CHAPTER FOUR: LIGHT, LINES, AND THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER
In the months that followed, they met on the weekends, usually on Sundays. As a given, they never met in Nerima. Most often, their sessions took place on the Komaba campus, around Naka-Meguro or back at Himonya or one of the other parks. Afterwards, they would go back to her dorm room or to Sartre to debrief over their scribbles or just talk.
Being able to just chat like a normal person with another human being felt incredible. Before her, the closest thing he had known to "just talking" was the chummy griping and groaning from time to time with Ucchan about the belligerent nonsense of some rival who never had a chance or about one of Akane's usual temper tantrums. Of course, however, even he knew there were limits to what he could say and how much he could ask for her to listen. Ucchan was, after all, still one of the girls who was after him.
The conversations he had now with this normal girl were different. Somehow, between them they simply had too many interesting things to talk about beyond fighting, arranged marriages, and unasked-for and unwanted obligations. She proved funny and witty, refreshingly cool and sophisticated, always unapologetically frank and candid, and yet surprisingly sensitive in her insights. He enjoyed her company, and more and more, he began hoping she enjoyed his company too.
# # # # #
"I don't get it," Ranma said with a bemused frown.
"What?" she asked without looking up. She laid lazily on her stomach while flipping through a manga book while humming softly to herself.
"You and shoujo manga."
"What about it don't you get?" she asked, now giving him her full attention and setting the book down.
"Ya can pontificate about Sartre, dissect Plato in your sleep, and wax poetic on the fly about human nature with metaphors drawing on quantum physics. Yet ya can waste hours on that stuff?"
"It's not a waste. Even Fumio Kishida (1) and Elon Musk read manga."
"But shoujo…?"
"Hey. I'm still a girl, and dreaming is what girls do from time to time."
# # # # #
"Black as the devil, hot as hell, pure as an angel, sweet as love," she muttered one morning. They were at Sartre again. She had just opened up shop for the day.
"What's that?"
"My morning coffee."
"Oh."
"Want one too?"
"Sure," he grumbled morosely.
"What happened now?" she asked as she reached up to one of the shelves for a tin of roasted beans.
"Akane cooked again last night."
"I'm sorry," she said, glancing up in sympathy. "Maybe not as much as you are, but I'm sorry."
"Thanks."
"You're welcome."
"Wish she'd just accept that she ain't any good at it and give up," he said in frustration.
She stopped working and fixed him with a quizzical, contemplative look. "Is that really what you mean, Ranma?" she eventually asked.
He sighed. "I just wish she would actually listen to someone for once, whether it's about cooking, the Art, or – just anything. What's the point if she won't listen to Kasumi or anyone else? Definitely don't listen to me."
She laughed. "And the kettle calls the pot black."
"I'm being serious here!"
"So am I," she said. "Akane definitely is not an easy person to deal with by any means, and it's definitely easy to say this, but be patient. She does listen, especially to you. She just doesn't want to acknowledge or admit that any more than you do. That's a lot of why she gets so angry with you all the time."
"Yeah, right."
"It's true, Ranma. Anger isn't the opposite of caring; that's apathy. My sister is most definitely not apathetic about what you say and do. And in case you don't know, for a girl, how a guy listens is one of the most important things that he does."
"Wait a minute," he said with a confused scowl. "How'd this suddenly become about me listening? And why's that specifically a girl thing?"
"Because that's how a girl measures for herself if and how much she's loved."
Ranma was intrigued now. He wondered how she would know such things. Two possibilities occurred to him. "Shoujo manga, right? Or…?"
"Or?" she challenged him.
"Have ya, uh, been in love before?"
"Ranma, Ranma," she chided, giving him her old, familiar Cheshire cat's grin. "Imagine what you will, but that's for me to know and you to wonder."
# # # # #
They were in her room again.
The same Kina Grannis song from that first day at Sartre played softly in the background. It was the one in which the singer asks about the meaning of her individual existence within the vast context of all of Time. He realised now that this particular song was one of her favorites.
"When all is said and done, what's the one thing that you would like for people to remember about you?" she asked.
The spontaneous question caught him off guard. He did not know. "Haven't really had a chance to think about that before," he freely admitted. "Too busy just staying alive. You?"
"That I was consequential."
"That why you've always been so interested in money?"
"No. I told you. I don't actually care about being rich one day or whatever; I just needed a way out of Nerima. I'd be lying though if I didn't admit that it was fun sometimes just to see how many eyes I could get away with poking, letting everyone know I was still there."
"Ya don't think that anymore?"
"It got lonely," she said. "Now, I think maybe if there will be at least one person who will care enough to remember that I was here and that changed even just one thing for them, probably that would be enough."
"So now ya wanna be a saint?"
She laughed. "Hell no! I'm just doing my best to be okay with what I am."
"That being?"
"A mortal human being. Maybe even one that likes chocolate, cookies, and ice cream from time to time. Occasionally fugu (3) and caviar too."
# # # # #
"Don't be frustrated."
They were in Naka-Meguro walking by the canal. He found himself annoyed by how contrived and naive his earliest attempts with paper and pencil seemed.
"People think a sketch is about a person or an object, but it's actually about so much more than 're trying to depict a three-way interplay between the light; whatever your subject is; and your own eye. To find and understand lines in the world around you, you have to be able to participate in that conversation."
"How do I begin?"
"Start with the light. It defines what you see. Your space. The objects and people in that space. Whatever relationship they have to one another. Everything. You always need to be aware of where the light is."
"Almost sounds like the light is more important than the subject."
She smiled. "In many ways, yes, Honestly, I'd think that the importance of light would be the most intuitive part of all this to a skilled martial artist like you. It's like in an old samurai movie, right? The guy who manages to get the sun behind him gets the kill; the one with it in front of him gets killed; and at noon, the odds are even, all other things being equal."
She was right. When put that way, he did understand. "So I shouldn't place the light in front of me."
She laughed. "You're getting ahead of yourself. We're talking about where the light should be in relation to the subject, and there isn't really a right or wrong. It just depends on what you want to be seen. If you think your samurai should live, draw him at sunrise. If you want your samurai to be killed, then do your sketching at sunset."
At some point, they turned off onto one of the small foot bridges traversing the canal. She stopped walking and began looking around. He suddenly became aware of her shadow falling directly on him as she stood a few steps ahead of him in the morning sun. The canal beneath them ran perpendicularly from North to South.
"Am I about to get killed?"
"As good a spot as any for the job, right?" she replied with a coy, mischievous smirk. She turned, climbed up onto the side rail and perched herself atop with legs crossed at the knees.
"Whatcha doin'?"
"Just wait," she replied.
She pulled her phone and a selfie-stick out of her purse and locked the phone into the mount. Then, she proceeded to shoot pictures of herself facing in each of the cardinal directions. She started with the East and ended with the South.
"Here," she said as she dismounted her phone off the stick and handed it to him. "Scroll through and take a look. You don't even have to tell me which one turns you on most."
Ranma became aware of his own collar choking him. The blood suddenly rushed to his head. The heat threatened to explode out of his flushed cheeks. In a panic, he fought to school his features into a scowl that he hoped would mask his mortified horror.
"Oh come on, Saotome!" she chided between peals of her own laughter as she clutched at her abdomen. "Relax! It was a joke."
He continued to hold on desperately to his frown. He did not trust himself to say anything that would not end up getting him killed.
"That's the problem with all of you martial artists," she continued after calming herself. "You're always so serious about everything. That's why things always end up being such a mess for you. You asked the other day what it's like to be normal. This is part of it. Normal people tease one another and laugh about it all the time."
"I usually get hit for that sorta thing. Usually by your sister."
"I'm not my sister," she replied.
"Ya really have no shame, do ya?"
She flashed a warm smile back at him. "What's there to be ashamed about? We're two friends taking a walk around the neighborhood on a Sunday morning."
He smiled back, liking how the words rang true. He also liked how she said it: unapologetically without any shame, like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Even… normal.
"Just scroll through my phone and look at those pictures, okay?" she eventually said, breaking the strange silence that had fallen between them. Her voice seemed unusually quiet and near, almost intimate even, as it gently slipped in through his thoughts. With it came the fleeting scent of peach blossoms once more.
"What am I looking for?"
"Nothing specific, but ignore the background. Just objectively take in for yourself that each one shows something a little different about my face."
Ranma began swiping between the four pictures like she told him. Each unique angle presented subtle, but no less real differences in what was emphasized depending on whether the sun was to her right or left, in front, or behind her.
The soul-piercing character of her eyes and the playful lines of her lips appeared most frank and candid in the one facing to the East. The shots facing North and South were far more interesting though. Here streaks of sunlight angling in from the sides cut mysterious, intriguing shadows that danced across the lush, shiny bangs of her bob-cut hair and brushed against the soft, graceful lines of her face. These angles also fully revealed the flawless porcelain complexion of her skin.
The memory of her standing on the stage that night in Roppongi overlaid itself on what he saw. She had demonstrated the same intimate understanding and mastery of the light then too. He sensed now something simultaneously enigmatic, dangerous, sophisticated and profound — even of delicious human warmth and beauty — swirling around him, drawing him in, and crying out for understanding.
She was a very beautiful girl.
I'm not my sister….
Without warning, an image of Akane's fist hurtling towards his face appeared before his mind's eye, violently knocking him out of his odd, dangerous reverie. Tumbling back toward the unforgiving reality of the present, he thought of Icarus realizing his wings had melted as he fell helplessly toward the Sea and his Fate.
"Yeah," a shaken Ranma drawled out evenly in his best impression of cool, outward objectivity. "Different."
# # # # #
Today, she thought they should review some basics about lines.
She took him back to Himonya and the same tree where she had told him about the Allegory of the Cave. This time, she sat beside him with long legs in high cut-off denim shorts and bare feet dangling high above the lake far below. The pleasant warmth of the mid-afternoon sun was behind them. It was late summer now. .
"The purpose of a line in a sketch is to indicate a change of plane. That's why you first have to be able to see planes in order to see lines."
She reached into her purse and then extended her hand out to him. In her palm were a pair of casino dice.
"What're those for?"
"Hold them for me," she said, placing the dice in his hand. "I'll show you."
She reached into her purse again. This time she drew out one of her now-familiar pencils and a cocktail napkin.
"Changes of plane are probably easiest to see in cubes like these dice. Each side is a plane, and you can very clearly see where they meet. It's really easy to do a line drawing of cubic objects; you just draw all the straight edges."
She handed him the napkin, showing him the simple box outlines that she had drawn.
"Our eyes and brains are inherently biased to pick out straight lines in the world around us," she told him.
This bias was the reason children invariably produced stick figures when asked to draw people for the first time. Straight lines appealed to that universal human desire for the simplest, most direct path from A to B.
"But the world isn't made of boxes, and most lines aren't straight — just like everything else in life."
She took the napkin back from him and started sketching again.
"Most lines are actually curves, just the way the edges of those dice really are if you look up close. In other words, a change of plane often occurs as a gradual transition."
"And when a transition that ain't a straight line like that comes at ya head on?" Ranma asked. "Whaddaya do then?"
"You mean when you're viewing a curved surface from a perspective of direct confrontation? Like a person's forehead and the other features of their face?"
He nodded. "Or even just a ball coming at ya."
"Good question!"
There was a palpable sense of excitement in her motions as she handed him the napkin. She had overlaid curved lines on the faint orienting straight lines with which she had started.
She reached into her purse for another napkin and started sketching something new.
"To understand a curved plane coming at you, you have to break it down in your mind's eye into a progressive series of many other mini planes. Since these mini planes are arbitrary – artificial even, you need a kind of line that will subtly convey their presence. To do that, we use something called an 'implied line' as opposed to a 'hard' or 'literal' line."
The napkin she handed him now depicted two very rough images side-by-side of what he surmised was supposed to be his own face. One looked like a robot. The other one was an ethereal appearing ghostly outline rendered entirely in dashed lines. He only knew he was looking at himself because of the pigtail she had added.
An amused twinkle appeared in her eyes as she took in his reaction. "Now you're really confused?"
"I think I look a lot better in real life," he said dryly.
She smiled. "This is an extreme example. A good sketch makes extensive use of both types of lines. It takes practice to see these things and even more to put them together."
"How long did it take ya? To be good at this?"
"A really long time. I'm still not even sure if I'm good at it."
Ranma laughed. "I don't think the false modesty suits ya."
She laughed too. "Of course not, but I'm not being modest. I really still am not sure sometimes. I just try to remember why I wanted to see these things in the first place."
"Why is that? What and why do ya want to see?" Ranma asked as he handed her back the dice.
She suddenly froze at his question and turned away. The strange silence that settled in between them confused him, even scared him.
"I'm sorry," he said, not knowing what else to say. "It's that foot-in-mouth thing of mine. I —"
He heard her say something, but could not make out the words. They were soft and mumbled, but seemed important. A sudden breeze carried them away. He was frustrated.
"I know you didn't hear me the first time, Ranma. It's okay," she said. She had read his darkening mood. She told him not to apologise for seeing things, no matter what anyone else might say. "Whether people want to hear you talk about what you see is a different matter, but you're entitled to your curiosity about the world, to be a beholder just like anybody else."
She needed to see because she needed a way to remain sane after her mother died. She had been ten then. No one could give her a reason for what had happened, and there had been nobody strong enough to love her and reassure her that what happened was not her fault. She had to figure those things out for herself.
Only she had been home with her mother when it happened; her father had taken Kasumi and Akane out to the grocery store. Her mother had been very tired that day. There were more and more of those days toward the end.
"We were in my room talking, and she was doing my hair," she remembered. "You may not know, but there was a time when I had hair that was even longer than Akane's when you first came."
Ranma tried to imagine her like that. He laughed at the image that came to his mind's eye.
She laughed too despite herself. "It's true."
"I'd like to see a picture of that one day."
She grew quiet and still again. "You can't," she mumbled after a moment. "I… I destroyed them all."
"Why…?"
"I still feel the touch of her hands running through my hair and pulling at it. She was laughing at something that I said one moment, and then, just like that, the next moment was just… just silence."
That terrible, deafening silence was the worst sound that she had ever known, far worse than anything she could ever have imagined before that moment. When she turned to look behind her, she found her mother lying absolutely still on the bed, her eyes wide open, but empty and unseeing.
"Mama…. Mama!" she remembered herself helplessly crying over and over. Desperately, she climbed up on the bed and tried to shake her mother back to life. Bright red blood suddenly filled in the whites of her mother's eyes. Then the body began to turn cool and rigid.
Her mother had a leukemia. At some point, the cancer had transformed and obliterated all of the marrow in her body. She had died from a catastrophic spontaneous intracranial hemorrhage, bleeding to death almost instantly within her own skull before her daughter's eyes.
"That was the first time I ever saw Death," she told Ranma. "It was also the first time I felt what loneliness truly was, when I discovered what it was like to know that I was inconsequential." In the void that emerged in her mother's shadow, she discovered the lonely horror of her own existential crisis.
Ranma found himself slipping his arms around her and pulling her in close as she began to cry. She felt so very small and fragile in his arms, like she truly was made of glass. He wondered if the memories she was sharing now were the thing she had not wanted to talk about that first day at Sartre. She had been on the verge of tears and seemed so fragile then too.
Do ya wanna talk about it?
Not right now. Maybe someday.
Yet, the very fact of her vulnerability made her seem somehow, in this moment, like the strongest, most beautiful and real human being he had ever touched and known. He felt grateful knowing her and that such a person could and really did exist in the world.
Desperately, she buried the warmth of her face against his chest. The thick lushness of her hair brushed up against his chin, and the soft, tender warmth of her body radiated against him as she did. Holding her aroused a peculiar, unexpected feeling of rightness within him.
There is no beauty without pain….
# # # # #
It was dusk now.
They were walking the long way back together from Himonya through Naka-Meguro and now finally down Meguro-dorii. He was glad that they had not taken the train back.
"You should go home, Ranma. Akane will be wondering where you are. I'll be fine making my way back," she suddenly said.
Strange things began to happen between the streaks of lamplight and shadows around them as the clock tower and the main gate of Komaba came into view. Ranma was struck by how extremely tired and pale she appeared, as if for a moment she were a star that had risen and burned just a little too brightly, leaving behind now these faded remnants of herself. The sight filled him with a sad ache of yearning, even a hint of fear
"I'll be fine," she repeated, smiling tenderly at him now to try and reassure him. She had seen the expression on his face. "Thank you for today, for seeing me, listening to me."
"I, no, uh, I should be— ," he struggled shakily.
She cut him off by throwing her arms around him, lingering one more time with the warmth of her body pressed affectionately against him. She smelled faintly of peach blossoms. "I always knew you could hear and see people and things, Ranma. Never stop or apologise for who you are. Akane is very lucky to have you."
Girls had glomped onto him before — many times. This was different. There was no demand or violation here, no hidden intentions that he could discern. It was strange to be touched by the honest presence of just another human being. Even more strange was the fact that it was her, this normal girl, who would be the first to touch him in this way. Maybe, though, the fact that it was her was the very reason that there should have been no surprise about what was happening. "I — "
"Go home, Ranma. I'll see you next time," she whispered before gently pushing him away. The realisation of what was happening was unexpectedly painful.
What was Icarus hoping to achieve by jumping off the Stage at Kiyomizu-dera?
Why're you asking me? Because I said Icarus was at Kiyomizu?
Because you're the one who drew Icarus at Kiyomizu.
He saw her waving at him now with uncharacteristic shyness before turning and walking off into the night.
"Nabiki…."
# # # # #
CHAPTER NOTES:
(1) Fumio Kishida is the current prime minister of Japan. He is an open Demon Slayer fan and has publicly pledged to support manga and anime during his term.
(2) A quote from Charles Maurice de Talleyrand (1754-1838) about the ideal cup of coffee. Talleyrand was the French foreign minister under Napoleon.
(3) Fugu, or puffer fish, is a Japanese delicacy so poisonous that the slightest mistake in its preparation could be fatal. The dish is legendary among the most daring culinary thrill seekers. The innards of the fish are suffused with a neurotoxin called tetrodotoxin, two to three milligrams of which is lethal to a human. In the words of famous science writer Christie Wilcox, tetradotoxin is "more potent than arsenic, cyanide or even anthrax."