“I guess that’s possible, but fortunately I haven’t met anyone I don’t like yet.”
“I hope I’m not the first,” Menshiki said with a smile. His eyes, though, weren’t smiling. He was serious.
“Don’t worry. I would be more than pleased to paint your portrait.”
“That’s wonderful,” he said. He paused. “This is kind of selfish of me, but I have a little request myself.”
I looked straight at him again. “What kind of request?”
“If possible I’d like you to paint me freely, and not worry about the usual conventions involved in doing a portrait. I mean, if you want to paint a standard portrait, that’s fine. If you paint it using your usual techniques, the way you’ve painted till now, I’m all right with that. But if you do decide to try out a different approach, I’d welcome that.”
“A different approach?”
“Whatever style you like is entirely up to you. Paint it any way you like.”
“So you’re saying that, like Picasso’s painting during one period, I could put both eyes on one side of the face and you’d be okay with that?”
“If that’s how you want to paint me, I have no objections. I leave it all up to you.”
“And you’ll hang that on the wall of your office.”
“Right now I don’t have an office per se. So I’ll probably hang it in my study at home. As long as you have no objection.”
Of course I had none. All walls were the same as far I was concerned. I mulled all this over before replying.
“Mr. Menshiki, I’m grateful to you for saying that, for telling me to paint in whatever style I want. But honestly nothing specific pops into my head at the moment. You have to understand, I’m merely a portrait painter. For a long time I’ve followed a set pattern and style. Even if I’m told to remove any restrictions, to paint as freely as I want, the restrictions themselves are part of the technique. So I think it’s likely I’ll paint a standard portrait, the way I have up till now. I hope that’s all right with you?”
Menshiki held both hands wide. “Of course. Do what you think is best. The only thing I want is for you to have a totally free hand.”
“One other thing: if you’re going to pose for the portrait, I’ll need you to come to my studio a number of times and sit in a chair for quite a while. I’m sure your work keeps you quite busy, so do you think that’ll be possible?”
“I can clear my schedule anytime. I was the one, after all, who asked that you paint me from real life. I’ll come here and sit quietly in the chair as long as I can. We can have a good long talk then. You don’t mind talking?”
“No, of course not. Actually, I welcome it. To me, you’re a complete mystery. In order to paint you, I might need a little more information about you.”
Menshiki laughed and quietly shook his head. When he did so, his pure white hair softly shook, like a winter prairie blowing in the wind.
“I think you overestimate me. There’s nothing particularly mysterious about me. I don’t talk much about myself because telling all the details would bore people, that’s all.”
He smiled, the lines at his eyes deepening. A very clean, open smile. But that can’t be all, I thought. There was something hidden inside him. A secret locked away in a small box and buried deep down in the ground. Buried a long time ago, with soft green grass now growing above it. And the only person in the world who knew the location of the box was Menshiki. I couldn’t help but sense, deep within his smile, a solitude that comes from a certain sort of secret.
* * *
—
We talked for another twenty minutes or so, deciding when he would come here to model, and how much time he could spare. On his way out, at the front door, he once more held out his hand, quite naturally, and I took it without thinking. A firm handshake at the beginning and end of an encounter seemed to be Menshiki’s way of doing things. He slipped on his sunglasses, took the car keys from his pocket, boarded the silver Jaguar (which looked like some well-trained, slick, oversized animal), and gracefully eased down the slope, as I watched from the window. I went out on the terrace and gazed at the white house on the mountain he was heading back to.
What an unusual character, I thought. Friendly enough, not overly quiet. But it was as if he hadn’t said a single thing about himself. The most I’d learned was that he lived in that elegant house across the valley, did work that partly involved the Internet, and frequently traveled abroad. And that he was a big fan of opera. Beyond that, though, I knew very little. Whether or not he had a family, how old he was, where he was from originally, how long he’d lived on that mountain. He hadn’t even told me his first name.
And why be so insistent on me being the one to paint his portrait? I’d like to think it was because I had talent, something obvious to anyone who saw my work. Yet it was clear that this was not his sole motivation for commissioning me to do the painting. It seemed true that portraits I’d done had drawn his attention. That couldn’t be a complete lie. But I wasn’t naive enough to accept everything he told me at face value.
So—what did this man, Menshiki, want from me? What was his endgame? What sort of scenario had he prepared for me?
Even after we had talked, I still had no idea how to answer these questions. The mystery, in fact, had deepened. Why, for one thing, did he have such amazingly white hair? That kind of white wasn’t exactly normal. I recalled an Edgar Allan Poe short story in which a fisherman gets caught up in a massive whirlpool and his hair turns white overnight. Had Menshiki experienced something just as terrifying?
After the sun set, lights came on in the white concrete mansion across the valley. Bright lights, and plenty of them. It looked like the kind of house designed by a self-assured architect unconcerned about things like the electric bill. Or perhaps the client was overly afraid of the dark and requested the architect to build a house where lights could blaze from one end to the other. Either way, viewed from afar, the house looked like a luxury liner silently crossing the ocean at night.
I sprawled out on the chair on the terrace and, sipping white wine, gazed at those lights. I was half expecting Menshiki to come out on his terrace, but that evening he didn’t appear. But if he had, how should I have acted? Wave my hand in a big gesture of greeting?
I figured that, in time, my questions would be answered. That’s about all I could expect.
8
A BLESSING IN DISGUISE
After my Wednesday-evening art class, when I taught an adult class for about an hour, I stopped by an Internet café near Odawara Station and did a Google search for the name Menshiki. I came up empty-handed. There were lots of online articles with the character men in them, as in unten menkyo—driver’s license—and the shiki appeared in ones about partial color-blindness—shikijaku. But there didn’t seem to be any information out there in the world about a Mr. Menshiki. His statement that he took anonymity seriously seemed, indeed, to be the case. I was assuming, of course, that Menshiki was his real name, but my gut told me he wouldn’t lie about something like that. It didn’t make sense for him to tell me where he lived but not tell me his real name. And unless he had some compelling reason, it seemed to me that if he were to make up a phony name, he would choose one that was more common and didn’t stand out so much.
When I got back home I called Masahiko Amada. After chatting a bit I asked if he knew anything about the man named Menshiki who lived across the valley. I described the white concrete house on the mountain. He had a vague memory of it.
“Menshiki?” Masahiko asked. “What kind of name is that?”
“It’s written with the characters that mean ‘avoiding colors.’?”
“Sounds like a Chinese ink painting.”