I took the “Kikuya” portrait up to my room, intending to look at it in the natural light from my window. But as soon as I opened my door Kaori’s doll, still on the floor, seemed so disappointed that I hadn’t brought a stand for her that I put the portrait down, picked her up and sat her on the windowsill, where the light I’d been after for the portrait infused her with a yellow-white glow. I had opened my window that morning, so I reached around behind her to pull it back down.
“A stand is on its way,” I said, “but in the meantime I’ve brought you a companion.”
I had laid the portrait on my futon. My novel was there, too, since I’d begun reading it a third time the night before. One end of the portrait’s frame rested on the novel, the other on my small pillow, with many of the twine knots Watanabe-san had used to wrap it facing up, letting me see what an intricate packaging job he had done.
Had I unwrapped the portrait as soon as I got home I would have broken the twine and torn off the paper, but now those knots, plus the way Kaori’s doll seemed to inspect the whole thing from the windowsill, told me it was essential to untie the knots and remove the paper with care. So I knelt beside the portrait and began working on the knots, each of which dependent on the next for the tension necessary to make a satisfying package.
When I stopped at Kinokuniya on my first full day in Kyoto, to buy my map and novel, I had paged through a book called “How to Wrap Five Eggs”, a photographic treatise on Japan’s stunning packaging ability. And now Watanabe-san’s wrapping expertise reminded me of that book. Putting things in order, making them take up a small amount of space, seeing to it that inanimate objects maintained their own intrinsic dignity… such was Japan’s great gift to the world, and I wondered if - never mind Zen - it might not be something Melinda should take back to law school with her. That would be good, would it not, to tie the law up neatly for once?
I couldn’t find the spot where the twine ended its journey, nor where it began. It simply moved from here to there, a complex Cat’s Cradle, now diagonal, now vertical or horizontal, crossing itself in lanes of two or three or four strands, some above the others, some below, like superhighways are wont to do in busy places like Los Angeles. A twine superhighway covering Japan’s first geisha.
Once I determined not to break the twine, I began to think of it as the price I had to pay to own the painting. I hadn’t bought it - Melinda had - but quite suddenly I knew that attending to this compulsion would not only teach me something about the painting, but might propel me toward further order in my life. Still, I couldn’t find the spot where Mr. Watanabe either started or ended his twine’s swirling journey.
Since I’d pulled the package onto my lap during my search, I pushed it back onto my futon and scooted across the tatami to the desk I never used, opened its only drawer and looked inside. I had stuffed a dozen aerogrammes in there when I first arrived, thinking I might write to my family, but so far I had only used one. I had noticed when putting the aerogrammes away, however, that Etsuko or her husband, or maybe a previous tenant, had stocked the drawer with pens and note pads and paperclips, and, in a far back corner, a magnifying glass that I recognized as having come from the two-volume Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, published just the year before. When I saw the magnifying glass the first time, I’d pulled it out to examine my cuticles through it, but when I pulled it out now I took a few of the paper clips, too, both large and small. I had told Etsuko, “A surgeon doesn’t wait before she sticks the knife in,” but I should have told her to unwrap herself from Fritz with care, for even odd ducks like him deserve a clear path back to the river.
When I began to look at the twine through the magnifying glass, I not only saw more clearly the comings and goings of Mr. Watanabe’s superhighways, but also that if I followed a highway that lay on top, and kept on like that, never jumping to the layers below, then sooner or later I would come to the spot where he had stopped wrapping the package and tied things off, or to where he’d started his wrapping in the first place, depending on which way I went.
Easy, right? To follow something into the future or into the past? Only it wasn’t easy, for I often got lost. A thought would come to me and I would follow the thought instead of the twine, and then I’d have to start again. And I also changed directions. So I began using paperclips to mark my progress, each time I had to turn the painting over in order to continue following that one strand of twine. It was as if I were the surgeon now, not sticking my knife in, but clamping my way through a complex operation.
“There!” I said, when I spied a tiny cul de sac that Mr. Watanabe created by twisting the twine back into itself. I’d seen the spot before, without the magnifying glass, and believed it to be another bend in the road. But now I used two small paperclips to mark both sides of it, then unbent a third and slid it down into the cul de sac, to probe and pull until the twine’s beginning showed itself. The twine’s beginning, not its end. After that, there was nothing left to do but free it and go forward, winding the twine around my hand.
Once, in England, when learning about great books from Natasha, I read a section of “Molloy”, a 1950s novel by Samuel Beckett. In it, Molloy kept a number of pebbles in the two front pockets of his pants, and he also kept one in his mouth. As he walked along, he exchanged the pebble in his mouth for one of those in his pants, and soon grew obsessed with working out a system by which each pebble would have equal time, not only in his mouth, but in alternating pockets. The scene so captured me that I read it several times, but otherwise failed to finish “Molloy”.
As I sat beside the uncovered painting now, I remembered Beckett’s pebbles. Why had I been so affected by them then, and why was I so satisfied with my twine unwrapping now? I thought, then, that it was because no pebble got short shrift, because each was tasted equally by he who held them in his command, and, in turn, now, because every road taken by Mr. Watanabe in wrapping my painting was also taken by me in its unwrapping, with no road less or more taken, as had been my conundrum in the bamboo forest. But also, as I sat there thinking about it, I grew impatient with Molloy, so fiercely dedicated to inanimate equality that he never did anything save contemplate the absurdity of existence. Wasn’t following Mr. Watanabe’s twine, however, pebble shifting’s opposite? For though it paid the same attention to detail, the same care regarding what came next, it was finding a way forward, just as I was about to do with whatever happened to me next.
I was so busy thinking about pebbles and twine that I hadn’t looked at the painting since freeing it from its wrapper. But when I looked now, I saw that it was different than it had been in the shop, that, while not exactly inferior, it sat more thinly on its canvas. Though I’d been sure, before, that it was an oil painting, I saw that it was a watercolor, that the paint on both sides of its demarkation line stretched out more thinly than I’d imagined, like reflections on the surface of a pond.
My first thought was to wonder how I could have made such a mistake, since oil paint and watercolors were nothing alike, but my second was to marvel at the painter’s achievement without using oil. What I’d labeled as Kikuya’s abstract side wasn’t as clear as I previously described it, but sat under the hazy influence of pastels, as if someone had left a Monet out in the sun for too long. On both sides of her face, her gaze was as steadfast as it had been in the shop, but on the realistic side that steadfastness now seemed sultry, even debauched, as if the plains of her cheeks and the set of her jaw sat atop, and awaited, the volcanic eruption that had already taken place on the abstract side. On one side she knew herself, while on the other side she was about to find out.
Like me, like every single one of us.
The portrait was head-on, but it now also seemed to be a cross section of everyone who had ever piled flesh and skin on bones, and then breathed in and out.
I had loved it in the shop for what it wasn’t. Now I loved it for what it was.
—
I spent an hour placing the portrait here and there… near the doll on the windowsill, over by the door to my bathroom, even in the bathroom, before finally propping her up in the shadows that lay across my desk, where she gained the height I would give her as soon as I found a hammer and nails. She was extraordinary, as powerful when seen from across the room as when I stood in front of her, but under the skeptical influence of Kaori’s doll, my ability to continue the monologue I’d engaged in during my twine adventure - thank God, you might say - began to wane. So I picked up Fritz’s letter. Perhaps he, too, would ask me to intervene on his behalf, since I seemed to be everyone’s favorite intermediary.
But the letter wasn’t from Fritz, nor was it a letter.
Rather, I found the itinerary in the envelope for a trip to Hokkaido, sent to me directly from a travel agency. It gave the dates of the trip, an accounting of the train fare and lodging, and the names of the travelers; Cornelius MacLeish and Ichikawa Yuki - my name in English, hers in Japanese.
I stepped into the hall to look for Bill, sure I would find him there splitting a gut. But the hall was empty.
I hurried back in to look out my window into the Sugiyama’s backyard, on the chance he might be grinning up at me from there, but the yard was empty, too, and in any case the idea that Bill was clever enough to play such a trick was dissipating fast.
I looked at my doll again, made by a woman who had given Bill such an itinerary, then I read the entire thing again as carefully as I could. The dates for the trip - the following Wednesday through the Wednesday after it - coincided with my remaining time off from school, but Ichikawa Yuki hadn’t contacted me since firefly weekend. I feared, in fact, that I might never see her again.
I took the doll from the windowsill, placed her on my desk beside Kikuya, looked at both of them squarely, and asked, “What do you two know about this?”
But I had left my door open and when I spoke Emi appeared in it, wearing her sweatpants and carrying a jumprope. “It’s no good talking to yourself, Cornelius,” she said. “People will think you’re nuts.”
I loved Emi dearly, but this was not the time, and when I barked, “What do you want?” she turned away from my door.
“Wait,” I said. “I’m sorry, Emi. Come back.”
“I only came to see if you felt like jumping a little rope,” she said.
When she held up her jumprope I held up the itinerary, saying that I really wanted to yell at whoever sent it. Or something like that. My Japanese was as muddled as my mind by then.
Emi dropped her jumprope and came in to peer at the itinerary.
“Well, well, I thought you were waiting for me, but congratulations,,” she said. “Everyone thinks Ichikawa Yuki is great. I wouldn’t disagree, though, if you said she was too skinny.”
“I didn’t arrange this. I found it here just now.”
“Who said anything about you arranging it? She arranged it, of course. Listen, keikoto, don’t you know what this is?”
Keikoto meant fluorescent light - the insult being that with me understanding blinked on slowly, perhaps with an irritating atmospheric hum.
“She did not arrange it! It’s a trick played on me by someone like Bill,” I said. “I happen to know that he got an itinerary, too, one time, from someone else. Only to Australia.”
Emi sighed, and went out to fetch her jumprope. “First of all, it’s the schedule for an expensive trip,” she said. “And second, it’s already paid for. That’s what the part down where all the stamps are says. She bought this trip for both of you.”
She came back to poke at a half dozen stamps, festooned unevenly at the bottom of the itinerary, like tiny visas in a passport.
“Come on, Emi, it doesn’t say that. Be honest now. Are you in on this, too?”
“That’s a perfect example of what I don’t understand about you, Cornelius,” she said. “You see something right in front of you, as plain as the nose on your face, yet you’re still as dumb as a frog in one of those science-experiment pans. But let me ask again… besides the fact that it’s a paid-for trip, do you know what this is?”
She paused until I said I did not.
“It’s a proposal, dummy, a new fangled kind of miai. It might seem expensive, but it cuts out the huge amount of money that you would otherwise have to pay the go-between. I was reading about it in Modern Japanese Woman just the other day. It’s all the rage. You just go on a trip together and see how things work out.”
Again, I hadn’t understood much of what she said, so I made her repeat it before asking, no doubt dumbly, “Are you talking about a marriage proposal?”
“You won’t be able to find the words in there, but yes. If you turn it down, by saying something stupid like you’re busy those days or you’re sick, it will be the same as a flat-out refusal and you will never see or hear from her again. Poof! She’ll be gone just like those fireflies we saw the other weekend. I think it’s pretty slick. No one gets embarrassed by having to look the other person in the face. And no one, other than the two of you, even has to know about it. Unless someone is a blabbermouth.”
I looked at the itinerary again. “So if I decide to go am I supposed to call her first or what?”
“Ah, well, that’s the tricky part. If you call her you’ll be… You don’t know this word in Japanese, but you’ll be acquiescing, and after that she calls the shots. But if you show up with your bag in your hand and a smile on your face, that’ll put you on equal footing. It’ll just be ‘off to see the lizard’, but in Hokkaido. It’s a good idea to start from scratch, rather than trying to recapture some idiotic feelings that go all the way back to, like, someone’s ancient childhood.”
Did that mean she knew as much about Fritz and her mother as she did about this itinerary? I hadn’t understood her second speech, either, but when I asked for clarification she gave it to me patiently. And then she took her jumprope and left.
After she was gone I looked at my doll again, forever skeptical, forever about to draw her sword, but never actually drawing it. Yet it appeared that Ichikawa Yuki had drawn hers without fanfare. And was now daring me to draw mine. I tried studying Kikuya’s portrait, to see what she might think about it, but neither side of her face gave me much solace.
Endnotes…
I have no idea whether or not “How to Wrap Five Eggs” is still for sale anywhere in Japan, but in the early 1970s I was enamored with it. The tying of the eggs, in particular, seemed magical to me, but all the packaging was a delight. So I slipped it in, in my way imitating it with Mr. Watanabe’s portrait packaging, as a tip of the hat.
I once had that two-volume OED set at my house, given as a gift or a prize for having joined … what was it?… some sort of book subscription thing? The set included a magnifying glass because the print in those books was too small to be read by a naked eye. I think I probably used those books a half dozen times before letting them sit on my shelf for a dozen years and then giving them away. But I still have that magnifying glass! I’ll bet that’s the case for many people who owned that compact OED.
Very little in this novel is autobiographical, but parts of this episode come close, for I, like Cornelius, read “Molloy” three or four times, but not beyond the stone sucking scene. Sometimes an early cathartic moment can be so beautiful and strong that it ruins the rest of a novel for me. Have you ever had such an experience?
I must admit that I cannot remember whether I heard about this “delivering itineraries” thing, as a kind of “early dating app”, or if I made it up. For a long time I was sure it was a real (if small) aspect of Japanese culture, but as I was writing the scene this week, it occurred to me that maybe I just thought it would be a novel idea, so invented the thing out of whole cloth. Is such a confusion common in all writers, I wonder, or only in geriatric ones?