A Man

by Keiichirō Hirano

Novelists, whether consciously or unconsciously, are always on the lookout for people that can serve as models for their novels.

His drawings and paintings didn’t suggest any kind of special talent. But they weren’t terrible either. They made Rié think of the pictures drawn by the boy who had been the best artist in her class at middle school. For most people, drawing pictures was something you did during arts and crafts time until you graduated from middle school and then immediately gave it up. His work was what you would expect from a random adult if you handed them a paintbrush and drawing paper out of the blue, employing technique that had not evolved since adolescence. Yet while everyone else had stopped, for some reason this man had kept on going.

Dressed in an outfit straight out of a men’s magazine fashion column with a caption like “Middle-Aged Playboy Essentials,” Kyoichi explained that he frequently visited Tokyo for business meetings. In fact, later on he would be going to the Roppongi nightclub district to, as he put it, “catch up with an old friend,” and Kido was shocked by the lewd overtones in the way he said this with a suggestive smile. Although the inn’s home page included a photograph of Kyoichi’s wife, describing her as the “Beautiful Proprietress,” Kido now wondered if Kyoichi kept a mistress from his Tokyo days—not that it mattered. Kido was simply amazed that the man felt compelled to imply such possibilities to a lawyer that he was meeting for the first time.

He loved dearly the angle he took when he was getting drunk on vodka. As though diving with no oxygen tank, he sunk in a straight line, heading toward the abyss of inebriation. His path along the way was transparent, words could never catch up with him, and even the flavor was like light sparkling on the distant surface of the water when he looked back.