The Art of Vanishing by Lynne Kutsukake

Author:Lynne Kutsukake [Kutsukake, Lynne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-06-11T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-One

In two weeks we received an invitation to another event, this time in Yamanashi. A week later, in Shizuoka. From that point on, it was every weekend. Were we free? Could we come? Please come! By the time of the third invitation, it was clear that Sayako felt it was more important to attend these events than to stay in her room painting a picture. And so we went to wherever Nezu and Kaori called us: to the mountains, to the seaside, to the woods, to wherever they found a suitable location to hold one of their happenings. Sayako wanted to go, and I wanted to follow Sayako.

The number of participants at the gatherings seemed to swell as time went by, from thirty to forty to sixty, to bigger and bigger crowds. Sometimes I’d see familiar faces, sometimes not. We all seemed to meld into one giant organism. At first I scanned the crowd for Watanabe, but I did not see him again.

“Who are all these people?” I once asked Kaori.

She smiled her crooked smile, the left side of her mouth tilting up and the right side down, as if her face couldn’t decide what she wanted to do. “It doesn’t matter. The important thing is that you are here. Nobody matters but you.”

According to Nezu, happenings required chemistry and they always needed to find new people, otherwise the chemistry wouldn’t be fresh. The happening wouldn’t happen. The process was hard to explain.

“You never know what kind of reaction you’ll get when you bring strangers together,” he said. “It’s like mixing unknown elements in a test tube and waiting for the combustion. That’s the beauty of human beings, they’re totally unpredictable.”

Once we sat on a deserted beach in our bathing suits. We were all given a stick and told to write our names in the wet sand as close to the water as we could. The waves rolled in, the kanji we had drawn were erased. We repeated this over and over for hours, till our shoulders were burnt red by the sun. Another time a man in a loincloth raced back and forth across a wet field flinging clumps of mud at those of us who stood watching him on the side. We were not allowed to throw anything back at him. On yet a different occasion, for a hiking trip to the mountains, we were told to bring our favourite teacup. I remember selecting the prettiest cup I owned. When we were close to the peak, Nezu led us in small groups to the narrow rock ledge where the view was the most breathtaking. As we took in the vista, exhausted but filled with awe, Nezu ordered us to throw our cups down into the valley. The sound of our teacups smashing into smithereens would create a singular music, he said, heard only once, heard only by us. I hesitated but everyone else did as they were told. So I did too, and assured myself this was part of my growth.

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