Two Names — Chapter 4

I find the printmaking studio by accident, which is the kind of thing that sounds like a beginning of a story but which is, in my case, simply a fact about navigation — I was looking for the etching room, which I had been told was on the second floor of the east wing, and I took a wrong turn at the top of the stairs and ended up in a corridor I had never been in before, and the door at the end of the corridor was open, and there was a smell coming from it that was not linseed oil or turpentine or any of the familiar smells of the painting studios but something older and sharper and more alive, the smell of wood and ink and the particular mineral sharpness of the ground where the block sits, and I stopped because stopping is what I do when I encounter something I do not have language for.

The room is larger than I expected. High ceilings, north-facing skylights, the kind of light that printmakers prize because it is even and cool and does not change with the time of day — unlike oil light, which moves and deceives, print light holds still, and holding still is what woodblock carving requires. The walls are covered in prints, some framed, some pinned directly to the corkboard panels, some unframed and stacked against the wall in a way that suggests work that is ongoing, work that has not yet resolved, work that is still becoming what it will be.

He is standing at the press. I do not know his name yet. I do not know who he is. I only know that he is tall and that his back is to me and that his hands — the hands I will spend the next several months trying to paint — are on the handle of the printing press, pressing down with a kind of authority that comes from having done this many times before, and the press is making a sound that is not quite a sound, more a vibration, a mechanical heartbeat, the sound of ink being forced into paper.

I should leave. I should apologize for being in the wrong corridor, in the wrong wing, standing in a doorway that is not mine to stand in. I should do the thing that a person with normal social reflexes would do, which is to say excuse me and close the door and go back to the stairs and find the etching room I was actually looking for. Instead I stand in the doorway and watch.

The press finishes its cycle. He releases the handle. He lifts the upper plate — the woodblock, inked, the image carved into it visible as a series of grooves and ridges that catch the light — and beneath it is the paper, the print, the thing that was inside the block and is now outside it, a ghost of the thing that made it. He sets the block aside. He picks up the print. He holds it to the light.

He looks at it for a long time. Not the way I look at my paintings — with anxiety, with the question of whether it is good enough, whether it will pass, whether it is technically adequate — but the way you look at something you have made and are still discovering, the way you look at something that has surprised you even though you are the one who made it. I recognize this look. I have seen it in the mirror on the rare occasions when a painting has come out right. I have not seen it often.

"Do you want to come in, or are you just going to stand there?"

His voice is quiet. Not soft exactly — there is a precision to it, a clarity, the kind of voice that carries without effort — but quiet in the way that certain kinds of confidence are quiet, the way that people who know exactly what they are doing can afford not to raise their voices about it. He has not turned around. He is still holding the print.

"I'm sorry," I say. "I was looking for the etching room."

"You took a left at the stairs instead of a right. This is the wrong wing." He turns around. His face is narrower than I expected from his build — the kind of face that looks like it was drawn rather than assembled, with features that are exact and considered, as if they have been placed precisely where they are for a reason. His eyes are dark. His hair is cut short, practical, the kind of cut that does not call attention to itself. His sleeves are rolled to the elbow. His hands are stained with ink in a way that mine are stained with paint, which is to say they are stained in a way that is not quite dirt and not quite decoration but something in between, something that marks the person as a person who makes things. "The etching room is in the west wing. This is the woodblock studio."

"I know," I say, which is a lie, I did not know, I am still learning, I am in the wrong place in every way that matters and I cannot bring myself to leave. "I just — I heard the press."

He looks at me. He has the kind of expression that is difficult to read — not closed, not guarded, but considered, the way a person looks when they are deciding how to respond to something they have not encountered before. He sets the print down on the table beside him. He picks up a piece of wood shavings from the floor — he is standing near a pile of them, small pale curls of wood that look like the shavings of some material softer than wood, something almost like paper — and he brushes them from his sleeve with a gesture that is automatic, practiced, the kind of thing he has done so many times it no longer requires attention.

"You paint," he says. It is not a question.

"Oil. Third year. Studio 3B."

"I know. I've seen you in the courtyard." He says this without interest, without elaboration, as a statement of fact. "What are you doing in the printmaking wing?"

"I got lost."

"You got lost."

"Yes."

He nods. He picks up the print again. He is not offering me anything — not an invitation, not an dismissal, not a conversation — but he is not closing the door either. He is simply standing there, holding the print, looking at it in the specific way that printmakers look at prints, and leaving me to decide what to do with the space he has not quite offered.

I stay.

"Can I see?" I ask. I am pointing at the print. I do not know why I am asking. I do not know why I am here, in the wrong wing, in front of a person whose name I do not know, asking to see work that is not mine to see.

He looks at the print. He looks at me. He considers.

"Most painters don't care about printmaking," he says.

"I'm not most painters."

This is not a thing I would normally say. This is the kind of thing a person with more confidence, or less self-awareness, or a different relationship to the social contract might say. I am aware, as the words leave my mouth, that they are more than I intended, that they have arrived with a weight that I did not put on them. He notices. I can see that he notices.

"No," he says. "You're not."

He hands me the print.

The image is a hand. Not a full hand — not the kind of hand that populates historical prints, hands performing actions, hands holding objects, hands gesturing toward meaning — but a fragment: the thumb and first two fingers, the way they curl around something that is outside the frame, the suggestion of pressure, of grip, of the thing being held. The carving is extraordinary — the lines so fine they are almost invisible, the gradations of tone created not through hatching but through the depth and angle of the grooves themselves, the way the ink sits in the hollows and reflects the light in a way that makes the paper seem to glow from within. It is, in the way that certain pieces of technical mastery are, both impressive and slightly terrifying — impressive because of what it shows the maker can do, terrifying because of what it implies about the maker's relationship to their own ability.

I have held my own paintings and felt the distance between what I meant and what I made. I have never held someone else's work and felt this: the sense that the thing I am holding was made by a person who is more honest with their tools than I am with mine, who puts the thing they mean into the thing they make without flinching from what the thing they mean might cost.

"This is beautiful," I say. The word is inadequate. I know it is inadequate. I say it anyway.

"It's not finished," he says. He says this without self-pity, without false modesty, as a simple assessment of a material fact. "The thumb is wrong. I carved it from the wrong side. I'll have to start the block over."

"The thumb is wrong?"

"It's too thin. The pressure is in the wrong place. The grip suggests a different weight than the one I intended." He takes the print back from me. His fingers brush mine briefly — his fingers are cold, I notice, cold in the way that hands are cold when they have been in cold water or cold ink or cold air, and he does not apologize for the coldness, does not seem to notice it. "I can see it now that it's printed. I couldn't see it while I was carving."

"That's the thing about prints," I say. "They show you what you couldn't see."

He looks at me. For the first time, he looks at me with something that is not merely polite attention — with interest, with the specific quality of regard that a person gives another person when they have said something that has landed, that has arrived in the place it was aimed at. It is not an invitation. It is not an assessment. It is simply a recognition.

"What's your name?" he asks.

"Kiryu. Toru Kiryu."

"Hasumi. Saku Hasumi. Fourth year. Printmaking." He does not offer his hand. He does not move toward me. He simply names himself, which is, in the economy of this kind of encounter, an offer — not of friendship, not of anything so simple, but of a kind of acknowledgment, the mutual recognition of two people who make things in a building full of people who make things and who have, for whatever reason, noticed each other. "You're in the right corridor now. The etching room is down the left stairs and to the right. But if you want to see how the press works —"

"I do," I say. Too quickly. I hear the quickness in my own voice. I do not correct it.

He smiles. It is a small smile, the kind that is more acknowledgment than humor, the kind that says I have noticed and I am not making anything of it except the noticing. It is not the real smile, the rare one, the one the BIBLE says he uses when something is true. But it is not the dry smile either. It is somewhere in between. It is the smile of a person who has decided, for reasons I do not yet understand, to let me stay.

He shows me the press. He shows me the blocks — the cherry blocks, the ones he carves into, which are sourced from a specific supplier in Chichibu and cut to specific dimensions by a man he has been buying from since his second year. He shows me the papers, the inks, the particular tool he uses for the finest lines, a blade so small it looks like it belongs in surgery rather than in a studio. He explains the process — the inking, the laying, the pressure, the paper, the print — with the generosity of someone who is accustomed to teaching, who knows how to give information in a form that can be received rather than merely endured.

I listen. I ask questions. I do not talk about my own work, because my own work is not ready to be talked about, because my own work is not honest, because my own work is the thing Professor Endo described in the guidance session and I am not yet ready to name it in front of another person.

What I do, instead, is watch. I watch his hands. I watch the way he holds the blade, the angle of his wrist, the motion of his arm as he carves — not the press, this time, but a smaller piece, a test block he is working on at the side of the table. I watch the way the shavings curl away from the blade. I watch the way the light catches the grain of the wood. I watch the way he is, in this room, in this work, completely and without performance, which is a quality I have been trying to find in my own practice for three years and which I recognize in him the way I recognize a language I studied once and have not spoken since but still, somehow, understand.

He catches me watching. Not in a way that is uncomfortable, not in a way that makes me feel observed in return — he simply pauses, briefly, in the way that a person pauses when they feel the quality of the air change, and then he continues, and the watching and the being watched cancel each other out and become something else, something that is neither and both, the shared space of attention that is the closest I have come, in months, to feeling like I am in the right place.

The afternoon moves. The light through the skylights changes in the specific way that north light does not change — it is already even, already consistent, already the thing it has been all day — but the quality of it shifts subtly as the sun moves behind the building and the angle of the skylights catches a different portion of the sky, a slightly different grey, a slightly different weight. I notice this because noticing is what I do, because I am a painter and this is what painters notice, the light on the things, the things in the light.

I notice the smell of the studio. It is different from the smell of the oil painting studios — not worse or better, but different, the turpentine and the ink and the wood and the particular mineral smell of the stone on which the blocks are carved, a combination that is sharp and clean and present in a way that the linseed-and-oil smell of my own studio is not, a smell that asks you to pay attention rather than inviting you to settle. I breathe it in. I do not know if I will paint it. I do not know if I can paint it. I do know that I will remember it.

"You should go," he says. It is not unkind. It is the kind of thing one person says to another when the afternoon has ended without either of them noticing it had a beginning. "It's almost six."

"It is," I say. I do not check my phone. I do not know what time it is. I accept his statement as a fact about the world, the way I have been accepting the facts of this room as facts — the press, the blocks, the prints, the hands, the smell, the light, the person who is telling me, with the quiet authority of someone who knows exactly what they are, that it is time to leave.

I stand up. I have been sitting on the bench near the wall, the one printmakers sit on when they are reviewing their work, the one that puts your eye level exactly at the height of the press table. I have been sitting here for — I do not know how long. Long enough that my legs are stiff. Long enough that the light has changed twice. Long enough that I have learned more about the process of woodblock printmaking than I have learned about anything else in the past month, and not from the process itself but from the person explaining it, from the way the explanation arrives, from the way he gives information without condescending, without simplifying, without treating my ignorance as a burden.

The print on the table — the one with the hand, the one he said was wrong, the one that was still beautiful — is still there. I look at it as I walk to the door. I look at the thumb that he says is too thin. I look at the fingers, the pressure, the grip. I look at the thing he made and the thing he sees when he looks at it and the distance between the two, which is the same distance I live in, which is the distance between the thing you make and the thing you meant, which is the distance that makes the work honest or makes it a lie.

"Can I come back?" I ask. I am at the door. He is at the press, beginning to clean the ink from the block, his movements precise, his attention on the task, his back to me in the way that it was when I arrived, the posture of a person who is alone in a room they have made for themselves and who has, for reasons I do not fully understand, allowed me to be in it.

"If you want to," he says. He does not turn around. "The press doesn't mind an audience."

I step into the corridor. The door closes behind me. The corridor is empty and dim — the printmaking wing has fewer windows than the painting wing, a design choice that makes sense for the work but that makes the space feel, at this hour, like the inside of something, like the inside of a box or a memory or a thought that has not yet been thought all the way through.

I walk down the stairs. I walk out of the building. The evening air is cool and the sky is doing the thing that Tokyo skies do in spring, which is to say it is layered — pink at the very top, then pale grey, then a deeper grey at the horizon — and the cherry trees along the path are at the stage where the blossoms are almost gone and what is left is the green of the leaves beginning to come, the future arriving slowly, the past falling away.

I breathe in. The air smells like cherry blossoms and diesel and the particular mineral smell of the stone pathways and, faintly, beneath all of it, the turpentine. I breathe out. The turpentine is still there. It will be there for hours. It will be there when I get home. It will be there when I paint tomorrow.

I take out my phone. There is a message from Kanade — I have been ignoring it since yesterday, which is a thing I do sometimes, the deliberate silence, the space I create between myself and the person I am closest to in order to contain the thing I cannot say — and I do not read it. I put the phone away.

I walk. I walk through the park, past the pond, past the couple on the bench who are still there — or a different couple, or the same couple, I do not know, I do not look closely enough to know — and I think about what I have just seen.

The press. The block. The hands.

The way he looked at his own work — with the specific honesty of someone who can see what is wrong with the thing they have made because they know what the thing they meant was supposed to be. The way he did not flinch from the wrongness. The way he said it — the thumb is wrong — with the same clarity with which he said everything else, without drama, without self-pity, without the thing I do, which is to pretend the wrongness is not there until it becomes impossible to ignore.

The way he let me stay.

I stop walking. I am at the edge of the pond, the water dark, the reflections of the trees wavering slightly in the evening breeze. I am thinking about the print. I am thinking about the hand. I am thinking about the way the ink sat in the grooves and the way the paper caught the light and the way the print showed him what he could not see while he was making it.

I am thinking about my own work. I am thinking about the ninth version, the technically perfect hands that were not his hands. I am thinking about Professor Endo's question — would you dare to paint something that frightens you? — and the answer I gave, which was not an answer, which was the not-answer of a person who has been not-answering for so long that he has forgotten what the question was.

I am thinking about the press. The smell. The light. The room.

I am thinking: can I paint him?

Not Kanade. Not the person I have been painting for nine months, the person I have known since I was thirteen, the person whose hands I cannot get right because getting them right would mean admitting that I have been looking at his hands for fourteen years and that the looking is not casual, not innocent, not the kind of looking that painters do when they paint people.

Hasumi.

Can I paint Hasumi.

The question arrives and I do not push it away. I do not do the thing I usually do, which is to translate the question into a safer one, a more formal one, a question about composition and color and the relationship between figure and ground. I let the question be what it is. I let it be terrifying. I let it be the thing it is, which is a question not about painting at all but about what I am willing to admit, to myself, in the late afternoon, by a pond, with the smell of turpentine still in my clothes.

I do not know the answer. The not-knowing is new. The not-knowing is the first honest thing I have felt in months.

I walk home. I do not check my phone. I cook rice. I eat. I sit on my bed. I close my eyes.

I see the print. I see the hand. I see the thumb that he says is wrong.

I do not know if I can paint him. But for the first time in nine months, the question is not about Kanade. The question is about someone new. The question is a door I have not opened and have not closed and the air coming through it is cold and clean and it smells like turpentine and I am, for the first time in a very long time, afraid in a way that feels like the right kind of afraid.

I sleep. I do not dream of cherry blossoms.

I dream of ink.