The Art of Kozu Page 4

  I do not wish to dwell upon what Yumiko and the Italian got up to in that other chamber, stared at by the hollow eyes of the dead, but when they returned Jun addressed the sculptor, saying that we should return to the surface. ‘This has been quite the experience, sir,’ he said.

  My translation complete, the wild-haired man bowed, his exaggerated movements extinguishing the flame of his candle. Yumiko lit his flame with her own, drawing her face close to his as she did so.

  Of the journey back to the Houdini’s cellar I remember nothing other than the spectre of Fournier’s sleeping form when we re-entered the kitchen. It was such a shock to see him there, his body whole and thin, his white hair glowing in the muted light of our candles, that Yumiko gave out a startled cry. The old man did not stir.

  Yumiko asked whether she should wake him.

  ‘The Houdini was not called the Houdini for nothing,’ the Italian said, mimicking the waiter’s southern accent. ‘In an hour he will have to open the café – let him lay there.’

  The rain had passed and the morning light reflected off the puddles in the lane, their edges cutting blue slithers between the cobbles. The lane smelt cold. Yumiko said something about a bath and the Italian, who seemed shorter when sober, grunted. His lips, black with dried wine, gave him the look of a tubercular apostle, his message and lungs spent. The two of them no-longer linked arms.

  I went to take my leave, but Jun stopped me, saying that we should all pay a visit Yuichiro’s apartment.

  ‘I trust that Yumiko is still to view her own portrait?’ he asked.

  Yuichiro shook his head. No, she had not yet seen the painting. Yumiko clapped her hands and implored the sculptor to come with us to the Right Bank. We should take the train. The Italian made some excuse about an appointment later that afternoon. He needed sleep to prepare for it. Yumiko’s expression turned crestfallen, but her smile never faded.

  Without another word to her lover, she took Yuichiro by the arm and led him out onto the avenue. At the entrance to Alesiá, that station I am told was named after a great battle between the Gauls and the Romans, the Italian crossed the road and headed northeast. I never spoke to him again, though I saw him from a distance a couple of times and I know he saw me. Two of his works, sir, now hang in this gallery. Ask me to show them to you sometime.

  It wasn’t until we waited at the platform edge that I felt conspicuous, accompanied as I was with such a strange band of Japanese. Petty businessmen and clerks were on their way to work and there I was beside two Orientals in dishevelled evening dress, cuffs red with wine like surgeons, Yuichiro impassive, Jun brooding; and Yumiko, a painfully thin exotic without a hat (at some point she must lost it!), her black hair gleaming over her breasts, eyes glazed as if in a daydream. I felt every face on the platform turn towards us, whether with scorn or curiosity, I cannot say, shame bringing me close to tears. We did not speak.

  At last we passed over the green waters of the Seine, shimmering like a vision by Matisse, the Eiffel Tower tall and emitting its invisible radio waves out over the world. We alighted at the Passy Station and I stumbled down its steps as if still drunk. Though no longer under the spotlight as it were, I felt something was chasing us; that at any moment a hoard of Parisians would surround us and throw us in the great green ribbon below Yuichiro’s building, leaving our bodies to wash up, rank and rotten, on some sandbank at Le Havre.

  Sat beneath the fretwork doors of Yuichiro’s parlour, a glass of sake held between my trembling fingers, the tension finally evaporated. I lay down, looking up at those wooden blossoms. How perfect they were; Yuichiro must have had them handcrafted back at home and shipped halfway around the world. Jun sat crossed-legged beside me, while Yumiko stood at the bay window, looking out.

  It took Yuichiro a short while to transport his canvas from studio to parlour; he didn’t want any help. Yumiko’s image was concealed beneath a cotton bed sheet, and I expected Yuichiro to make a great ceremony over the impromptu unveiling. As it was, he leaned the canvas against the fireplace and pulled off the sheet.

  How to explain what happened next? Yumiko shook off the reverie which had pulled her eyes to the city outside, and dropped to her knees, speechless.

  The picture was as Yuichiro had explained the night before. Yumiko, clutching her knees, looked outward towards a Metro carriage window. She was nude. The shadows from the tunnel did not spread across her naked form, though: what confronted one was an ultramarine sky, vast despite the window, breaking over purple-slated roofs, the limestone beneath them burnt-orange. The balance was striking: lines, straight and formidable, from the backs of the seats, to the highlights of Yumiko’s ribs – all were angled towards that sky, infinite in their bearing, as Seurat had once theorized. Yumiko was beautiful, in a Gauguin kind of way, at once warmed and drained by that gaze towards blazing colour, her own body bright like those of the facades.

  I applauded the masterpiece and its master, the painting was more achieved than I could have imagined from Yuichiro’s sketches. I looked to Jun, to watch his reaction to the portrait, for I could not fathom why he had taken such offence at Yuichiro’s vision the night before at the Houdini. Was it not the case in our modern world that, if the artist felt it to be so, he could paint the sun green? Would such a vision have to be wrong? Hadn’t the catacombs below the greatest of European cities only confirmed the idea that we are bone beneath, our flesh destine to rot? If that was our destiny, shouldn’t we look up at a green sun, or a thin girl of burnt-amber, for that matter, a girl looking to an ultramarine sky? Weren’t we supposed to feel alive? Couldn’t one of my own countrymen believe in that girl enough to allow us to believe in her too? To believe in ourselves?

  Jun paced over to the window, unfolding his newspaper as he did so. He held up the front page beside Yumiko’s face. De Vinci’s smiling daughter of Florence looked back at us.

  ‘You’re continued blindness disappoints me, brother,’ he said. ‘Look at the angle of her jaw,’ Jun demanded of Yuichiro, ‘the curve of her ocular canals, their depth as they sweep along her cheek; look at the length of her teeth, how they extend the profile of her maxilla; the shallowness of her zygnomatic; the slope of her frontal bone – must I go on?’

  ‘Please do,’ Yuichiro said, lighting a cigarette, his only defence it seemed, when Jun went on the assault.

  ‘Now, look back at this painting. What do you see?’

  Yuichiro shrugged his shoulders; the question was redirected at me.

  ‘A painting of a woman?’ I answered, at a loss for what else to say.

  ‘A painting of a white woman!’ Jun threw back at us all. ‘Yes, the hair may be black, her eyes a little narrow, but look at the face, its shape, its angles. They are not Japanese. All you have painted is a white woman, made-up for a fancy-dress ball. All this visionary rubbish is in vain if you cannot even see that your so-called art is not your own at all. If you cannot possess even the surface of an object, how can you attempt to evoke its spirit?’

  Sir, how can I explain the power of Jun’s words? It was as though a cloud had passed over the sun: the image of Yumiko, its brushstrokes and paint, remained physically unaltered, but its life force was stripped away. The Japanese girl was no longer of the Orient, but a parody in bright hues.

  I looked at Yumiko’s portrait and then at Yumiko: how different they were, it was true. How could I not have seen it before! Had I become so accustomed to copying the masters of that other culture myself, that I had allowed the colours, the pose, the system of Yuichiro’s portrait to fool me. In that moment the fear that had chased me from the subway that morning, the fear that I thought dispelled by the smell of tatami, the taste of sake, the look of carved cherry blossoms, returned in force. I felt the weight of the city around me. The girl of the carriage, of the ultramarine sky and rooftops, was no Japanese beauty: she was constructed, thoroughly, through European grace. As such, she was a monster, a woman possessed. Yuichiro had captured the Western in Yumiko, without capturing
Yumiko at all. The portrait repulsed me, just as Yumiko’s manners had done so the day we first met on the Metro.

  Moreover, the painting had fooled the artist himself and now, Yuichiro’s failure confronted him, both in the image leaning against the mantelpiece and the girl who stood by the window. I can only imagine what went through his head at that moment, the doubts that set his dreams of being the best Japanese artist in Paris alight: if he displayed the picture in public, the critics, surely, would call his vision hackneyed, that the man from overseas lacked any originality of his own. That he was a copycat.

  Yuichiro threw his glasses to the floor, moving toward Jun as if to strike, but before a blow could fall, Yuichiro stopped himself. He stared at the canvas and sunk to his knees in defeat.

  ‘So I am an academician after all,’ he said.

  Jun, calm now, as if delivering a lecture, said, ‘Brother, look at this girl – look at her. She is a lost soul. If you want to rescue her: give her back to herself. Show her –and those beyond these walls who incite an artist to do such violence upon her – that beauty isn’t in disfigurement. Paint her! Is she not Japanese?’

  Yumiko, who until this moment had remained silent, awestruck, much like myself at Jun’s revelation of the European face that looked out from the portrait stood and gave out a wild laugh, like a soul possessed. With uncontrolled passion, she spat at Jun, ‘I think Yuichiro has succeeded masterfully. He has looked into my heart and given shape, harmony, to my most inner desires. Yuichiro has painted me as I see myself. It is you who are blind.’

  ‘Then you truly are lost. No wonder your husband favours his Russian whores. He might as well have married a foreigner.’

  At such a levelling, Yumiko stormed out.

  But Jun was not done. He left Yuichiro and me to stand in the parlour, while he followed the girl through the front door, onto the hallway landing, from where we could hear him shout down the stairwell, ‘Yumiko-chan! Oi, Yumiko-chan! You may forget our country when fucked by a gaijin, but that won’t make you white!’

  He came back into the room and repositioned himself on the ledge of the parlour’s open window. From his new vantage point, he must have caught sight of Yumiko as she fled up the stairs to the Passy Station, because again his voice boomed out, ‘Enjoy your lie, Yumiko-chan! One silly artist may paint you white, but you’ll never look anything other than Asian to this nation with cataracts!’

  As far as I know, Yumiko kept her distance from Yuichiro after that episode. Never again did I see her at the Houdini, the Louvre, though I kept an eye out for her down every street I passed along, every park I sat in.

  For a while, I thought she had perhaps joined her husband, who I knew to be touring the south coast. Then came that Monday when the Kozu brothers and I met for breakfast at the Houdini and Yuichiro handed me the paper, as I’ve already told you. I read first for myself that she was dead, self-murdered, her body wrapped in a white funeral kimono.

  Yuichiro excused himself and returned to his apartment, I think now, to gaze upon his fatal portrait of Yumiko; his vision of what Yumiko had wanted to be, had willed him to paint, that image of what she never was.

  The telegram arrived that same afternoon. Could I join him and Jun at the municipal morgue at 4.00 pm? A third party, to claim Yumiko’s body, was needed. For reasons that I can only speculate about, it appeared Saiki had refused to claim her body.

  Though I had known the morgue was open to the public, I had never ventured inside it. What confronted me when I arrived left me more shocked than the crypts beneath Montparnasse. The grand high-ceilings, were filled with a strange scent like rotting apricots and behind glass doors, the bodies were laid out on rude beds. Somehow the overall effect was like that of a waiting room. I half-expected to run into the Great King Emma, the judge of the dead, at the end of the foyer. One or two of the visages behind the glass were calm and somnolent; others were frozen in a scream. Then there were those putrefied masses, stewed by the waters in which they had been found. To think Yumiko had wound up in such a place disgusted me.

  To locate the Kozu brothers I had to solicit the help of a clerk. Jun greeted me cordially, like an old friend, and asked whether I had followed the instructions as they had been laid down in the telegram. I told them I had.

  Yuichiro paced the room, a handkerchief pressed to his mouth and nose.

  It was then I saw what remained of the painfully thin girl who had once described so vividly how she wished to be painted. Severed into pieces, she looked like a puzzle, like one of those dolls one used to see on sale for the instruction of children in expensive Ginza department stores; only she of course was not made of wood. Jun picked up her head alone and smeared it with chloride of lime, saying it was to prevent putrification. Her long hair was shorn; a pair of scissors lay on the tabletop where Jun worked.

  I remember thinking how low I had sunk; how, in so short a time, I had ventured down a path leading me from one level of hell to another. I stood there, motionless, in that place where death seeped into the lungs, corrupting the soul from within, holding the leather travel bag, until he took it from me. Opening it, he proceeded to take one of the morgue assistants’ aprons, a heavy black thing made of Indian rubber, and used it to line the bag’s interior. Into that hole went Yumiko’s severed head. He silenced the clerk’s protests by asking me to explain how such practices are quite the norm in our country. We were to perform a burial right to set her soul at peace. I translated the lie, but the man did not look convinced. He exited the room, vowing to report us to his superiors. We made our escape. I cannot imagine the clerk’s reaction on finding us fled, but he must have given up the chase, for nothing ever came of our leaving in such a manner.

  As I replied to a similar question asked me by Akutagawa, I do not know why I accepted Jun’s offer to catch a cab with them back to the rue de l’Alboni that afternoon. I do not expect you to understand why I couldn’t abandon them. I mean, does one break ranks at the first volley? The first sight of blood? Yuichiro was wounded more than I. He had loved Yumiko in his way. If it were not for Jun, our steadfast commander, we both would have wavered from our route, casting that bag into the Seine.

  When we stepped into the parlour, I could see that Jun had been busy that day. A line of scalpel blades and forceps, procured from who knows where, lay in a line on the edge of a square of black silk, which I recognized to be one of Yuichiro’s kimono, folded neatly. The choice of material was an ingenious idea. Though Yumiko’s lifeblood had long since drained away, Jun obviously didn’t want waste from his specimen to distract his brother. Strange to think, isn’t it sir, that a simple choice of work surface would be the source of Yuichiro’s dark backgrounds for his portraits ever after.

  Yuichiro left the room, only to return moments later, drying his face with a towel, his hair still wet. Under his arm he carried a sketchpad, a tin of pencils, too. He knelt down at the edge of the black square in seiza. Jun and I joined him. What a strange sight we were to behold, looking as we did, like guests at a tea ceremony.

  Jun opened the travel bag.

  The stench of rotting apricots and chloride of lime that ensued caused me to retch. Jun, the doctor, duly scolded me. Yuichiro, who sat there in silence, a blank expression on his face, rotated a pencil between his lips.

  Whilst gently lifting the head from the bag to the silk, Jun instructed me in how I was to assist him, asking me to hand him a particular blade and certain forceps when the time called for them.

  I think his words to Yuichiro were, ‘Watch carefully. Sketch every detail. All those nuances the whites never see. Do not flinch.’ For him, the girl had proven to be the strongest of us all; as such, we should honour her in this, our own way, a manner that would help her spirit find its bearing home. I listened to Jun’s words and something struck me about the way he spoke, gesturing towards the head as he did so. He did not use Yumiko’s name; in fact I had not heard either brother address Yumiko by her name since the morning I had seen her ali
ve at the Houdini. The impression this imposed upon me was that, with her life force spent, Jun viewed Yumiko’s severed head as an artwork, a piece of sculpture in itself, to be broken down and resembled on Yuichiro’s pad.

  The glare of the room’s electric bulbs gave me a headache, but I took in the remainder of Jun’s orders and explanations with the morbid interest that lures one to a funeral – not that of a close relation, of course, but of a distant colleague, a man one did not know well.

  I see my words offend you, sir!

  In that case, I shall keep my story brief! Well, at last, Jun said, ‘Shall we begin?’ His tone was thoroughly professional, intrigued even. With such a calmness, I can still imagine how comforting he must have been on the battlefield, the shells falling all around, the wounded in awe of his discipline.

  There is not much to tell after that: I handed Jun the tools he asked for and took them from his hand when he was done. Bile burnt the back of my throat, when Jun revealed the yellow layer of fat beneath the epidermis, but that was the only time. I steadied myself, holding firm, concentrating on the scratching sound Yuichiro’s pencil made. The hum of the light bulbs eased my nerves.

  Yuichiro’s sketches were a marvel to behold – I still have two, from that very day, locked safely away. Their lines are so faint. As if Yuichiro were afraid to press any harder, to mark with fervour the morphological differences, as Jun called them, hidden away under muscle and capillary.

  Ah, as for what happened to that first painting of Yumiko, the original? I do not know. As is well documented these days, it is this painting before you, his first truly Japanese work of art, which marks the great advancement of our country’s painters into the 20th century. I do not need to tell you how Yuichiro began what was to become the great Japanese renaissance, a reclaiming of the truth from the Parisians who tried to bleed out our bloodline with their Western configurations of our Oriental beauties. My old friend would go on to paint over a hundred bijinga, and in doing so, he would take his place on that long path trodden by so many of our countrymen, deepening its ruts through his use of oils (no more pigment, no more ink); widening its girth with his rendering of facial nuances, those turns of bone and flesh that mark our race’s place amongst the peoples of the world.