After having lunch, I headed for the atelier as promised. Kunagisa claimed, as usual, not to be hungry and headed to bed shortly afternoon. She was a chronically sleep-deprived little techie.
"Wake me for din-din, please. I hafta see Iria-chan and stuff," she said.
I knocked on the atelier door, waited for a response, then turned the knob.
The floors were uncarpeted hardwood. In some ways, it reminded me of the art room in my elementary school, except of course that this room wasn't lined with scarred-up desks and there weren't any fake-looking plaster sculptures. It wasn't as big either. The total area of the atelier was probably around half the size of the room Kunagisa was staying in.
"Welcome. Take a seat over there," Kanami-san said, after briefly staring at me in cold silence. Shinya-san must have been in his room or someplace, as Kanami-san was the only person there. I walked past a shelf containing paint and paint supplies and took a seat as told.
I faced Kanami-san. "Thanks for doing this."
I couldn't deny that she was a pretty woman. With blond hair and blue eyes, she was like one of those "well-bred young ladies" you see in old films. An intellectual, at that. And even more, she had artistic talent. It was like she had God's favor.
No, maybe I can't say that.
She had bad legs, and until a few years ago, she couldn't even see. I guess it would be pretty damn low of me in all my able-bodied good fortune to gripe. But on the other hand, Kanami-san herself didn't seem to view her condition as a handicap or disability.
"God is fair. If I had been able-bodied, it would've conversely been unfair to ordinary people."
"Legs are just a decoration."
"Even when I gained my eyesight, my world didn't really change. The world looked just as I'd thought. Natural selection and fate have unusually bad taste."
All of these are quotes from Kanami-san's art books.
Kanami-san sat in a round, wooden chair just like the one I was sitting in. She was in a dress, so it looked mildly uncomfortable, I noticed.
"Kanami-san, is that what you wear when you're painting?"
"Are you doubting my fashion sense?"
Her face grew subtly more stern. It seemed that this was no joke. She was actually miffed. I scrambled to weasel my way out.
"No no, I didn't mean that. I was just thinking your clothes might get dirty."
"I don't go and change my clothes every time I paint something. Up to now, I've never dirtied my clothes even once while painting. I'm not an idiot."
"Oh, I see."
I guess it was like being an expert calligrapher. In retrospect, getting paint on your clothes is probably a pretty amateur blunder. To Kanami-san, one of the top artists in the entire world, the mere suggestion was probably rude.
I shrugged.
"But is it really okay painting someone like me?"
"What's that supposed to mean?" she snapped with the same stern expression. She seemed to be in a pretty awful mood. Or no, maybe this was her default setting.
"Er, no, it's just that, won't it decrease your worth as an artist?"
Like, for example, it was probably safe to say that Kunagisa had a technological skill like no one else in the world. However, she only ever used that technology for fun, so the number of people who actually acknowledged her as amazing and brilliant was extremely small.
"Authority comes from results. Not doing and not being able to do are the same thing."
Apparently, that was Kunagisa's case.
I figured it was the same with painters. If you just choose your subjects randomly and mess around all the time, it's hard to get other people to acknowledge your worth as an artist.
But Kanami-san renounced my ideas.
"Didn't I just tell you I'm not an idiot? Do you have a brain at all? I don't go around choosing subjects. You know, if you keep your mouth shut, people won't see how stupid you are, so why don't you do just that?"
My heart sank.
"I just… I hate that kind of thinking. It makes me want to puke. 'Oh, there were no good subjects to paint.' 'My model was no good.' 'The environment was all wrong.' 'That's not the kind of subject I should be painting.' And it's not just with painters either. Even you know people who say obnoxiously egotistical things like 'Oh, this isn't what I want to do' or 'Oh, I don't know what I want to do,' right?"
"Yeah, I do."
Yeah, myself.
"For god's sake," she sighed. "I hate people who bitch about what they want and don't want to do, putting their own ineptitude on a pedestal. I want to tell them to stop living like pricks. I don't mean they should all die, but they should be more humble. Just paint anything and stop whining all the time. I don't care if it's some boring jerk or a pile of bug guts. I'd turn it into gorgeous art."
Regardless of how sweet and pretty she looked, she sure was full of herself. She was so uncompromising that she didn't even forgive others who compromised.
Being compared to a pile of bug guts wasn't my favorite thing in the world, but if she could paint that, surely she could paint me. It seemed that making any further thoughtful comments would just end badly, so I decided to stay quiet.
I noticed that behind Kanami-san was a canvas. An underagle view of the cherry blossom tree was drawn on it in pencil. The one she had been looking at this morning with Shinya-san.
It was so precisely drawn, it was like a monochrome photograph. With about ten million pixels. No, that's dumb. There was no need to cheapen such an intricate drawing with that kind of metaphor.
I pointed to the picture. "When did you draw that?"
"This morning. Got a problem?"
It was early morning when she was observing the tree. That was about five hours earlier. In other words, she had drawn this amazingly detailed picture in a mere five hours. A drawing like this should've taken at least a week to complete. Without thinking, I shot her a skeptical expression. She grimaced back at me audaciously.
"Only idiots spend three or four months doing something you can finish in a week. Idiots or lazy people. And since I'm neither, I did this picture in three hours. It doesn't take me any longer than that."
Huh.
Being the pure embodiment of laziness myself, this was painful to hear. It stung. I wished Kunagisa could've heard it, too.
"Right? Even you have to agree a little, too, right?" she asked in a cruel tone, demanding my concurrence. I couldn't help but feel as if she were attacking me with a direct insult. And I doubt that was just a false impression.
"Uh, no, well, I mean… Yeah. Er, but anyway, you're really good."
"Yeah, sure," she answered, completely uninterested in my generic praise. It really was an exceedingly bland comment for me to make, in retrospect. You're really good - it sounds like something a five-year-old would say.
"Uh, so, Kanami-san, you do detail pictures?"
"I do all kinds of pictures. Didn't you know?"
Oh yeah, I'd put my toot in my mouth again. The woman before my eyes was Ibuki Kanami-san, the woman artist who denied having any style and took no stance. Whether it be detailed or abstract, there was no picture she couldn't or wouldn't paint.
She squinted just one eye at me. "I don't get hung up on one style. It's not a rule set in stone, but getting too hung up is just plain crazy. It's nuts. If there's one thing in life I want to do as I please, it's painting."
"You may be right, huh?" Unable to argue or concur, I settled with a simple nod. Perhaps able to see through me, she returned my nod with a contemptuous sneer.
"Hey, have you ever seen my art?"
"Well, a few times in some of your art books. But owing to my ignorance, this is the first time I've seen it directly."
"Hmm, and what did you think of it? Not the artbook stuff, but that cherry blossom one."
To me, Kanami-san's question was a bit of a surprise. I never figured that so-called geniuses cared much about other people's opinions of them. Starting with Sonoyama Akane-san, none of the people at ER3, including that deplorable group of study-abroad participants, had any vanity or desire for glory, and nobody cared about how they looked in other people's eyes.
"I know my worth better than anyone else does. I don't need to sit here and be evaluated by a bunch of brainless slackers." This was their unanimous way of thinking. Probably why I wasn't a big fan of theirs.
"Um," I said, groping for an answer, "well, it's a very pretty picture."
"A pretty picture, huh?" she repeated my line. "You know, there's no need to try and flatter me. I won't get mad."
"Well, it's just that I don't really have much judgment or a critical eye for this kind of thing. But yeah, I think it's a pretty picture."
"Hmm… Pretty?"
She wore an utterly disappointed expression as she stared at her canvas. She muttered something to herself.
"Pretty… Prettyprettypretty. That's not the kind of compliment you give to art."
"Eh?"
"Hmm, you don't get it, huh? Damn, I really don't want to do this. What a waste."
She let out a heavy sigh, hunched over a bit, and picked up the canvas.
She lifted it up over her head…
…and smashed it into the hardwood floor.
The sound of splintering wood.
Of course, it wasn't the floor that had broken.
"Hey, wh-what are you doing?"
"As you can see, I'm disposing of my screwup. Ah, why did it have to come to this?"
That decidedly should've been my line. She stared down at the shattered remains of her canvas, a sorrowful expression on her face, and let out another sigh.
"Geez, it looked like it would've been worth about twenty million one day."
"Twenty million yen?"
"Twenty million dollars."
Different unit.
"Of course, we're talking about several decades later."
"Artists can be pretty reckless sometimes, huh?"
I couldn't help but feel guilty that my crappy comments had invited this disaster.
"You shouldn't feel like you did something wrong. This is my responsibility. I'm not the kind of imbecile who pushes her own responsibilities onto other people."
"But I'm just an amateur. You didn't have to do something like that based on the opinion of an amateur."
"It's not art if you get to pick who looks at it," she insisted.
So that's how it was.
I could understand that.
Her words and her manner were filled to the brim with spitefulness, but to be sure, this woman was an artist to the bone.
"But it was so realistic, it was just like a photograph."
"That's not a compliment either, you know. Listen, if you have a habit of complimenting people by saying 'it's just like blah blah blah,' I think you'd better quit it. It's really an insult of the highest order. If you absolutely have to box everything into a style, though, I guess there's no hope." She turned back toward me. "I suppose I can understand why you say it was like a photograph, though. After all, photographs originally spawned from drawings."
"Is that right?"
"Yeah. You didn't know?" She raised an eyebrow at me.
It seemed to say, "You didn't know?" was her habit.
"The person who invented daguerreotype photography was a 'factual artist.' Apparently, the study of perspective is related to the invention of the camera. You've heard of the camera obscura, right?"
Heard of it, yes. The so-called dark chamber. The phenomenon where if you make a hole in one spot on the wall of a pitch-black room, the outside scenery will project onto the opposite wall. It was quite an old technology, dating back to the days of the Roman Empire, and even having been mentioned by Aristotle. Supposedly it was the origin of the camera.
"It was just one invention used to create accurate images. The main idea behind perspective is to 'show things the way they really look.' That's how the French artist Courbet put it. He also made such realist remarks as 'I've never seen an angel, so why would I paint one?' It goes against my philosophy, though. If you get a kid to draw something, it never has any perspective or depth, right? Everything's just displayed in the foreground. The size of objects is also chosen at whim, so, for example, a house and a person are the same sizes, or the most important thing is drawn the biggest. In other words, what they're putting on the canvas isn't what the objects look like, it's how the objects feel. If you believe that drawing pictures is a form of personal expression, then I think that's the correct way to do it. If you think about it like that, a drawing that looks just like a photograph isn't a good drawing at all, is it?"
"Wow."
As soon as she had broken out the professional lingo, I lost my grip on what she was talking about. And with all her chitchat, she hadn't even started setting up to paint. When was she planning to get started already?
"Though truth be told, photographs aren't such an accurate representation of reality either. If you edit a photograph well, it's not hard to fool people. Maybe they're not so different from paintings, in the sense that they're both selective."
"Uh, Kanami-san, were you going to draw me?"
"Right now I'm memorizing."
Just as I thought I was about to be called incompetent again, she spoke to me with unexpected gentleness.
"Maybe you didn't know? I'm the type who has to do her work alone. When I'm with other people, my focus goes wacko."
She sounded like Leonardo da Vinci. Artists who don't look and paint at the same time weren't the kind of thing you heard about every day, but they weren't the most uncommon thing in the world either, so I wasn't particularly surprised.
"So when I do portraits, I just have to rely on my memory."
"You can do that?"
"To me, memory and perception are synonymous."
Now she sounded like Hannibal the Cannibal.
"Let's just stay and talk like this for the next two hours. Then I'll start painting after you leave. Ah, after I redo this cherry blossom picture, that is. I want to turn it into something at least you can comprehend. For your painting, I'll need to put down two layers of color, so it'll take a little while to draw. I should be able to give it to you tomorrow morning."
"You'll give it to me?"
"Sure. I don't need that kind of painting. I have no interest in paintings that are finished. I'll sign it, so if you sell it you should be able to make something decent. Of course, you could always destroy it if you don't like it, but that seems like a bit of a waste. It should be worth about fifty million."
What a materialistic conversation.
Sigh.
"Hey, by the way, I hear you're on bad terms with Akane-san, is that right?"
"That's right. Or really, it's sort of a one-sided hatred on her part. As an individual, as a scholar, as a researcher, as a member of the ER3 Seven Fools, I personally have nothing but goodwill and respect for Sonoyama Akane, but…"
"But? What's that supposed to mean?"
She gave a little smirk. "As for 'just plain' Sonoyama Akane, I despise her."
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Two hours later.
After leaving Kanami-san's atelier, I headed for Kunagisa's room. She was in bed, but evidently, she had awoken at some point and fixed my watch. In a world-class prank, she had changed the digital face so that the numbers were displayed backward, but at least it seemed to be working, so I stuck it on my left arm, patted the sleeping Kunagisa on the head, said thanks, and headed to Akane-san's room.
"Play me," she challenged, and then said with a delighted smile, "I'll give myself a bigger handicap."
With that, she lined her side of the shogi board with chess pieces.
"It's a Japanese-Western compromise."
"Kinda like two different martial arts styles, huh?"
Handicap notwithstanding, I was thoroughly trounced. Seven times in a row.