordis Somnia 2/2
Kame doesn’t know when it starts happening, but sometimes, while he’s working, he loses track of time and of what he’s doing and spends hours staring at the portrait with the paintbrush held in the air, unmoving and shut inside his own mind, lost in dreams he won’t remember. Sometimes he snaps out of it after a few minutes, and sometimes when he comes to his senses again it’s late in the afternoon and the studio is dark and freezing. The only thought in his mind when he comes to is how heartbreakingly sad the man in the portrait looks.
Kame starts to lose his sense of time, hours and days passing in a mix of dreams and fantasy that end up blending together. Kame forgets to eat because someone ate in his dreams and the feeling of a full stomach stays with him even after he wakes up, he doesn’t notice the freezing air coming from the open window because the warmth of the dreams feels real when he’s working. As March comes and the days on the calendar pass Kame finds himself consumed by the portrait, working and dreaming and dreaming and working until he doesn’t know when he’s sleeping or when he’s awake.
#
The sun came into the room through a crack in the blinds Jin had pushed half shut. It was warm inside the dimly lit room, but not as much as outside, where the early afternoon breeze barely managed to help against the summer heat. Kazuya was naked in bed with the sheets tangled around his legs; painted on his chest were flowers and kanji and waves that started on his shoulders and went down to slide across his stomach, on his hips and down his thighs, painted by Jin’s fingers. Some had dried and some had blurred and smeared against Jin’s own body and the white covers of the futon, silent witnesses of what no one was allowed to know.
Jin was sprawled next to him, looking elegant and beautiful in his careless abandon, a sight out of one of his paintings. He was sketching Kazuya in one of his moleskine notebooks, but Kazuya felt too relaxed and content to care, alone with Jin in a dark room they hadn’t left all day.
“Let me paint you like one of my French girls,” Jin had joked, even though he had promised Kazuya again and again that he had nothing to do with all those pictures of naked women and that they were all Kiyoteru’s, whoever Kiyoteru was. Jin looked more like the kid he had been when they met all those years ago than like the 37-year-old man he was when he was smiling like that, goofy and amused, and Kazuya hadn’t been able to deny him.
Now Jin sketched Kazuya and Kazuya watched Jin, the dark fringe that fell over his eyes and his little focused frown, the cute way he pursed his lips when he was deep in thought and the way the sparse beams of light fell over his skin in an almost liquid way, highlighting soft curves and blotches of smeared paint. Jin looked beautiful and peaceful. His frown dissolved into a confused expression when Kazuya tugged the notebook out of his grasp, softly so as to not make the pencil slip on the paper and ruin the drawing.
“What…?”
“I love you.”
Kazuya rolled into Jin’s arms, stretching up a bit to kiss him. Even caught by surprise Jin was fast to kiss back and pull Kazuya closer, so close that Kazuya hoped their naked bodies would melt into one. Jin’s hands were calloused and rough and tender and bold wherever they settled on Kazuya’s body, exploring and searching and caressing, touching, tracing the painted patterns to draw a map of his skin. Kazuya sighed softly and pushed himself against Jin, slow and lazy like the summer that trickled away behind the closed blinds of their window.
But not even the summer could last forever, and Kazuya dreaded its end.
#
It isn’t unusual for Kame to forget to answer e-mails for days or to miss calls that he doesn’t reply to until late in the night, but even when he is up to his eyebrows with work Kame never fails to let his friends and family know he’s doing alright. That’s why after two weeks of receiving no reply from him Koki decides to use the spare key Kame gave him to pick up paintings when he wasn’t around and check on his friend. He has a moment of doubt in front of the door, because maybe Kame’s just busy and Koki’s intruding, but any possible apology dissolves in his mind when he finds his friend passed out on the studio’s floor.
Koki paws his pockets for his phone as he calls out to Kame, voice loud and shrill with alarm, but Kame doesn’t answer, because Kame’s dreaming.
#
Jin missed Europe, sometimes. He missed Paris, and the French countryside, and Spain and England and the studio where he painted, and his French friends and drinking absinthe and smoking and tumbling home together, singing loud rude songs in different languages under the influx of la fée verte. He missed the boat rides down the Seine in summer and watching the snow fall in winter until his fingers got too cold and he had to take refuge in the nearest café with a mug of hot coffee and a cigarette. Jin missed climbing the steep stairs to the towers of Notre-Dame to sketch the ugly-faced gargoyles, and looking up at the bells to wonder if Quasimodo had really lived there.
Jin thought about going back, sometimes, but then Jin thought about Kazuya; about leaving him behind and about the aching longing of eight years spent apart. Jin thought about nights spent curled around each other, about stolen kisses when no one was looking and bright smiles and stubby fingers poking at his ribs to steal his glasses. Jin thought about eight, ten years without any of it and Europe didn’t look so tempting anymore, not if he couldn’t have Kazuya with him.
Instead Jin took Kazuya with him on trips. They went to Nara in summer so Jin could paint the antique temples and the deer in the park, to Kyoto in the fall to capture the magnificent sight of Kiyomizu-dera and Kinkaku-ji between the sea of deep crimson leaves of the maple trees, and the geishas and maikos strolling down the calm streets of Gion; they went to Osaka in spring to paint the sakura trees around Shitennō-ji and eat takoyaki, and to Hokkaido during winter so Jin could practice his landscapes with the beautiful snowy mountains. When Kazuya couldn’t go anywhere, Jin went to Ueno zoo to paint the animals and the playing children.
Jin dragged Kazuya everywhere he could and filled a thousand pages with sketches of him, and in the meantime the nostalgia for Europe somehow faded away.
#
Kame’s admitted into the hospital the 12th of March, unconscious, burning with fever and having difficulty breathing. Later Koki tells him all of this with loud angry yells and violent hand motions, but Kame doesn’t even wake up during the ride in the ambulance or while the doctors put him on oxygen to aid his breathing, because Kame’s dreaming.
Kame dreams for a long time.
#
The new century started without any surprises, wrapped in a blur of snow and cold. Kazuya’s workload had been steadily increasing since his adoptive father Katsuhiko had died in 1892, leaving him as the heir and new head of the family. As 1900 advanced and he turned 34 the pressure on him only seemed to double as whispered talk about duty and family rose around him; Kazuya knew he could only tune them off for so long.
The year went on between Kazuya’s obligations and Jin’s painting lessons, which had grown more and more popular with students interested in his revolutionary techniques of light and bright colors ever since he had returned from France. Jin had gotten a reputation for organizing public expositions along with Kiyoteru, a short balding man whom Jin had finally introduced to Kazuya as Seiki as soon as the man had returned to Japan years ago. Jin painted and exhibited his paintings and won prizes and Kazuya’s collection of newspapers articles featuring pictures and mentions of Jin grew at a steady pace. Jin had Kazuya’s photograph taken too, and at least then Kazuya didn’t look as stiff and uncomfortable as he always got when Jin started painting him.
Jin, ever the artist, loved technology, photography and film and things Kazuya had never stopped to think about. Jin had a photograph taken of the two of them together, Kazuya in his kimono looking rigid and serious and Jin in his worn out, messy western clothes, smiling brightly enough to outshine the sun. Jin took Kazuya to see the moving images recorded on film as soon as there was a projection in Japan; he had been speaking wonders about it, but he still squeaked like a small girl and jumped when the train seemed to rush towards them, and it was left to Kazuya to pat his shoulder and pretend he had not been squeezing Jin’s had back out of a little fear of his own and not only reassurance.
As summer unrolled in slow, hot days Kazuya grew restless in Tokyo. Jin had an exhibition in July, a special event organized by the American Consulate in Tokyo to commemorate the 4th of July, a day that was coincidentally also Jin’s birthday, and a few other compromises that couldn’t be avoided, but as soon as July was over Kazuya surprised him with a month of vacation at one of the country residences he had inherited from his uncle all the way up in Aomori, where the summer temperatures dropped enough to give them a rest. The house’s garden merged with the forest, and the trees provided a refreshing shadow. The servants that kept the house habitable were fast to leave upon Kazuya’s request, with their only order being to bring food to the house every two days.
The isolated house with its large garden became their bubble of peace. Tokyo and its obligations couldn’t reach Kazuya between the shelter of the trees, where there was only Jin laughing and poking fun at him as he tried to make Kazuya smile for his portrait. Some days they didn’t even bother to get out of bed and then there was only Jin, naked and honest and warm, Jin without pretenses and demands, Jin with kisses and touches that made Kazuya want to hold onto him and never let go.
But even among the forests of Aomori summer trickled away day by day, and with each passing sunset Kazuya’s heart grew heavier with sadness in his chest.
#
Kame’s fever breaks, but it still takes a day to completely disappear. The saline slips into his system through the needle hooked into the crook of his arm, but it still takes his weakened body time to recover. Kame wakes up a few times during the first two days, to a nurse changing the saline bag or checking his temperature, to his mother’s worried fretting and to Koki’s hostile silence that only hides a big fright. But mostly, Kame sleeps, and he dreams.
#
”The portrait is almost done!” Jin grinned widely and stretched his legs lazily under the low table in the living room of Kazuya’s house in Tokyo. It was a rude gesture, but Jin never watched his manners when they were alone. “Only a few details and it’ll be done.”
Kazuya didn’t answer, instead staring down at his cup of warm tea with a deep frown. Jin sighed deeply and kicked Kazuya’s ankles under the table to startle him, and Kazuya yelped a bit. Jin laughed, though he reached across the table to pull Kazuya’s hand into his own. September was not cold enough for them to be cold, but despite the tea Kazuya had been holding Jin’s were still warmer.
“Are you okay? You seem so distracted. Thinking about work again?”
“I… What…? Yeah, what… What were you saying?”
Jin laughed again, amused by the pout on Kazuya’s lips as Kazuya tried to focus on their conversation again. “Your portrait is almost done. I only need to finish a few details and it’ll be done. Do you want to see it?”
“Yes, I’d like that.”
“I’ve been thinking about going down to Okinawa before the month is over to paint some seascapes, can you sneak away from work a couple of days? We could go to the beach, and…”
“Jin, I… We need to talk.”
Kazuya’s voice was small, but his tone was serious and determined and it froze Jin in mid-sentence. He frowned at Kazuya, who was staring intently at the tatami floor. Dressed in his yukata, sitting on his heels and stiff, he looked like someone about to give Jin a lecture. Jin opened his mouth to defend his innocence, but Kazuya beat him to it.
“We have to stop seeing each other.”
“What?!”
Jin’s response was instinctive, not thought out. It blurted past his lips a moment before his brain fully processed what Kazuya had said. Jin stared wide-eyed at Kazuya, and Kazuya hated the way Jin’s heart sat in his eyes, because he could see all the confusion and the pain reflected behind those stupid round, golden glasses he didn’t even need to see, and it wasn’t making things any easier.
“I don’t mean as friends… We can still be friends, but we can’t continue this, what we have… I can’t keep being your lover, Jin.”
“But why?” Jin’s voice was shrill, like he was trying and failing to keep his emotions at bay. Jin had never been very good at that. Kazuya gulped; he had to keep in control for the two of them. “Did I do something wrong? Don’t you love me?”
“I do! I love you, Jin. But I just can’t… This can’t keep going anymore. There’s talk going around and I can’t… I can’t allow that to happen. I have a reputation, and my uncle’s name… The family name, and my duties… I’m the head of the family now, Jin, I have responsibilities towards it that I can’t ignore… I must marry, you don’t understand…”
“No, I don’t!” Jin yelled. His voice was high now, high and shrill and broken with a pain so intense that it made Kazuya shudder and look down as it drowned his own heartache. “Of course I don’t understand! I love you, Kazuya. I love you.” Jin reached for Kazuya’s hand and tugged on it, but Kazuya couldn’t bring himself to answer. “I love you. Please don’t leave me. We can… We can go to Paris and live there, together. It’s not weird there, to share a room with another man. No one would say anything; they would only think we’re good friends. Please. Please, Kazuya. Don’t throw away what we have for… nothing!”
The last word set Kazuya off. How could Jin… How could Jin say he was giving their relationship away for nothing, when each word Kazuya said made his own heart crack a little? How could Jin, careless, free Jin, who had never felt the weight of responsibility on his shoulders, who had only himself to care about, say that Kazuya’s whole life was… nothing? He looked up to meet Jin’s hurt look, not bothering to hide the anger in his own.
“I work in the government, Jin! Why can’t you understand?! Meiji Government may be opening up to the foreigners you love so much, it may be trying to modernize Japan, but Japanese people are still the same. They talk, and they will talk more if I don’t settle down! My father died years ago and I’m the head of the family, yet I’m not married. It’s my duty to provide the family with an heir, to stop the gossip that taints my father’s name. Katsuhiko gave me everything I have! He made me who I am, and I owe him everything. An omiai has been set for me to meet the daughter of a high ranking official in the Government. This is not what I want, Jin. But it’s what I must do. Why can’t you understand that?”
Kazuya’s rant had started loud and angry, but somehow his rage deflated towards the end, maybe because Jin looked so broken where he was sitting on the floor, with his shoulders hunched and pulled towards his body as if he was trying to protect himself. Jin flinched when Kazuya tried to touch his arm, so Kazuya pulled his hand back.
“I can’t.” Jin’s voice was tiny and thin, a broken whisper. “I can’t understand. I’m nothing to you then? All that we lived… These ten years have been… nothing?”
“They’ve have been everything to me, Jin. You have been everything to me. You still are. There’s nothing I want more than to stay with you, Jin, or run away to Paris together, but I can’t. I can’t turn off society and their expectations and I can’t let them down. Please, try to understand this. Please.”
There were a few moments worth of silence, and suddenly the sound of raindrops splattering against the rocks in the garden was so loud it seemed intrusive in their painful silence. Kazuya didn’t even know it had started raining. He was looking down, to where the knees of Jin’s French trousers rubbed against the tatami. They were nice trousers, or had been, years ago, but now they were worn down thin and discolored by time. The contrast of the foreign fabric against the traditional floor seemed to mock Kazuya, a reminder of all the reasons why their relationship could have never worked.
Jin’s knees knocked against the low table when he got up, and the still full cup of tea shook and fell to the ground, spilling its contents over the tatami. Kazuya looked down at it because he was unable to watch Jin standing up to leave him.
“I can’t. I’m sorry. I loved you. I love you.”
And then there was only the soft shuffle of socked feet against the tatami and the quiet whisper of a sliding door, and finally there was only the loud downpour of rain and the pounding of Kazuya’s heartbreak, blood rushing in his ears and drowning out any other noise. He stayed there, sitting on his heels and bent forward, forehead on his knees and arms around himself. Tea was seeping into the tatami and he should call a servant to clean it up, but Kazuya couldn’t bring himself to do it. Maybe he would do it later. Later, when he stopped crying. When he was done picking up the pieces of two shattered hearts.
#
Kame’s not allowed to go home for a week and a half. His fever is gone and he feels strong and well rested, but the doctors insist. He’s to take things easy, he’s told, to take a break from work and stay in bed for a few days to recover. Kame complains that he’s perfectly fine, but he thinks Koki has bribed every doctor while he slept, because it takes a whole week before they even let Kame take a stroll through the corridors without a wheelchair. His mother frets over him all the time and brings him sweets and fruits and babies him in between half-hearted scolding sessions about taking care of himself.
The dreams fade away, somehow, as if in distancing himself from the portrait Kame has put an end to them too. He kinds of regrets it, because despite never being able to remember anything, the feelings that remained with him after waking up had always felt so real that it was as if he has been remembering a story, rather than dreaming it up. Still, the nights of dreamless, deep sleep do his body well, and soon he feels better than he has in weeks. A current of energy runs through him, and Kame can barely keep to the hospital bed anymore.
Kame is finally released on the 23rd of March, and he has barely a weekend to finish the few details he has left of the portrait before he has to let it dry for the exhibit, which usually takes around one or two weeks. He is made to promise to take it easy though, and somehow Koki manages to find enough free time to stay with Kame throughout the day and even stay over for the night. Kame finds an extra futon for him and Koki sleeps next to him.
Kame had thought the dreams to be gone, but as if the mere physical closeness to the portrait can provoke them, they come back again. Kame lies down and closes his eyes to Koki’s light snoring, and Kame dreams.
#
Kazuya looked down at the bundle of blankets cradled in his wife’s arms, at the red little hand and the tiny fingers that peek in between the soft fabric, at the thin black hair and the round cheeks and the pouting lips, and he smiled. His wife was smiling too, tired after the delivery, but happy. Kazuya nodded at her and reached out with a careful hand to brush his fingers over the flushed cheek of the baby, who stirred lightly without waking up.
Gen’ichiro.
His son.
#
Kame thinks Koki and his mother have made a secret pact to babysit him, because the following morning she appears unannounced and stays with him all through the day to make sure he doesn’t overwork himself. She’s distracting when Kame’s trying to focus on the portrait, but she makes sure he rests and eats and doesn’t get pulled in too much. She only allows Kame to work until there’s no more natural light, and when he’s finally made to set down the palette and the paintbrush there’s still the last details to be retouched. Kame doesn’t mind, though, because he can finish tomorrow anyway, and he’ll have just enough time to let it dry.
Kame lets his mother take his usual, more comfortable futon and he sleeps in the same one Koki had taken the previous night. His mother’s breathing is even and soft and it lulls Kame to sleep like a lullaby.
#
The tremor was sudden and unexpected. Kazuya was reading the newspaper by the garden door, enjoying a small moment of peace as his wife cooked their meal, and in a second the ground was shaking so hard that things were falling out of place. Suddenly the air was filled with screams in counterpoint to the thunder of the Earth. Kazuya heard his wife cry out and finally snapped out of the panic that had wrapped itself around his mind. He got up, barely able to keep his balance, and stumbled towards her to push her out, out of the shaking house, out where it was safer in the street.
Gen’ichiro… Gen’ichiro was away in Osaka. The earthquake wouldn’t reach there, it couldn’t be so widespread. Gen’ichiro was going to be fine, safe, and Kazuya breathed out a heavy sigh of relief, letting go for a moment of the frantic fear that filled his mind. His wife was yelling at him from the street, her broken cries mixed between the multitude of sounds that filled Kazuya’s ears until it was all too much and not a single sound more could have made it into the chaos. He turned to leave, and suddenly the Earth shook again. Kazuya tripped and lost his balance, and there was a surge of white in his brain and blinding pain as his head collided against something. The world twisted and blurred before his eyes, and then there was darkness. No color, no sound, no pain, nothing.
Nothing.
#
Kame starts on Sunday with an uncomfortable feeling and a headache that pounds on his temple; it feels like he hit his head against something, even though there’s nothing in his room that could allow for such a thing to occur in his sleep. He doesn’t tell his mother, just in case she forces him to rest, and instead takes a painkiller when she’s not looking. The dark feeling, a remnant from another dream he doesn’t remember, starts to fade as he works on the last bits of light between the trees, the peaceful scenery soothing and therapeutic now when it had been an obsession for weeks.
Kame is about to set the palette down and declare the job done for good when he sees it. His eyes travel over the expanse of the portrait, assessing the corrected details and the magnificent artwork that it’s now repaired, and his eyes somehow fall on the lightest trace of gold upon the book’s brown leather cover. He frowns and leans closer, and wonders how it’s possible that he didn’t notice its existence after the many hours he spent staring at every detail of the painting. The golden paint forms elegant roman letters, but they’re too small to be read without a magnifying glass.
Kame looks at the inscription on the book through the magnifying glass for the best part of an hour, reading carefully and writing down every word. They’re written in French, and even though they could very well be the title of the book in the portrait, Kame feels the amount of detail and care put into them suggests instead they’re the title of the portrait itself. Kame looks at the four words written on white paper in front of him, with their translation to Japanese scrawled under them, and he finally picks up his paintbrush and selects the adequate color.
Kame traces the letters one by one, putting all his attention in the careful, delicate movements of the paintbrush.
Portrait de l’homme aimé..
Portrait of the loved man.
#
The news took time to arrive in New York. They came with devastating reports through telephone calls and telegraph reports first, and Jin’s heart stopped in his chest as he read the bold black letters stating the tragedy and its numbers in newspapers. Jin bought a bundle of them on his way back home and anxiously read them sitting at the kitchen table. He called the Japanese Embassy, but there was no information yet. Too much confusion, too many casualties, too much distance. They were offering their telephones for international calls, but most of the lines in Tokyo had been brought down by the earthquake. “The Great Kanto Earthquake,” they named it.
The letters took longer to arrive, carried on ferries across the ocean. Letters from family and friends reporting their safety, reporting losses and panic and fire. And with the letters came the pictures, grainy and in black and white. Pictures of destruction and death, terrible and soul-freezing, and Jin couldn’t tear his eyes away from them for hours. Some were newspaper clippings, some were photographs taken by some of his photographer friends, but they all made Jin shiver and choke back sobs all the same. Tokyo was burnt down to the ground, houses fallen after the strong tremor shook the earth or consumed in the fires that followed. The numbers were dizzying.
It did not occur to Jin until a few days later. It had been years since the name had crossed his mind, since he had allowed himself to remember, but suddenly it was there again, bleeding like a fresh cut. Jin had no way to know if he was alright, if he had made it… Jin didn’t know how to contact him or his family. He could ask the Embassy. He had worked in the Government, surely there was a way to know… To find out if he was okay, to find his name in the casualty lists, even though Jin couldn’t even force himself to pronounce it aloud. But there had been so many dead, so many that were still missing, and he was only a name among thousands…
Jin stood in front of the Embassy, debating with himself, until a hand closed around his own and pulled on it. Jin snapped out of his mental argument to find a girl, eighteen at most and wearing a light dress ending just below her knee, pouting at him. He ruffled her boyish hair and she whined, swatting away his hands.
“Stop it, Dad! You promised to take me to see the new Chaplin movie today.”
“Oui, chérie.” Jin laughed as his daughter rolled her eyes, as she did every time he spoke any French, even though she was perfectly fluent herself. “Come on, let’s go. We don’t want to end up with bad seats.”
Jin offered his arm to his daughter and she was quick to link hers through it, happily pulling him along with such energy that Jin barely had a moment to look back at the Japanese Embassy. Almost one hundred thousand dead. Over forty three thousand missing. And just one name, lost in a list in the middle of it all. Jin turned his eyes to his daughter again and squeezed her against his side. It didn’t matter. It had been a long time since he cared and he was not going to start again. Jin focused on this, and tried to ignore the part of him that worried that the long ignored name would be indeed on a casualty list. His daughter laughed at something silly she had just told him, and Jin leaned in to press a kiss to her temple. He was happy now.
#
The portrait needs two weeks to dry for the exhibit, but the same man who brought it - Reio, he introduces himself again - comes to pick it up a week before the exhibition is scheduled to open. Kame reminds him that it’ll need to be re-varnished in a few months, gives him precise instructions for its transportation to the gallery and a letter suggesting the title for it, and in exchange receives an invitation to attend the opening day. He smiles and bows politely and promises to go.
Kame returns to his normal life, slowly and clumsily. The portrait had obsessed him in such a way that it feels like he has to hop over a gap now, to fill a hole left by its sudden absence. Soon enough new jobs start to pop up, though: a catholic school searching for someone to repair the damages inflicted upon a portrait of their founder by a disrespectful student, a landscape painted by someone’s grandfather and left over the fireplace for a decade or two too long, a small public gallery searching to clean a couple of paintings recently acquired. Kame assesses damages and receives visits from worried owners and somehow his life finds its own pace again.
The dreams are gone too. It felt like a loss at first, to wake up and not be filled with feelings so strong they felt like his own, but he doesn’t even think about them now. He thinks about the portrait, from time to time, but distance works to blur the details. Only as the date of the exhibition approaches does the portrait come back to Kame’s mind with all its force, and settles a certain amount of unreasonable nervousness within him that Kame can’t shake off.
Kame had learned early in his career that exhibits’ opening days were better attended in the late hours of the afternoon, VIP passes or not. It doesn’t matter for how long the artworks are scheduled to be displayed: people always clustered in long queues that stretched for hours in the cold wind or the blazing sun to be the first to see them, as if that conferred the artworks any kind of special quality. Kame arrives early and settles in with a book and an iced coffee on the terrace of a café in front of the gallery until the queue is gone and the visitors start to leave with comments of praise.
Kame’s steps are loud inside the now mostly empty room. The walls are white and the pictures hanging on them are all of the Impressionist style. Kame recognizes the thick, short and visible paintbrush strokes, the blurriness of wet paint applied over still wet layers, the beautiful shadows of the evening light. Kame lets his eyes sweep lightly over each painting, taking in the details: the soft pink sakura, with their pastel colored, blurry petals not quite obscuring the sight of Shitennō-ji behind them; the deer pacing calmly in Nara during a bright summer day; the crimson autumn leaves of maple trees that nestle Kiyomizu-dera; the white and deserted snowy landscape of Hokkaido. Kame walks past maikos and geishas and children playing at the zoo and spends a bit longer in front of a party in the French countryside, watching a redhead girl laugh as she runs away from a grinning boy.
The portrait is propped up against a wall at the end of the room, but there’s no nail or tag, or anything to signify it is going to be hung with the rest of artworks. There’s a man standing in front of it and Kame stops by his side to look at the familiar features of the portrait’s subject again. The man standing next to him takes a few glances between Kame and the painting, but if he notices the striking resemblance he says nothing. Kame risks a glance of his own. The man is tall, with black hair permed into a messy mass of curls, and he’s wearing a suit that looks too big for him. His tie is slightly askew and Kame has to resist the urge to fix it; instead he toys with the cellphone charms hanging outside his pocket.
“You’re not going to exhibit this one?”
The man looks startled as Kame breaks the comfortable silence. He looks down at the portrait with a thoughtful frown that draws an accompanying pout onto his lips and does funny things to Kame’s heart.
“It’s titled Portrait of the loved man… Or at least that’s the translation; you don’t want to suffer my French pronunciation. I’m not sure about exhibiting it or not…”
“After all the work it gave me,” Kame sighs dramatically and the man looks at him with a confused frown that quickly dissolves into understanding, followed immediately by a guilty expression so genuine that Kame can’t help a grin. “Kamenashi Kazuya, art conservator. Nice to meet you.”
“Akanishi Jin,” the man says. His cheeks are such a lovely shade of red one would have believed them to have been blushed by the paintbrush of an artist. When he shakes the hand the man offers him, Kame’s skin stays warm and tingling even after Akanishi lets go. “I’m the owner of the paintings. I believe you’ve met by brother Reio already. I’m sorry we haven’t been able to meet before, but I’ve been busy lately.” Akanishi rubs at his nose with an embarrassed sniff and Kame licks his lips nervously. “I’m actually a music producer.”
“That’s quite a jump, from music to 19th century painting.”
“I know! I’ve never had much of an interest in art… At least not in visual arts and architecture, because music is another kind of art. But my brother and I… We inherited these recently. It’s quite a long story, but my great-grandfather was an artist and after he moved to the USA he left his paintings here… Around the turn of the century, I think. They only survived because they have been moving due to storage reasons, they were found in the attic of a house belonging to the family of someone who had been friends with my great-grandfather, with a letter from him to pass them on his family… It’s actually a bit confusing, but somehow they were forgotten and only as the house was recently sold and we found we had inherited them… Oh!” Akanishi gasps and the guilty expression returns to his face so suddenly that Kame’s thrown off for a moment, confused as to what had happened. “Am I boring you?”
Kame laughs. “You can never bore an artist with talk about art.”
Akanishi seems relieved. He gives Kame a shy smile before he turns toward the portrait again. “After I saw it restored and with the title you suggested… I thought it looked private, you know? Different from the others, like it wasn’t mean to be shared. Like it was something special for the artist and the subject…” Akanishi rubs at his nose again and gives a short laugh, shy and nervous. “You probably think I’m an idiot, right? A music producer suddenly pretending to know anything about art… And giving lessons to an artist, no less! But it just… I don’t know why, but it gives off that feeling to me.”
“I think you’re right,” Kame blurts out before he knows where the words come from. He looks at the portrait too, and with Akanishi’s words he can see it in a different light despite having worked on it for two months. The trees around the small meadow seem to create a small bubble secluded from the world outside, and even the man’s posture suggests an intimate moment shared only between subject and painter, to the point that Kame feels like he’s intruding on something and looks away. “I think you’re right not to exhibit it. It feels personal.”
Akanishi grins from ear to ear and Kame feels a smile pulling at his own lips and a pleasant bubbling at the bottom of his stomach. The silence when they both turn to look at the portrait again is comfortable, even if they have just met. It feels like the presence of an old friend, smooth and fitting easily into the space between them by use and time. Kame thinks it’s weird, but he feels drawn towards Akanishi in the same way he felt drawn by the portrait they’re both looking at now.
“I’d like to learn more,” Akanishi says. “About art, I mean. In general… Or painting. All these artworks, they’re so beautiful. I can feel the warmth of the sun and the breeze and the laughter, and I can feel the affection in this portrait… I can feel all of that and I think it’s amazing how painting can make you feel these things just like music can. I really would like to learn more about it all, but I don’t know where to start.”
Kame looks at him and takes in the details slowly: the dirty sneakers that contrast with the suit slacks, the shirt and the jacket a size too big for the frame they cover, the slightly crooked tie and a shy smile, and a mess of curls barely obscuring an honest look.
“You can start by treating me to a coffee,” Kame says while trying not to fidget, “and I’ll see what I can teach you.”
“Deal!” Akanishi exclaims, and Kame’s heart misses a beat at the happy enthusiasm in his voice.
As Akanishi goes to look for the security guard to put the portrait somewhere safe Kame turns to look at it one last time. He could have sworn it had looked sad before, but maybe because of the play of the artificial light and the way it is propped against the wall, or maybe because Kame’s own giddiness is playing tricks with his mind, it looks happy now. The lips of the man who so closely resembles Kame and had given the whole painting a feeling of infinite longing with their grim line of sadness, are now turned into a placid, contented smile that looks almost encouraging. Kame bows his head in a quick salute, and rushes to leave the room before he can feel silly for saluting a painting.
Akanishi is waiting for him at the door. The twilight orange rays fall over the sunglasses that hang from his open jacket’s front pocket and reflect on the lenses so that his heart seems to be ablaze with molten gold and it’s impossible not to look at him. When Akanishi smiles, brightly enough to outshine the sun, Kame feels warmer than he has in years.
Kame starts to lose his sense of time, hours and days passing in a mix of dreams and fantasy that end up blending together. Kame forgets to eat because someone ate in his dreams and the feeling of a full stomach stays with him even after he wakes up, he doesn’t notice the freezing air coming from the open window because the warmth of the dreams feels real when he’s working. As March comes and the days on the calendar pass Kame finds himself consumed by the portrait, working and dreaming and dreaming and working until he doesn’t know when he’s sleeping or when he’s awake.
#
The sun came into the room through a crack in the blinds Jin had pushed half shut. It was warm inside the dimly lit room, but not as much as outside, where the early afternoon breeze barely managed to help against the summer heat. Kazuya was naked in bed with the sheets tangled around his legs; painted on his chest were flowers and kanji and waves that started on his shoulders and went down to slide across his stomach, on his hips and down his thighs, painted by Jin’s fingers. Some had dried and some had blurred and smeared against Jin’s own body and the white covers of the futon, silent witnesses of what no one was allowed to know.
Jin was sprawled next to him, looking elegant and beautiful in his careless abandon, a sight out of one of his paintings. He was sketching Kazuya in one of his moleskine notebooks, but Kazuya felt too relaxed and content to care, alone with Jin in a dark room they hadn’t left all day.
“Let me paint you like one of my French girls,” Jin had joked, even though he had promised Kazuya again and again that he had nothing to do with all those pictures of naked women and that they were all Kiyoteru’s, whoever Kiyoteru was. Jin looked more like the kid he had been when they met all those years ago than like the 37-year-old man he was when he was smiling like that, goofy and amused, and Kazuya hadn’t been able to deny him.
Now Jin sketched Kazuya and Kazuya watched Jin, the dark fringe that fell over his eyes and his little focused frown, the cute way he pursed his lips when he was deep in thought and the way the sparse beams of light fell over his skin in an almost liquid way, highlighting soft curves and blotches of smeared paint. Jin looked beautiful and peaceful. His frown dissolved into a confused expression when Kazuya tugged the notebook out of his grasp, softly so as to not make the pencil slip on the paper and ruin the drawing.
“What…?”
“I love you.”
Kazuya rolled into Jin’s arms, stretching up a bit to kiss him. Even caught by surprise Jin was fast to kiss back and pull Kazuya closer, so close that Kazuya hoped their naked bodies would melt into one. Jin’s hands were calloused and rough and tender and bold wherever they settled on Kazuya’s body, exploring and searching and caressing, touching, tracing the painted patterns to draw a map of his skin. Kazuya sighed softly and pushed himself against Jin, slow and lazy like the summer that trickled away behind the closed blinds of their window.
But not even the summer could last forever, and Kazuya dreaded its end.
#
It isn’t unusual for Kame to forget to answer e-mails for days or to miss calls that he doesn’t reply to until late in the night, but even when he is up to his eyebrows with work Kame never fails to let his friends and family know he’s doing alright. That’s why after two weeks of receiving no reply from him Koki decides to use the spare key Kame gave him to pick up paintings when he wasn’t around and check on his friend. He has a moment of doubt in front of the door, because maybe Kame’s just busy and Koki’s intruding, but any possible apology dissolves in his mind when he finds his friend passed out on the studio’s floor.
Koki paws his pockets for his phone as he calls out to Kame, voice loud and shrill with alarm, but Kame doesn’t answer, because Kame’s dreaming.
#
Jin missed Europe, sometimes. He missed Paris, and the French countryside, and Spain and England and the studio where he painted, and his French friends and drinking absinthe and smoking and tumbling home together, singing loud rude songs in different languages under the influx of la fée verte. He missed the boat rides down the Seine in summer and watching the snow fall in winter until his fingers got too cold and he had to take refuge in the nearest café with a mug of hot coffee and a cigarette. Jin missed climbing the steep stairs to the towers of Notre-Dame to sketch the ugly-faced gargoyles, and looking up at the bells to wonder if Quasimodo had really lived there.
Jin thought about going back, sometimes, but then Jin thought about Kazuya; about leaving him behind and about the aching longing of eight years spent apart. Jin thought about nights spent curled around each other, about stolen kisses when no one was looking and bright smiles and stubby fingers poking at his ribs to steal his glasses. Jin thought about eight, ten years without any of it and Europe didn’t look so tempting anymore, not if he couldn’t have Kazuya with him.
Instead Jin took Kazuya with him on trips. They went to Nara in summer so Jin could paint the antique temples and the deer in the park, to Kyoto in the fall to capture the magnificent sight of Kiyomizu-dera and Kinkaku-ji between the sea of deep crimson leaves of the maple trees, and the geishas and maikos strolling down the calm streets of Gion; they went to Osaka in spring to paint the sakura trees around Shitennō-ji and eat takoyaki, and to Hokkaido during winter so Jin could practice his landscapes with the beautiful snowy mountains. When Kazuya couldn’t go anywhere, Jin went to Ueno zoo to paint the animals and the playing children.
Jin dragged Kazuya everywhere he could and filled a thousand pages with sketches of him, and in the meantime the nostalgia for Europe somehow faded away.
#
Kame’s admitted into the hospital the 12th of March, unconscious, burning with fever and having difficulty breathing. Later Koki tells him all of this with loud angry yells and violent hand motions, but Kame doesn’t even wake up during the ride in the ambulance or while the doctors put him on oxygen to aid his breathing, because Kame’s dreaming.
Kame dreams for a long time.
#
The new century started without any surprises, wrapped in a blur of snow and cold. Kazuya’s workload had been steadily increasing since his adoptive father Katsuhiko had died in 1892, leaving him as the heir and new head of the family. As 1900 advanced and he turned 34 the pressure on him only seemed to double as whispered talk about duty and family rose around him; Kazuya knew he could only tune them off for so long.
The year went on between Kazuya’s obligations and Jin’s painting lessons, which had grown more and more popular with students interested in his revolutionary techniques of light and bright colors ever since he had returned from France. Jin had gotten a reputation for organizing public expositions along with Kiyoteru, a short balding man whom Jin had finally introduced to Kazuya as Seiki as soon as the man had returned to Japan years ago. Jin painted and exhibited his paintings and won prizes and Kazuya’s collection of newspapers articles featuring pictures and mentions of Jin grew at a steady pace. Jin had Kazuya’s photograph taken too, and at least then Kazuya didn’t look as stiff and uncomfortable as he always got when Jin started painting him.
Jin, ever the artist, loved technology, photography and film and things Kazuya had never stopped to think about. Jin had a photograph taken of the two of them together, Kazuya in his kimono looking rigid and serious and Jin in his worn out, messy western clothes, smiling brightly enough to outshine the sun. Jin took Kazuya to see the moving images recorded on film as soon as there was a projection in Japan; he had been speaking wonders about it, but he still squeaked like a small girl and jumped when the train seemed to rush towards them, and it was left to Kazuya to pat his shoulder and pretend he had not been squeezing Jin’s had back out of a little fear of his own and not only reassurance.
As summer unrolled in slow, hot days Kazuya grew restless in Tokyo. Jin had an exhibition in July, a special event organized by the American Consulate in Tokyo to commemorate the 4th of July, a day that was coincidentally also Jin’s birthday, and a few other compromises that couldn’t be avoided, but as soon as July was over Kazuya surprised him with a month of vacation at one of the country residences he had inherited from his uncle all the way up in Aomori, where the summer temperatures dropped enough to give them a rest. The house’s garden merged with the forest, and the trees provided a refreshing shadow. The servants that kept the house habitable were fast to leave upon Kazuya’s request, with their only order being to bring food to the house every two days.
The isolated house with its large garden became their bubble of peace. Tokyo and its obligations couldn’t reach Kazuya between the shelter of the trees, where there was only Jin laughing and poking fun at him as he tried to make Kazuya smile for his portrait. Some days they didn’t even bother to get out of bed and then there was only Jin, naked and honest and warm, Jin without pretenses and demands, Jin with kisses and touches that made Kazuya want to hold onto him and never let go.
But even among the forests of Aomori summer trickled away day by day, and with each passing sunset Kazuya’s heart grew heavier with sadness in his chest.
#
Kame’s fever breaks, but it still takes a day to completely disappear. The saline slips into his system through the needle hooked into the crook of his arm, but it still takes his weakened body time to recover. Kame wakes up a few times during the first two days, to a nurse changing the saline bag or checking his temperature, to his mother’s worried fretting and to Koki’s hostile silence that only hides a big fright. But mostly, Kame sleeps, and he dreams.
#
”The portrait is almost done!” Jin grinned widely and stretched his legs lazily under the low table in the living room of Kazuya’s house in Tokyo. It was a rude gesture, but Jin never watched his manners when they were alone. “Only a few details and it’ll be done.”
Kazuya didn’t answer, instead staring down at his cup of warm tea with a deep frown. Jin sighed deeply and kicked Kazuya’s ankles under the table to startle him, and Kazuya yelped a bit. Jin laughed, though he reached across the table to pull Kazuya’s hand into his own. September was not cold enough for them to be cold, but despite the tea Kazuya had been holding Jin’s were still warmer.
“Are you okay? You seem so distracted. Thinking about work again?”
“I… What…? Yeah, what… What were you saying?”
Jin laughed again, amused by the pout on Kazuya’s lips as Kazuya tried to focus on their conversation again. “Your portrait is almost done. I only need to finish a few details and it’ll be done. Do you want to see it?”
“Yes, I’d like that.”
“I’ve been thinking about going down to Okinawa before the month is over to paint some seascapes, can you sneak away from work a couple of days? We could go to the beach, and…”
“Jin, I… We need to talk.”
Kazuya’s voice was small, but his tone was serious and determined and it froze Jin in mid-sentence. He frowned at Kazuya, who was staring intently at the tatami floor. Dressed in his yukata, sitting on his heels and stiff, he looked like someone about to give Jin a lecture. Jin opened his mouth to defend his innocence, but Kazuya beat him to it.
“We have to stop seeing each other.”
“What?!”
Jin’s response was instinctive, not thought out. It blurted past his lips a moment before his brain fully processed what Kazuya had said. Jin stared wide-eyed at Kazuya, and Kazuya hated the way Jin’s heart sat in his eyes, because he could see all the confusion and the pain reflected behind those stupid round, golden glasses he didn’t even need to see, and it wasn’t making things any easier.
“I don’t mean as friends… We can still be friends, but we can’t continue this, what we have… I can’t keep being your lover, Jin.”
“But why?” Jin’s voice was shrill, like he was trying and failing to keep his emotions at bay. Jin had never been very good at that. Kazuya gulped; he had to keep in control for the two of them. “Did I do something wrong? Don’t you love me?”
“I do! I love you, Jin. But I just can’t… This can’t keep going anymore. There’s talk going around and I can’t… I can’t allow that to happen. I have a reputation, and my uncle’s name… The family name, and my duties… I’m the head of the family now, Jin, I have responsibilities towards it that I can’t ignore… I must marry, you don’t understand…”
“No, I don’t!” Jin yelled. His voice was high now, high and shrill and broken with a pain so intense that it made Kazuya shudder and look down as it drowned his own heartache. “Of course I don’t understand! I love you, Kazuya. I love you.” Jin reached for Kazuya’s hand and tugged on it, but Kazuya couldn’t bring himself to answer. “I love you. Please don’t leave me. We can… We can go to Paris and live there, together. It’s not weird there, to share a room with another man. No one would say anything; they would only think we’re good friends. Please. Please, Kazuya. Don’t throw away what we have for… nothing!”
The last word set Kazuya off. How could Jin… How could Jin say he was giving their relationship away for nothing, when each word Kazuya said made his own heart crack a little? How could Jin, careless, free Jin, who had never felt the weight of responsibility on his shoulders, who had only himself to care about, say that Kazuya’s whole life was… nothing? He looked up to meet Jin’s hurt look, not bothering to hide the anger in his own.
“I work in the government, Jin! Why can’t you understand?! Meiji Government may be opening up to the foreigners you love so much, it may be trying to modernize Japan, but Japanese people are still the same. They talk, and they will talk more if I don’t settle down! My father died years ago and I’m the head of the family, yet I’m not married. It’s my duty to provide the family with an heir, to stop the gossip that taints my father’s name. Katsuhiko gave me everything I have! He made me who I am, and I owe him everything. An omiai has been set for me to meet the daughter of a high ranking official in the Government. This is not what I want, Jin. But it’s what I must do. Why can’t you understand that?”
Kazuya’s rant had started loud and angry, but somehow his rage deflated towards the end, maybe because Jin looked so broken where he was sitting on the floor, with his shoulders hunched and pulled towards his body as if he was trying to protect himself. Jin flinched when Kazuya tried to touch his arm, so Kazuya pulled his hand back.
“I can’t.” Jin’s voice was tiny and thin, a broken whisper. “I can’t understand. I’m nothing to you then? All that we lived… These ten years have been… nothing?”
“They’ve have been everything to me, Jin. You have been everything to me. You still are. There’s nothing I want more than to stay with you, Jin, or run away to Paris together, but I can’t. I can’t turn off society and their expectations and I can’t let them down. Please, try to understand this. Please.”
There were a few moments worth of silence, and suddenly the sound of raindrops splattering against the rocks in the garden was so loud it seemed intrusive in their painful silence. Kazuya didn’t even know it had started raining. He was looking down, to where the knees of Jin’s French trousers rubbed against the tatami. They were nice trousers, or had been, years ago, but now they were worn down thin and discolored by time. The contrast of the foreign fabric against the traditional floor seemed to mock Kazuya, a reminder of all the reasons why their relationship could have never worked.
Jin’s knees knocked against the low table when he got up, and the still full cup of tea shook and fell to the ground, spilling its contents over the tatami. Kazuya looked down at it because he was unable to watch Jin standing up to leave him.
“I can’t. I’m sorry. I loved you. I love you.”
And then there was only the soft shuffle of socked feet against the tatami and the quiet whisper of a sliding door, and finally there was only the loud downpour of rain and the pounding of Kazuya’s heartbreak, blood rushing in his ears and drowning out any other noise. He stayed there, sitting on his heels and bent forward, forehead on his knees and arms around himself. Tea was seeping into the tatami and he should call a servant to clean it up, but Kazuya couldn’t bring himself to do it. Maybe he would do it later. Later, when he stopped crying. When he was done picking up the pieces of two shattered hearts.
#
Kame’s not allowed to go home for a week and a half. His fever is gone and he feels strong and well rested, but the doctors insist. He’s to take things easy, he’s told, to take a break from work and stay in bed for a few days to recover. Kame complains that he’s perfectly fine, but he thinks Koki has bribed every doctor while he slept, because it takes a whole week before they even let Kame take a stroll through the corridors without a wheelchair. His mother frets over him all the time and brings him sweets and fruits and babies him in between half-hearted scolding sessions about taking care of himself.
The dreams fade away, somehow, as if in distancing himself from the portrait Kame has put an end to them too. He kinds of regrets it, because despite never being able to remember anything, the feelings that remained with him after waking up had always felt so real that it was as if he has been remembering a story, rather than dreaming it up. Still, the nights of dreamless, deep sleep do his body well, and soon he feels better than he has in weeks. A current of energy runs through him, and Kame can barely keep to the hospital bed anymore.
Kame is finally released on the 23rd of March, and he has barely a weekend to finish the few details he has left of the portrait before he has to let it dry for the exhibit, which usually takes around one or two weeks. He is made to promise to take it easy though, and somehow Koki manages to find enough free time to stay with Kame throughout the day and even stay over for the night. Kame finds an extra futon for him and Koki sleeps next to him.
Kame had thought the dreams to be gone, but as if the mere physical closeness to the portrait can provoke them, they come back again. Kame lies down and closes his eyes to Koki’s light snoring, and Kame dreams.
#
Kazuya looked down at the bundle of blankets cradled in his wife’s arms, at the red little hand and the tiny fingers that peek in between the soft fabric, at the thin black hair and the round cheeks and the pouting lips, and he smiled. His wife was smiling too, tired after the delivery, but happy. Kazuya nodded at her and reached out with a careful hand to brush his fingers over the flushed cheek of the baby, who stirred lightly without waking up.
Gen’ichiro.
His son.
#
Kame thinks Koki and his mother have made a secret pact to babysit him, because the following morning she appears unannounced and stays with him all through the day to make sure he doesn’t overwork himself. She’s distracting when Kame’s trying to focus on the portrait, but she makes sure he rests and eats and doesn’t get pulled in too much. She only allows Kame to work until there’s no more natural light, and when he’s finally made to set down the palette and the paintbrush there’s still the last details to be retouched. Kame doesn’t mind, though, because he can finish tomorrow anyway, and he’ll have just enough time to let it dry.
Kame lets his mother take his usual, more comfortable futon and he sleeps in the same one Koki had taken the previous night. His mother’s breathing is even and soft and it lulls Kame to sleep like a lullaby.
#
The tremor was sudden and unexpected. Kazuya was reading the newspaper by the garden door, enjoying a small moment of peace as his wife cooked their meal, and in a second the ground was shaking so hard that things were falling out of place. Suddenly the air was filled with screams in counterpoint to the thunder of the Earth. Kazuya heard his wife cry out and finally snapped out of the panic that had wrapped itself around his mind. He got up, barely able to keep his balance, and stumbled towards her to push her out, out of the shaking house, out where it was safer in the street.
Gen’ichiro… Gen’ichiro was away in Osaka. The earthquake wouldn’t reach there, it couldn’t be so widespread. Gen’ichiro was going to be fine, safe, and Kazuya breathed out a heavy sigh of relief, letting go for a moment of the frantic fear that filled his mind. His wife was yelling at him from the street, her broken cries mixed between the multitude of sounds that filled Kazuya’s ears until it was all too much and not a single sound more could have made it into the chaos. He turned to leave, and suddenly the Earth shook again. Kazuya tripped and lost his balance, and there was a surge of white in his brain and blinding pain as his head collided against something. The world twisted and blurred before his eyes, and then there was darkness. No color, no sound, no pain, nothing.
Nothing.
#
Kame starts on Sunday with an uncomfortable feeling and a headache that pounds on his temple; it feels like he hit his head against something, even though there’s nothing in his room that could allow for such a thing to occur in his sleep. He doesn’t tell his mother, just in case she forces him to rest, and instead takes a painkiller when she’s not looking. The dark feeling, a remnant from another dream he doesn’t remember, starts to fade as he works on the last bits of light between the trees, the peaceful scenery soothing and therapeutic now when it had been an obsession for weeks.
Kame is about to set the palette down and declare the job done for good when he sees it. His eyes travel over the expanse of the portrait, assessing the corrected details and the magnificent artwork that it’s now repaired, and his eyes somehow fall on the lightest trace of gold upon the book’s brown leather cover. He frowns and leans closer, and wonders how it’s possible that he didn’t notice its existence after the many hours he spent staring at every detail of the painting. The golden paint forms elegant roman letters, but they’re too small to be read without a magnifying glass.
Kame looks at the inscription on the book through the magnifying glass for the best part of an hour, reading carefully and writing down every word. They’re written in French, and even though they could very well be the title of the book in the portrait, Kame feels the amount of detail and care put into them suggests instead they’re the title of the portrait itself. Kame looks at the four words written on white paper in front of him, with their translation to Japanese scrawled under them, and he finally picks up his paintbrush and selects the adequate color.
Kame traces the letters one by one, putting all his attention in the careful, delicate movements of the paintbrush.
Portrait de l’homme aimé..
Portrait of the loved man.
#
The news took time to arrive in New York. They came with devastating reports through telephone calls and telegraph reports first, and Jin’s heart stopped in his chest as he read the bold black letters stating the tragedy and its numbers in newspapers. Jin bought a bundle of them on his way back home and anxiously read them sitting at the kitchen table. He called the Japanese Embassy, but there was no information yet. Too much confusion, too many casualties, too much distance. They were offering their telephones for international calls, but most of the lines in Tokyo had been brought down by the earthquake. “The Great Kanto Earthquake,” they named it.
The letters took longer to arrive, carried on ferries across the ocean. Letters from family and friends reporting their safety, reporting losses and panic and fire. And with the letters came the pictures, grainy and in black and white. Pictures of destruction and death, terrible and soul-freezing, and Jin couldn’t tear his eyes away from them for hours. Some were newspaper clippings, some were photographs taken by some of his photographer friends, but they all made Jin shiver and choke back sobs all the same. Tokyo was burnt down to the ground, houses fallen after the strong tremor shook the earth or consumed in the fires that followed. The numbers were dizzying.
It did not occur to Jin until a few days later. It had been years since the name had crossed his mind, since he had allowed himself to remember, but suddenly it was there again, bleeding like a fresh cut. Jin had no way to know if he was alright, if he had made it… Jin didn’t know how to contact him or his family. He could ask the Embassy. He had worked in the Government, surely there was a way to know… To find out if he was okay, to find his name in the casualty lists, even though Jin couldn’t even force himself to pronounce it aloud. But there had been so many dead, so many that were still missing, and he was only a name among thousands…
Jin stood in front of the Embassy, debating with himself, until a hand closed around his own and pulled on it. Jin snapped out of his mental argument to find a girl, eighteen at most and wearing a light dress ending just below her knee, pouting at him. He ruffled her boyish hair and she whined, swatting away his hands.
“Stop it, Dad! You promised to take me to see the new Chaplin movie today.”
“Oui, chérie.” Jin laughed as his daughter rolled her eyes, as she did every time he spoke any French, even though she was perfectly fluent herself. “Come on, let’s go. We don’t want to end up with bad seats.”
Jin offered his arm to his daughter and she was quick to link hers through it, happily pulling him along with such energy that Jin barely had a moment to look back at the Japanese Embassy. Almost one hundred thousand dead. Over forty three thousand missing. And just one name, lost in a list in the middle of it all. Jin turned his eyes to his daughter again and squeezed her against his side. It didn’t matter. It had been a long time since he cared and he was not going to start again. Jin focused on this, and tried to ignore the part of him that worried that the long ignored name would be indeed on a casualty list. His daughter laughed at something silly she had just told him, and Jin leaned in to press a kiss to her temple. He was happy now.
#
The portrait needs two weeks to dry for the exhibit, but the same man who brought it - Reio, he introduces himself again - comes to pick it up a week before the exhibition is scheduled to open. Kame reminds him that it’ll need to be re-varnished in a few months, gives him precise instructions for its transportation to the gallery and a letter suggesting the title for it, and in exchange receives an invitation to attend the opening day. He smiles and bows politely and promises to go.
Kame returns to his normal life, slowly and clumsily. The portrait had obsessed him in such a way that it feels like he has to hop over a gap now, to fill a hole left by its sudden absence. Soon enough new jobs start to pop up, though: a catholic school searching for someone to repair the damages inflicted upon a portrait of their founder by a disrespectful student, a landscape painted by someone’s grandfather and left over the fireplace for a decade or two too long, a small public gallery searching to clean a couple of paintings recently acquired. Kame assesses damages and receives visits from worried owners and somehow his life finds its own pace again.
The dreams are gone too. It felt like a loss at first, to wake up and not be filled with feelings so strong they felt like his own, but he doesn’t even think about them now. He thinks about the portrait, from time to time, but distance works to blur the details. Only as the date of the exhibition approaches does the portrait come back to Kame’s mind with all its force, and settles a certain amount of unreasonable nervousness within him that Kame can’t shake off.
Kame had learned early in his career that exhibits’ opening days were better attended in the late hours of the afternoon, VIP passes or not. It doesn’t matter for how long the artworks are scheduled to be displayed: people always clustered in long queues that stretched for hours in the cold wind or the blazing sun to be the first to see them, as if that conferred the artworks any kind of special quality. Kame arrives early and settles in with a book and an iced coffee on the terrace of a café in front of the gallery until the queue is gone and the visitors start to leave with comments of praise.
Kame’s steps are loud inside the now mostly empty room. The walls are white and the pictures hanging on them are all of the Impressionist style. Kame recognizes the thick, short and visible paintbrush strokes, the blurriness of wet paint applied over still wet layers, the beautiful shadows of the evening light. Kame lets his eyes sweep lightly over each painting, taking in the details: the soft pink sakura, with their pastel colored, blurry petals not quite obscuring the sight of Shitennō-ji behind them; the deer pacing calmly in Nara during a bright summer day; the crimson autumn leaves of maple trees that nestle Kiyomizu-dera; the white and deserted snowy landscape of Hokkaido. Kame walks past maikos and geishas and children playing at the zoo and spends a bit longer in front of a party in the French countryside, watching a redhead girl laugh as she runs away from a grinning boy.
The portrait is propped up against a wall at the end of the room, but there’s no nail or tag, or anything to signify it is going to be hung with the rest of artworks. There’s a man standing in front of it and Kame stops by his side to look at the familiar features of the portrait’s subject again. The man standing next to him takes a few glances between Kame and the painting, but if he notices the striking resemblance he says nothing. Kame risks a glance of his own. The man is tall, with black hair permed into a messy mass of curls, and he’s wearing a suit that looks too big for him. His tie is slightly askew and Kame has to resist the urge to fix it; instead he toys with the cellphone charms hanging outside his pocket.
“You’re not going to exhibit this one?”
The man looks startled as Kame breaks the comfortable silence. He looks down at the portrait with a thoughtful frown that draws an accompanying pout onto his lips and does funny things to Kame’s heart.
“It’s titled Portrait of the loved man… Or at least that’s the translation; you don’t want to suffer my French pronunciation. I’m not sure about exhibiting it or not…”
“After all the work it gave me,” Kame sighs dramatically and the man looks at him with a confused frown that quickly dissolves into understanding, followed immediately by a guilty expression so genuine that Kame can’t help a grin. “Kamenashi Kazuya, art conservator. Nice to meet you.”
“Akanishi Jin,” the man says. His cheeks are such a lovely shade of red one would have believed them to have been blushed by the paintbrush of an artist. When he shakes the hand the man offers him, Kame’s skin stays warm and tingling even after Akanishi lets go. “I’m the owner of the paintings. I believe you’ve met by brother Reio already. I’m sorry we haven’t been able to meet before, but I’ve been busy lately.” Akanishi rubs at his nose with an embarrassed sniff and Kame licks his lips nervously. “I’m actually a music producer.”
“That’s quite a jump, from music to 19th century painting.”
“I know! I’ve never had much of an interest in art… At least not in visual arts and architecture, because music is another kind of art. But my brother and I… We inherited these recently. It’s quite a long story, but my great-grandfather was an artist and after he moved to the USA he left his paintings here… Around the turn of the century, I think. They only survived because they have been moving due to storage reasons, they were found in the attic of a house belonging to the family of someone who had been friends with my great-grandfather, with a letter from him to pass them on his family… It’s actually a bit confusing, but somehow they were forgotten and only as the house was recently sold and we found we had inherited them… Oh!” Akanishi gasps and the guilty expression returns to his face so suddenly that Kame’s thrown off for a moment, confused as to what had happened. “Am I boring you?”
Kame laughs. “You can never bore an artist with talk about art.”
Akanishi seems relieved. He gives Kame a shy smile before he turns toward the portrait again. “After I saw it restored and with the title you suggested… I thought it looked private, you know? Different from the others, like it wasn’t mean to be shared. Like it was something special for the artist and the subject…” Akanishi rubs at his nose again and gives a short laugh, shy and nervous. “You probably think I’m an idiot, right? A music producer suddenly pretending to know anything about art… And giving lessons to an artist, no less! But it just… I don’t know why, but it gives off that feeling to me.”
“I think you’re right,” Kame blurts out before he knows where the words come from. He looks at the portrait too, and with Akanishi’s words he can see it in a different light despite having worked on it for two months. The trees around the small meadow seem to create a small bubble secluded from the world outside, and even the man’s posture suggests an intimate moment shared only between subject and painter, to the point that Kame feels like he’s intruding on something and looks away. “I think you’re right not to exhibit it. It feels personal.”
Akanishi grins from ear to ear and Kame feels a smile pulling at his own lips and a pleasant bubbling at the bottom of his stomach. The silence when they both turn to look at the portrait again is comfortable, even if they have just met. It feels like the presence of an old friend, smooth and fitting easily into the space between them by use and time. Kame thinks it’s weird, but he feels drawn towards Akanishi in the same way he felt drawn by the portrait they’re both looking at now.
“I’d like to learn more,” Akanishi says. “About art, I mean. In general… Or painting. All these artworks, they’re so beautiful. I can feel the warmth of the sun and the breeze and the laughter, and I can feel the affection in this portrait… I can feel all of that and I think it’s amazing how painting can make you feel these things just like music can. I really would like to learn more about it all, but I don’t know where to start.”
Kame looks at him and takes in the details slowly: the dirty sneakers that contrast with the suit slacks, the shirt and the jacket a size too big for the frame they cover, the slightly crooked tie and a shy smile, and a mess of curls barely obscuring an honest look.
“You can start by treating me to a coffee,” Kame says while trying not to fidget, “and I’ll see what I can teach you.”
“Deal!” Akanishi exclaims, and Kame’s heart misses a beat at the happy enthusiasm in his voice.
As Akanishi goes to look for the security guard to put the portrait somewhere safe Kame turns to look at it one last time. He could have sworn it had looked sad before, but maybe because of the play of the artificial light and the way it is propped against the wall, or maybe because Kame’s own giddiness is playing tricks with his mind, it looks happy now. The lips of the man who so closely resembles Kame and had given the whole painting a feeling of infinite longing with their grim line of sadness, are now turned into a placid, contented smile that looks almost encouraging. Kame bows his head in a quick salute, and rushes to leave the room before he can feel silly for saluting a painting.
Akanishi is waiting for him at the door. The twilight orange rays fall over the sunglasses that hang from his open jacket’s front pocket and reflect on the lenses so that his heart seems to be ablaze with molten gold and it’s impossible not to look at him. When Akanishi smiles, brightly enough to outshine the sun, Kame feels warmer than he has in years.