Chapter Text
The thin chill of the late winter day sliced through his clothing. Hiromi looked around him, at the naked, gnarled branches of the trees that curled and twisted against the pale grey sky. The tips of his fingers were reddened with cold, which he shoved into the warm sanctity of his trouser pockets – he was not accustomed to wearing a coat. Rather, he relied on the thinner armour of his work blazer to shield him from the harshness of the wind. As young man of twenty-seven, he was primarily occupied by the affairs of his arduous profession. He worked as an advanced bengoshi¹, given his outstanding results from the bar examination and the virtuoso of his undergraduate degree in philosophy. He saw is career in law not as a flux of event, and change, and potentiality, but as a territory ahead that awaited his exploration.
Unlike most who jumped at the chance to beam about their status in the legal system, or better yet, pretend to lament about its tedium, Hiromi viewed it as a divine opportunity to fight for those most vulnerable and grant them their justice when it was most at risk of being divested.
Most of his time was spent in quiet solitude or accompanied by the plentiful paperwork that he was burdened with diurnally. He hadn’t any friends, and for what appeared to be the first time in his life, he became aware of loneliness.
With feeble hopes of drawing his conscience away from the dealings of his work, Hiromi went to visit his local art museum, a notable tourist destination in Kyoto with paintings so opulent, so profound that they resembled mirrors to other worlds. There were works of native Japanese artists, neighbouring international talents that were also on display.
The breeze brushed past his cheeks as he stepped through the grand, archaic double doors of the establishment, greeted by the marvel and gravitas of the artistry. It was only around four in the afternoon, yet the paleness of the sky outside began to shift into a much deeper hue.
He ventured gradually towards a vast painting of a desert plain with a single, bare branch. And from it, hung a clock that seemed to be melting away – there were a few other melting clocks around the painting, perhaps a metaphor to convey the scarcity of time.² Hiromi was unsure, but he enjoyed it, nonetheless. Throughout his teenage years, he had been admittedly pretentious about art, claiming that it could not be truly enjoyed unless its symbolism was understood by the beholder. As an adult, he had abandoned such pompous notions. From his place, he turned his head just slightly leftward and his eyes fell on a woman.
She was a few paces away from him, gazing upon various pieces. She carried herself unobtrusively with her hands held behind her back and her head slightly tilted sideways, as if she were a critic. Around her neck was a red scarf of wool that concealed some of her face from his view – she appeared to be around twenty-two at the very most, her eyebrows were pinched in concentration as she observed.
Then, she strolled his way.
Not for him (this he knew) but for the painting he had also been studying. Despite there being sufficient space between them, Hiromi stepped once sideways, awkwardly clearing his throat and facing the strokes of paint before him. The ambience of the public shuffling against the wooden floors and murmuring amongst themselves persisted, but it felt like white noise in his ears. As if he were in a bubble.
With her.
She slowly pulled her scarf downwards and with the restraint of a fool his eyes flickered towards her visage. Those eyes looked like they were encumbered by the knowledge of the universe, a kind of melancholy that came only with age and experience. Her lips pursed almost unperceptively, before she spared him a fleeting glance and looked away again.
“Dalí?” Was the only thing she said, eyes still trained on the work before them.
Hiromi swallowed, “I think so. The one with the moustache.”
She huffed quietly with laughter, but soon the animation in her face ceased. Then, almost absently, she queried, “It makes me feel kind of odd.”
“I think that’s an intended effect,” he mused.
She said nothing after that, but gave a hum of acknowledgement. And suddenly, after those words had escaped, nothing mattered. For an instant Hiromi felt the truth of what he said and felt lift away from him the weight of a despair whose heaviness he had not fully acknowledged.
Emboldened by some power unbeknownst to him, he cleared his dry throat again and looked her way with interest. “Do you usually visit this museum?” He winced almost immediately after, “That wasn’t a line, by the way. Not a ‘You usually come here?’—not like that.”
A chuckle.
“I’m here on occasion,” she informed him. “Do you always wear pretty suits around?” She raised a brow at his corporate wear and awaited his response with aloofness-cloaked intrigue. She had such a graceful confidence about her, it made him feel disarmed. There was something deliberate in her choice of the adjective ‘pretty,’ like concepts of masculinity or femininity were of no interest to her. Perhaps he liked it, perhaps he did not. He was unsure, a mental state that he rarely found himself in.
Now, he laughed. A sliver of shock found its way into the sound and he steadied himself before answering, “Only to work. I'm a lawyer, it’s a very dress-coded profession.”
“I see,” she nodded. “I’m still in school, majoring in psychology.”
“What do you want to do after you graduate, then?” Hiromi was suddenly much more invested in this woman. Psychology was a course done with intent—anyone could apply for law, or dentistry, or economics. But to choose psychology, there has to be some deeper intent to be explored. She was a complete stranger, but already, he felt himself longing to pick her brain. What was hidden behind that calmness of hers? How could she make a man of 192cm feel so small?
She clicked her tongue with thought. Next, she said, “I want to read minds.”
His face fell and for a moment, he could not tell whether she was being serious or toying with him. But the wrinkle in her nose when she tried not to laugh gave her away. He sighed with quiet relief and shook his head. “What’s your name?”
He had about ten minutes to figure out how he’d ask for her phone number.
The pair had talked at length afterwards, but that night, Hiromi crawled into his concrete bed and laid awake on his back, glaring up at the ceiling like it owed him answers—he had not worked up the courage to request her number, effectively allowing her to slip through his fingers like smoke.
It was suffocating and rather frustrating how she had plagued him so. Twenty minutes of conversation should have scarcely been enough to unmake a man of his character, yet there he lay, still as a felled oak in nothing but his pyjama pants.
Every stray wander of his mind made its way back to the regal slope of her nose, the flutter of her eyelashes that made his chest clench most ignominiously, the magnetic repelling nature of her eyes that made it so that it was near impossible to stare straight into them, for Hiromi had always been afraid of drowning. For once, his conscience was not occupied with the details of his latest case, how early he would need to get out of bed, or whether he had indeed bought the printer ink that he had been tasked with supplying. Instead, he thought only of her.
The lady in the red scarf without an identity to trace.
FOOTNOTES.
¹: The highest ranking lawyers in Japan, covering defence and prosecution.
²: ‘The Persistence of Memory,’ a painting from Salvador Dalí, Spanish artist.