Chapter 1

There’s something infinitely soothing about painting.  The way that the brush sweeps smoothly along the surface of a blank canvas leaving a trail of colour in its wake, the way that the colours combine and blend together, blue and yellow creating a vibrant green, red and a dash of blue creating purple.  Painting presents me with limitless possibilities, endless ways in which to express my joy, my sorrow, my pain.

It’s my refuge, something that I turn to in times of extreme emotion.  And it was a painting that brought me to him, a painting that started the wheels of fate turning, if there is such a thing as fate.  Something that I still can’t be sure of, even up to now.

I had just finished my second year of senior high school back then, and was about to enter my third and final year.  Shohoku University was the only school in Kanagawa completely dedicated to the visual arts, and as such, there were quite a lot of budding artists who had applied for entry.  The selections had already been made, and as was the tradition, there was to be a showcase compiled of selected works from the portfolios of the applicants that had been accepted into the school.

My friend, Fujima Kenji and I, had been put in charge of categorizing the paintings that had been chosen for display.  He wasn’t very happy about this, he said that it was the establishment’s way of punishing us for getting good grades, but I really didn’t mind.  I found the prospect of being able to paw through all those paintings to be quite an attractive one.  When I told him so, he gave me that look that clearly said that he thought that I was crazy.

“ Trust you to be so happy about being stuck in this stupid old storeroom sorting through hundreds of paintings on a perfectly beautiful Saturday morning!” Fujima sighed, looking out wistfully through the sole window of the stuffy room and out onto the front lawn of the school.  You could see from the faraway look in his eyes that he was picturing himself lying somewhere along the beach, as the two of us should have been, had we gone along with the rest of our friends for today’s outing instead of having to stay behind and work. “ You never think of anything besides painting, Kogure!”

“ You make that sound so bad…” I commented dryly, as I set the painting that I had been examining onto the expressionism pile.  I picked up the next, gave it a cursory glance and set it aside with the other abstracts.

“ It is.  There’s more to life than a brush and canvas you know, old friend?  I love art myself, why else would I be going to this school if I didn’t?  But you don’t see me spending every waking moment locked up in my room like some sort of mad hermit dabbling away with paint…” Fujima frowned as a thought struck him in the middle of his tirade.  “ Hey…wait, am I supposed to be categorizing these things by styles, medium or subject?”

“  You’re exaggerating. Like you always do.  You know that I’m not really as bad as that!  I’m just very focused! And what were you doing it by before?”

“ By subject…” Fujima bit his lip in trepidation.  The prospect of having to start the sorting all over again obviously didn’t appeal to him.

I sighed.  “ If you’d been listening to Anzai-sensei while he was explaining things, then you would have known that he asked us to do it by styles…”

“ Oh, dammit.” Scowling and muttering a few select curses under his breath, Fujima retrieved the paintings that he had already sorted out into the wrong categories and set out to start again.  Taking pity on him, I sat myself beside him and began to help him.

We worked in silence for several minutes until I picked up a painting that had immediately intrigued me.  “ This one is pretty good.  I like it…” I muttered, holding it out at an arm’s length so that I could get a better look at it.  The surface of the canvas had been slathered entirely with red, orange, yellow, all the colours that you would expect to see in a raging fire. It gave one the impression of flames leaping out towards you.  The painting was warm, bright, vibrant and quite beautiful to look at.

Even Fujima, though currently not in one of his best moods, seemed to like it.  He smiled and came in for a closer look.  “ Whoever did that one must be a pyromaniac or something.  That, or he’s got an explosive personality.” He beckoned for me to turn it over so we could see the name of the artist.

“ Sakuragi Hanamichi.” I read out aloud, setting the painting down after one last brief examination.  “ I’m going to be looking out for that one.  He should be interesting.”

“ Hey, do you remember which one of your painting was displayed after you got accepted, Kogure?" 

“ Of course!  Don’t you?”

“  That’s not something that a person is likely to forget.” Fujima pointed out.  He sat back on his heels, his blue eyes, which I had always thought were his best feature, getting this faraway look in them as he thought back.  “When I was a little kid, there always used to be this open air market every second Saturday near where I lived.  My oldest brother, you know him, Kogure-kun, the one that’s living in America now?  He used to take me there every time, without fail.  He’d buy me all the sweet, incredibly bad things for my health that I liked and let me play all the games that I wanted.  I loved going to that market.  I still do, though it’s not the same without my older brother.  The painting that Anzai-sensei chose to display was the one I did of that marketplace before Aniki left for America .  .”

“ Anzai-sensei has a knack for choosing the work that we most care about, don’t you think?”

Fujima shrugged, “ That’s because the more you care about the subject in your painting, the more that love and care will pour into the canvas to make what you’re painting more beautiful.”

I smiled and nodded in agreement.  “True.”

“ What about yours then?  I remember it.  I thought it was great when I first saw it…”

“ Really?” I raised an eyebrow.  “ I didn’t think anyone would understand what I was trying to say with that painting except for myself.  I was really surprised when the sensei chose that one…”

“ Well, I didn’t understand right away…” Fujima admitted.  “ I spent at least a quarter of an hour standing before it staring and thinking.  At first, it seemed to be nothing more than a whole lot of paint thrown against the canvas, then after a while, I realized that there was a balance to the whole thing.  I started thinking about why there was a dab of  black there, why you had placed that streak of blue by the middle, why the bright yellow and the red surrounded all of that.  Then I sort of realized that…well, you were making a statement about life.  The blue and black in the middle?  They were the bad things, the loneliness, the pain.  And as for the surrounding brighter areas?  The part that overwhelmed the darker portion of the painting and shone through, they were the good things, they were the things that gave you a passion for life.  That was why you titled the painting ‘Things That Give Meaning’.”

I remained silent, stunned.  Fujima was a good, close friend, he had established himself as that after years of acquaintance, but I hadn’t expected him to see so much into my work.  He had last come across that painting some two years ago, and still he remembered.  Quite frankly, I was amazed, very, very touched and a bit ashamed of all of those times that I had thought him to be shallow.

He looked at my stunned expression and smiled.  “Of course, I could have just read far too much into the whole thing.  You might have just thrown a whole bunch of paint at the canvas, knowing that we art students tend to over analyze all paintings we see and trusting us to give the whole mess some sort of meaning that was never there in the first place…”

I punched him playfully on the arm, knowing that he was just joking around, “ Do you think I’m the type to do something like that?”

“ Well, Kogure-kun, you never know.  It’s always the quiet ones that you have to watch out for.  They’re sneaky, and wily and you’re never sure about what’s going on in their heads!” chuckling, he turned back to the pile of artwork before him, picked a particular one out and gave it a lingering look.  “ Do you want to know why I was suddenly reminded of your painting?”

He never even waited for my answer, he just thrust the painting that he had been looking at into my hands and asked me, in that casual, drawling way that he has when he’s pretending that something isn’t a big deal when it really is, “ Well, Kogure-sensei.  What do you think of this one?  Rather like yours, don’t you think?  Only…at the same time, it’s disturbingly different in a few, essential ways from that painting that you did a couple of years back.  How the artist chose to use the colours for one.”

I stared. 

Blue.  That was the first thing that my brain picked out.

The very first thing I noticed was that various shades of blue held dominance in the canvas.  Fujima was right.  Looking at it, I was rather reminded of my own work, the painting that I was most proud of, even up to now. 

It was like mine in the sense that it seemed, at first glance, to be nothing more than a chaotic blend of wild streaks of colours.  But that was pretty much where all of the similarities ended. From then on, it seemed to be the exact opposite of my work, a complimentary piece.

Where the light, cheery colours had taken precedence in my painting, the cold, dark shades did so in this other artist’s.  Where I had smoothed the paint on thickly to give my work an overall texture of depth and warmth, he had used light, gentle and precise strokes of the brush to give it a detached, rather clinical feel.

The two paintings were the exact opposite, and yet, still remained quite similar…

“ Is looking at that making you feel as uneasy as it’s making me right now?” Fujima asked, laughing awkwardly.  I could tell that he was somewhat embarrassed to admit that some stranger’s painting was having such an effect on him. I wanted to tell him that he shouldn’t be, that sometimes art just had that sort of effect on people, but I decided against it.  It would probably just start a debate between us. 
“ It’s not that the painting’s ugly or anything.  It’s quite good.  It’s just that…I remember all the things that our teachers tell us about our work being the portrait of our souls and in this painting, I just see…” His words trailed off.  Give Fujima something to draw with, anything at all, and he would be able to express himself beautifully, but words sometimes failed him.  As it did me more often than not.

“ Blue.” I finished for him, after a moment of thought in which I never once took my eyes off the painting.  I knew that this would have made no sense for him if left simply at that, so I went on to explain, “I’ve always thought of blue as the loneliest of all colours.  It’s a beautiful colour, yeah, but it’s cold.  It’s the colour of the water and the sky that separates us from so many things.  Blue, to me, means separation. Detachment.” I murmured, I was unable to tear my eyes away from the painting.  I had been captivated, drawn right in.  I wondered who this person who had painted this hauntingly beautiful work was.  I wanted to know why he felt so alone.

Fujima snapped his fingers together.  “ That’s right! Exactly what I wanted to say.  This painting is so cold.  It makes me feel alone, and I’m wondering how the artist must have felt when he painted it!  This…” he checked the back of the canvas, which was facing him since I was still examining it, for the name of the painter,
 “ Rukawa Kaede strikes me as a very aloof person by just looking at his work. Just like how I got the impression that you were someone who is very complex and who enjoyed everything about life when I first saw your painting.”

“ Rukawa Kaede…” I repeated softly, testing the sound of the name out.  I raised a hand and touched my fingertips to the surface of the canvas. 

Just as our paintings complimented each other with their differences and strange little similarities, would this Rukawa Kaede compliment me?  Would he enhance the person that I am just as I had no doubt that his painting, if displayed right beside mine, would heighten the overall effect of my work and vice versa? 

After all, where he is dark, I am light.  Where he is cold, I am warm. We seemed to be the two sides to the ying and the yang…  “I want to get to know him…” I whispered, I was still so wrapped up in my examination of the painting that I didn’t notice Fujima’s small frown.

That was to be the beginning of an obsession.  An all consuming need for me to find this person who thought like me, expressed himself like me, and still remained so different and alien.

That was the painting that changed my life, and would eventually give me one more thing to add to my list of things that give meaning.

~**~ To Be Continued ~**~

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