The Art of Kozu Read online

  ‘I have brought you my sketches of Yumiko,’ Yuichiro said and proceeded to lay down several sheets of cartridge paper on the table. ‘What do you think?’ I felt honoured to have the opportunity to offer my advice on a work in progress, but before I could offer my humble opinion, he continued, ‘This girl, she will launch my name across Paris. “Kozu”, they will call, my name echoing off the walls of the Salon, like the report of a gun!’

  It seems strange to me now that I can sit here and talk to you of a time when any work by Kozu was less of interest for what would become his signature style, than his ability to ape the Japanese masters before him. You probably find such a time even more inconceivable than I, but, you can be assured, before the portrait your wife has shown such a keen interest towards was exhibited at the Salon Autumne, Yuichiro Kozu was little more than a copyist, albeit a copyist who managed to keep us living in fine apartments.

  His arrival in Paris, five years before mine, could not have been more fortuitous. Japanese prints were still in vogue and many artists and intellectuals collected them by the hundred. With his ability to study and copy whatever he laid his eyes on, Yuichiro cashed in on this trend, this Japonisme, making a quick fortune by reproducing selected street scenes by Hokusai, famous landscapes by Hiroshige and the beautiful women of Utamaro. All of which he claimed were original. That was how I first made his acquaintance. With Yuichiro’s deft eye for detail, a week or two of Parisian sunlight to fade the fresh inks and my contacts, we were set for success. He even made up some pieces from scratch, laying down just a few lines of ink and selling them off as rare sketches made by some great master on their deathbed.

  But I digress.

  I looked at those sketches Yuichiro had handed me, finished my beverage and felt the first bangs of an approaching headache.

  ‘Kozu-san,’ I said to him, ‘they are not quite what I would have expected.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ His hands closed into fists. ‘Isn’t she the most interesting subject you’ve seen in years? And she’s Japanese to boot!’

  ‘Is it not that she is uninteresting – she does have a most peculiar body, but . . .’

  I spoke the truth. Yuichiro had skilfully rendered the body of a woman in thick swipes of charcoal, but this woman looked close to death. The very sight of her skeletal figure brought to mind those artists who in the late days of the Heian period would sketch the bodies of peasants dumped on the sides of roads.

  I said to Yuichiro, ‘She is so painfully thin, wherever did you find her?’ and he told me about the Metro, of how he thought I would recognize her. ‘She’s Masahiro Saiki’s wife,’ he said.

  Of course I knew of Saiki. At the time he was the only Japanese artist the French critics approved of. That was reason enough for the conservatives back here to reject him; and well, I don’t mean to be scandalous, but Masahiro Saiki’s lifestyle has become the stuff of legend. The tales of his Russian mistresses are proof of that. From the elegance of his nudes, though, one would never have assumed he was bold and short, with the thick shoulders of a judo champion and the face of a poor boxer.

  Yuichiro explained to me how she hadn’t eaten properly for months, saying that the food in Europe didn’t agree with her. ‘It’s too rich,’ she would say, and true enough, I saw her force down a lunch once, only to become violently ill afterwards.

  I took another look at the sketches, holding each image up to the sky, one by one, so as to illuminate Yuichiro’s slashed lines from behind. The light around the café was growing stronger by the minute and with it, my headache intensified. I tried to relax, to enjoy the burnt earth scent of their charcoal, but something nagged me about Yuichiro’s composition. Before I knew it, I had sullied my jacket with blackened fingers.

  I asked whether she had a lovely face, for it was unclear from the sketches.

  ‘It’s hard to tell,’ Yuichiro replied. ‘She has lovely hair. She wears it down – like those renegade girls one reads about in newspapers sent from home.’

  I asked myself: where was the so-called cherry blossom he had boasted of? Maybe I should I have kept my objections to myself – I have spent much time since those days, wondering whether I should have kept true to my upbringing and not appraised Yuichiro’s effort so directly. As it was, his talk of the girl’s hair clarified my doubts.

  Now, I beg your pardon, sir, but I take it that an esteemed and knowledgeable gentleman like your good self is familiar with the work of Kawanabe Kyosai? I am sure you’ll agree that he was the last of the great Japanese print artists – for no other figure, with the decline of that delicate form, has risen to match the skills of such a man. This was especially so when it came to his pictures of yurei. Ghosts. My own nurse told me ghost stories when I was a child, so as to stop me leaving my futon on hot summer nights. Her favourite story was of a nameless yurei Kyosai had rendered, an image she had seen in my father’s study. I can still hear her nasal way of speaking (so far removed from the soft grace of my mother’s), as she warned me of that ghost of ghosts, of how it wandered the night, the hair of a severed head clenched between its teeth.

  Though I digress, and excuse my impropriety, I am privileged to say that my father knew Kyosai in person. Knew him well. And once, while I helped him dry his brushes, the cicadas’ call a low hum from the twilight outside, my father told me how Kyosai had confided in him a secret – the reason for why his ghoulish scenes chilled the public so. The great master told my father a story from his youth, of how he had found a severed head on a riverbank. With the detachment of undiscovered genius – that was how my father put it – the nine-year-old Kyosai took the grim curio home. Of course, his parents were outraged and made him cast it into the river. But before he did so, he had the wherewithal to draw that unique trophy from every angle.

  That blue-sky morning, sat at the Café Houdini, I told Yuichiro the same anecdote. His reaction was curious. He looked puzzled at first, until I pointed out that Yumiko’s emaciated shoulder blades, the way her spine cleaved her ribs in two, for all the sketches of Yumiko were from behind, reminded me of Kyosai’s image.

  I regretted my words instantly. Yuichiro ordered another cup of coffee, drank it in silence, brooding on my words. The pain behind my right eye increased with every wordless moment that passed between us. I should have kept my thoughts to myself.

  Dishonesty aside – for Yuichiro was not one to bother himself with ethics – try to imagine how a man with such raw talent could manage in a world where it seemed every fresh breeze, rising off the Seine, bore within its vapour the germ of some great new idea, a new way of seeing. Fresh-faced youth gorged their appetites on Van Gogh, the brushwork of Cézanne, the personality of Picasso, while he knew himself a fraud. Compared to the rest of us, he was a rich man, yes, and a handsome man, but in his own eyes, Yuichiro Kozu was nothing more than a mimic, a glorified apprentice. And what was more, a Japanese apprentice at that.

  I apologized and tried to extradite myself from my blundering. I said that, on second thought, I had been mistaken, that it was the dusting of charcoal across the paper that reminded me of Kyosai. The hazy effect it produced brought to mind that ghostly vestige of Kyosai’s yurei because it reminded me of Asian light, murky and wet. It was not a Parisian light.

  Yuichiro stared at me as I blathered, finally standing up when I started to repeat myself. ‘You will meet her yourself,’ he said.

  I agreed, ashamed that I had caused him such vexation.

  The next morning at eight, I arrived at Yuichiro’s apartment on the corner of the rue de l’Alboni, where the Metro tracks glide out over the Seine. I expected him to show me through to the parlour, the spacious room, split in two by a set of finely wrought Japanese doors, the fretwork of which twisted and burst to the interlinking rhythms of cherry blossoms and their branches. Tatami-matting, too, covered the floor, so that in the summer heat, the room was filled with the green fragrance of home. That was where I joined him when we met with prospective clients, his lithe body hi
dden beneath a black kimono. He always looked smaller amongst those folds of black silk. As it was, he met me at the door, dressed in a grey pinstriped suit. He didn’t stop and was halfway down the second flight of stairs before I caught him up.

  I followed him outside and up the steps to the Passy Station. He instructed me to buy a first-class ticket and checked his watch. I eyed the mouth of the tunnel beyond the end of the platform. I used the line often to visit Yuichiro, but always got off at Passy. I never liked the idea of being shot into the tunnels beneath the Right Bank, like some virus injected into an artery.

  A train pulled into the station and we boarded. As if entering the confines of a stage, Yuichiro stepped up to a woman sat next to the doors, her face covered by the brim of her hat. She looked to be sleeping. ‘I am Yuichiro Kozu. I paint cats,’ he said. The girl looked up. I remember that moment distinctly. The train passed into the tunnel and the lights flickered. Her face was at once Japanese and not. I don’t know why, but her mouth, lips red and smiling in that instant of the lights’ failure, brought to mind a poem by Basho: the one where the heron’s shriek illuminates a flash of lightning.

  Unaccustomed, as I was at the time, to speaking to women from my own culture, I bid the girl a good morning, hoping she would turn her face, those lips, towards me. She did not. Her energy, intense, as if connected to the currents that pulled the train through the underbelly of the French capital, was directed at Yuichiro. So this was Yumiko, I thought. Yuichiro sat down beside her, offering her a cigarette. I was left to stand. She lit the tobacco herself with practiced movements, took a drag and looked me up and down, a movement of the eyes I had never seen a Japanese woman do before, let alone do so with such vigour. ‘Don’t you work for the consulate?’ she asked. I explained that I, like Yuichiro, was an artist. She scoffed.

  Yuichiro interjected, ‘My friend here is a famous man, you know, a working man. You’ve seen his pictures, Yumiko, of that I’m sure. You just don’t know it.’ Though his face was earnest, I knew Yuichiro was mocking me. You see, during my time in Europe, my only success came, not by exhibiting at the Salon, but from my commercial practices. My proficiency with a brush, as it was back then, along with a connection of my father’s at the Japan Steamship Company, gained me a commission painting the images for that company’s advertisements.

  It is a shame that you have not been to Europe yourself sir, but I am sure you must have seen one of the advertisements I painted. Yuichiro hated such posters. He saw them as emblems of the academic style our countrymen were enslaved to. That was how I originally met him, when he declared to me, as I sat reading in a chair in the Jardin du Luxembourg that I should paint whores and sheep, whores and sheep only, he told me.

  ‘Do you think,’ I still remember him asking me, ‘do you think Japanese women look like sheep? I think you do, what with those elongated eyes you always give them. Not one of your portraits has any expression in spite of the smile you paint onto their lips.’ The spring sunshine was bright on the white gravel, the surface of the Fontaine de Medicis, and I found myself unable to disagree.

  What I am trying to say, sir, is that Yuichiro believed my portraits to be momentous failures. Standing on that train, watching Yumiko puff on her cigarette, as she studied her own reflection in the window, I could understand why.

  After we had passed out of Boissiere, Yuichiro moved to a seat across from Yumiko. ‘This is how I want to paint you,’ he said, ‘here on the Metro. I’ll call it Train and Chrysanthemums or something similar. You’ll have chrysanthemums on your kimono, gold ones like the crest of the Emperor – yes – gold over white silk!’

  Still smarting from his mocker, I told him that I hadn’t figured him for a genre painter, at which Yuichiro shook his head. He would construct the carriage around Yumiko, he exclaimed, with the shadows creeping out from the black walls of the tunnels beyond the windows, falling across her neck, collar bone, the top of her sternum; she would be wearing only the outer layer of her kimono, its white silk resembling a funeral gown. Yumiko would glow – an ethereal energy to match the invisible powers that hurled the train underground.

  The train pulled into Etoile. All three of us alighted. I was still unsure of where we were headed, until I followed Yuichiro and Yumiko, walking arm in arm like some Parisian couple, onto a Line 1 train. From there, I assumed we were making our way to the Louvre.

  ‘I do not want to wear a white kimono,’ Yumiko said once aboard. ‘I do not want to wear anything at all. I want you to paint me as a nude.’

  Well, you can imagine the flush that coloured my cheeks at such an outburst. And on the Metro of all places! I could have sworn the other passengers, those Frenchman in their collars, and neckties, the lady who sat close by, a peacock’s feather in her hat, could understand what Yumiko had said. Only, they were too shocked too look in our direction. I was reminded of that train journey a few years later, when those upstart New Women, you remember the ones, caused a scandal by visiting Yoshiwara, the pleasure district, and drinking French liquor in its bars!

  Yumiko must have noticed my discomfort because she then said to me in French, ‘Why uncle, was it not because of women’s flesh that you became a painter?’

  An old man along from us chuckled at this perversion of Renoir’s sacred proclamation. I decided there and then to get off at the next station, to escape this demon in woman’s clothing – I would not play Benvolio to her Mercutio.

  To inflict further embarrassment upon me, she carried on with her offensive, turning to Yuichiro and saying, ‘I already have an idea on how I want you to paint me: there will be a system behind my pose – something more than just a vase of arranged flowers and an umbrella.’

  She thought for a moment, sucking smoke into her lungs, before she continued with her manifesto, catching glimpses of herself in the window behind a spellbound Yuichiro, seeming to enjoy the shapes her words took as smoke, ‘Consider my lines, my profile: the triangle of my legs as I hold them before me, hands on my knees, arms an inverted triangle.’ She raised her chin. ‘My eyes look upwards, as if at some distant horizon. Your idea of using the Metro is good, inspired even – I want to gaze up towards a carriage window, I want the viewer to ask, ‘Does she gaze at that space between her own reflection and the world beyond the window, one haunting the other?’’

  At that point, before she could continue, the train came to halt at Concorde. I fled.

  You would never think, would you sir, that this girl, hanging so serenely before us, could be the same girl who said such ignominious things? I try to remember what she looked like that day, but all I can remember is her smile – her rouge lips. You see, although it is my business to collect faces, to pass them on, so to speak, I have great difficulty recalling them, if they are not close at hand. That was one of my many failings as a young artist. I could not paint from memory, nor abstract the qualities of the many faces I had seen into some personal vision of the ideal. That, I guess, was why my women looked like sheep. After Yuichiro’s criticisms, I spent hours in the Louvre, copying firsthand the single works of Valequez, Rubens, Rembrandt, which hung in the Salon Carré, outnumbered by their Italian competitors. But once I left those hallowed halls, to catch one of those motorized buses that lined up outside the Denon Gate, I could only recall the visages of murky ghosts.

  I guess this is another reason for why – and I do not mean to be coy here – I am reticent to part with Kozu’s portrait of Yumiko. To no longer have her face in the gallery, watching over me as I talk of other works, their artists and their models, rivalries and confederations, would be like seeing her far out at sea, drifting away. A particular feature of a face – a nose, chin, a smile – I can recall with ease. If you asked me to sketch out a likeness of the Mona Lisa, or more to the point Yuichiro Kozu himself, I would have to locate a magazine or a textbook from which to copy. That is, apart from his eyes. Those I could present you within minutes, as if I had plucked them from his head moments before you walked through my door and
made a study of them. It took Kozu’s portrait and, more specifically, Jun’s arrival in August for me to realize how hard Yuichiro’s eyes could be.

  He wore glasses you see, Yuichiro, round-rimmed spectacles that, with his moustache, and height (made greater by the bowler hat he wore out) gave him a rather European look. An Occidental profile I think he enjoyed. He rarely took them off, blaming his poor eyesight on the nights spent as a youth sketching and painting, the only time he could practise without his father becoming suspicious. I know it is rude to speak so openly of a son neglecting his father, but you must understand: Paris was intoxicating. Its scent was in our noses, our hair, before the steamer docked at Le Havre or Marseille, even before boarding the train to Yokohama. It was borne in the skies of the Van Goghs or Matisses we gazed at in bookstores, their clouds smelling of turpentine.

  It is strange how one remembers one thing and forgets another. Like those moments one knows, deep in the heart, will be a fulcrum in our lives. Proust knew it – would spend hours reflecting on an imperfect glance of a woman who flashed by his cab. I knew from Jun Kozu’s opening remark to me the night I met him, he would change my life. ‘I have my nose,’ was what he said, looking up from a cup of tea as white as the tie of his evening dress.

  But forgive me. I was talking about Yuichiro’s eyes and now, here, Jun’s nose. When really, at this point, I’m more interested in recalling the night in which Yuichiro introduced me to Jun, himself. Suffice, it was the night I first met Jun that illuminated me to how cold Yuichiro’s stare could be. How penetrating. You’ll understand why I’ve jumped ahead presently, when I tell you I met Dr. Junosuke Kozu on a Tuesday evening few Parisians will ever forget! For reasons lost to me now, I did not go to the Louvre that day. What I remember is the call of the newspaper vendors, announcing the release of the evening editions. The city was changed in an instant: The Mona Lisa, La Jonconde herself, was gone. Stolen.