Colorful

by Eto Mori

  “I don’t want to go to school. I’m done.”

  “Then you’ll be disqualified as Makoto Kobayashi.”

  “Fine, so I’m disqualified then.” I remained fixed to the bed.

  “You’ll never be able to return to the cycle of rebirth.”

  “Fine. I don’t care.”

  “I won’t play cards with you anymore.”

  “What—you monster!” I leaped to my feet. My only pleasure in this tedious life was those card games.

  “Do you really want to end on a five-loss streak?” He arched a single eyebrow.

  “Hngh!” There was no god in this world, only this annoying angel.

  A twenty-minute walk to school, Prapura showed me the way, drilling me all the while in all things Makoto. I had to hurry toward the end and slipped through the school gates at a trot. I managed to arrive at Makoto’s classroom right before the start of homeroom.

  Everyone was already in their seats when I opened the door. They all turned to look at me simultaneously, indescribably strange expressions on their faces. The silence that descended on the room was both an exclamation point and a question mark.

  Whatever else was going on, this was clearly not a warm welcome for a classmate returning to school after an extended absence due to illness. I knew right then and there that Prapura hadn’t been filling my head with lies about Makoto.

  “Woh-kay! Let’s get started!” The homeroom teacher came in a few minutes after I took my seat. “We’ve got a lot of worksheets today. Hand ’em out and get to work. Err, but first, attendance.”

  Sawada was a thirty-something bachelor who boasted a gorilla-like physique. His superhuman idiocy was apparently also on par with a gorilla. He’d come to visit any number of times while I was in the hospital, but I’d been asleep. This information has been brought to you by Prapura.

  “Kobayashi, you here?”

  I gasped and saw that all eyes in class had zeroed in on me once more. At the teacher’s podium, Sawada had a menacing look on his face. I guess he’d called my name several times already.

  “If you’re here, say so,” he growled.

  “Yes, I’m here.”

  Instantly, the class erupted in frenzied whispers.

  Even Sawada’s eyes widened in surprise.

  “Oh, Kobayashi. You sound pretty cheerful today,” he noted.

  Whoa, hey there. This is how I always sound.

  Keeping this thought to myself, I spoke again just to see how everyone would react. “Yes. Thanks to all of you, I’m fully recovered.”

  The cacophony of whispers doubled in volume.

  Apparently, the strangest thing in their world was a cheerful, enthusiastic Makoto. People gawked at me for the rest of that day, like they were about to witness an alien give birth. They all seemed to find me unsettling.

  But of course, they were simply surprised that Makoto had changed; no one suspected he had a new soul. So no matter how shocked people were or how high they raised their eyebrows, I was going to pay absolutely zero attention to them and do whatever I pleased. I mean, however weird whatever I did seemed, as long as I was wearing the body of Makoto Kobayashi, that made me plenty Makoto Kobayashi.

  This was the general rule I’d decided to live by, but there was at least one person at that school with unbelievably sharp eyes.

  It happened on lunch break and nearly gave me a heart attack. I was heading back to class after a nap behind a tree in the rear courtyard when suddenly I heard someone trotting after me in the hallway. I looked back to find a tiny girl with hair in a neat bob staring up at me intently. If she was tiny from Makoto’s perspective, then she had to have been pretty small.

  “Seminar?” the shrimp said, abruptly, her shiny eyeballs bulging. “C’mon. You went to a seminar, right? You went and discovered a new you, right?”

  “What?” I was baffled.

  “Don’t you try to fool me. I can tell.” She narrowed her eyes. “You’ve been acting strange all day. You’re not the usual Kobayashi.”

  “What are you on about?” I flinched and took a step back.

  “I knew it.” She looked extremely smug. “I just knew it. I saw an article about that seminar before. You pay a ton of money and they brainwash you. You get reborn as a better you. Am I right? I’m right, aren’t I? You skipped school to go to this seminar. And you were reborn into an optimistic, positive, cheerful human being. But I don’t think it suits you at all.”

  “Excuse me?” Now I was annoyed. “I’ll tell you right now. I didn’t go to any seminar.”

  “So then what? What else is there?”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “Liar. I don’t believe you.”

  “Fine. Don’t believe me.”

  What was this girl’s problem? And what about me was so optimistic or positive or cheerful? Although I still had questions, I started to walk away from her. Better not to get too deep with these types.

  “I totally don’t believe you!” she howled, stubbornly, right before I turned the corner. “I can tell. You definitely did something. You might be able to fool everyone else, but you’re not fooling me!”

  Tiny weirdo. But strangely sharp.

  I kept my cool, but I was pretty shaken up. I raced to a stall in the boys’ bathroom and called Prapura.

  “Who the heck was that?”

  “The thing is, well . . .” He already had the handbook open when he appeared before me. But there was no trace of his usual bravado. The fingers that flipped the pages moved with a slight hint of uncertain impatience.

  “Nothing.” He finally gave up and closed the book. “She’s not in here.”

  “What do you mean, she’s not in there?”

  “The fact that she’s not in the handbook means, in other words, that the girl didn’t exist in Makoto’s memories.”

  “So then, basically,” I said, “he didn’t notice her?”

  “Well.” Prapura nodded. “In a word, yes.”

  “Huh.” As I gave the useless handbook the side eye, a mix of complicated emotion welled up in me.

  A weirdo shrimp who even Makoto Kobayashi hadn’t noticed. And she was the only one who had sniffed out that I wasn’t Makoto.

  The first day back felt like forever. In the classroom, everyone attacked me with their eyes, and in the hallway, I was accosted by that shrimp. I was utterly wiped out by the time the last homeroom was over. But despite that, after school, I wanted to take a peek at just one more place.

  The art room.

  Prapura had told me only that very morning that Makoto had been quite the passionate member of the school art club. As far as I could tell, this guy hadn’t had a single thing going for him, but it turned out he’d been a master painter. He basically kept attending school only so that he could go to art class and art club.

  Makoto had continued going to the club even in the second term, despite the fact that the general rule was to quit any extracurricular activities at the end of the first term in ninth grade. Still, there were other ninth graders who went, and the club advisor not only tolerated it, but actively encouraged this passion Makoto and the others had for art.

  I didn’t think Makoto’s passion had been directed solely at the canvas, though.

  Once classes were over, I went up to the art room on the third floor of the new school building and looked for Makoto’s canvas on the shelf at the back. I found a half-finished oil painting there, so I laid out the oil paints and set the canvas on an easel. I could’ve just left it at that, but once I set everything up, I found myself wanting to paint.

  I sat down on a folding chair and faced Makoto’s canvas for ten minutes. Finally, I squeezed some paint onto the wooden palette and got to work on the unfinished picture. At first I was merely copying what was already on the canvas, but then my brush gradually took on a life of its own, and before I knew it, I was frolicking in the world of the painting.

  The brick-colored light of the afternoon sun poured into the warm cl
assroom, while the scent of oil paints that tickled my nose comforted me. In this rich silence, I could feel Makoto there with me. There were a dozen or so other people in the room, but they were also focused on their canvases, their faces intent with passionate concentration. No one was staring at me like in Grade Nine Class A. And the occasional bit of quiet banter or laughter made the room even more agreeable to me.

  Here, in this art room, Makoto was able to relax.

  In the place alone, he could be himself.

  When I realized why he came here, my chest tightened inexplicably.

  At the same moment, I heard a voice like a bittersweet fruit. “Haven’t seen you in a while, Makoto.”

  I knew who it belonged to before I even turned around. Hiroka Kuwabara. I’d come here because I wanted to catch a glimpse of her.

  Flustered, I looked back to find a pleasingly chubby girl with brown hair peeking at Makoto’s canvas.

  “Where were you, Makoto? You didn’t show up to the club at all. I was so worried you’d never finish this painting. This is, like, my fave. You know, I come just to see your painting. Aah, okay. I’m kidding, but still.”

  Prapura’d already told me that this wasn’t true. Hiroka Kuwabara didn’t do any extracurricular activities, but a good friend of hers was in the art club, so she’d come hang out sometimes whenever the whim took her. And Makoto would always, always wait with bated breath for the moment she came and talked to him in her little baby voice.

  “I’m so glad you’re all better. I soooo want you to finish this painting. Your stuff’s been so super dark lately, Makoto. But I’ve been hoping this one’ll be happy, like, the first colorful painting you’ve done in forever.”

  This girl who crouched down to talk to me, the girl who was practically pressing her cheek against mine, was very different from how I’d pictured Hiroka Kuwabara. I thought she’d be more mature, acting like she was too cool for school, but her voice and her way of speaking were both extremely childish. Even so, she was weirdly sexy. Each time her long hair touched her cheeks, my heart threatened to leap out of my chest. Of course, that was just Makoto’s body responding to her.

  “You can’t skip anymore.” She waggled a finger in front of my face. “You have to promise Hiroka. I, Makoto Kobayashi, promise Hiroka Kuwabara to finish this beautiful painting, pinky promise? I mean, this horsey here, it’s crying. Wah-wah, so sad, I’m only half-finished.”

  Even though Hiroka was in eighth grade, younger than Makoto, she didn’t call him by his last name in the usual show of respect. She called him Makoto. Makoto had no doubt been totally blown away by this kind of adorable endearment.

  “So, look, this horsey, you did, like, a super great job here. I know it’s still only an outline, but I can hear it breathe, y’know? Flying through the sky, right? So cool.”

  She wasn’t beautiful, but she was strangely coquettish. Her soft, milky pale skin made me shiver. Maybe it was because I couldn’t shake off the image of her at a love hotel, but just thinking about how I could reach out and touch those plump lips made my lower half go numb. Aah, again, of course, Makoto’s lower half just went ahead and . . .

  “The blue in the background’s, like, super pretty, too. You don’t really see this kind of blue, huh? It’s so vast an’ clear, like this big ol’ empty sky. I’ve never seen a sky like this before, okay? But I love it.”

  The best part about Hiroka Kuwabara was that she would just talk and talk whether or not Makoto said anything in reply. This had to have been such a huge relief for Makoto, who hadn’t been such a great talker.

  But I couldn’t actually bring myself to agree with what she was saying. The blue spread across the canvas, and the horse floated up on the top right, still half-finished. The horse didn’t look like much of anything, to be honest. It looked more like the blue was the main part of the painting, and Hiroka was saying it was the sky. But I actually . . .

  “I think it’s the ocean.”

  I heard a familiar voice from behind me, and my heart skipped a beat. I’d been thinking the same thing.

  “A horse flying through the sky would be great, too, but to me, this definitely looks like the horse is swimming in the ocean. It’s at the bottom of a deep, quiet sea, and it’s slowly heading toward the surface of the water. Look, see? The blue up here is a little brighter, right?”

  “That’s exactly it!” I looked back at the owner of the voice, eagerly. And all my excitement instantly vanished.

  “See? I told you.” The shrimp grinned with self-satisfaction. “You can’t fool these eyes of mine.”

  3

  Her name was Shoko Sano. I found out she was in the same class as Makoto—Grade Nine Class A—and on top of that, she also belonged to the art club. And yet Makoto somehow never even saw her. Well, maybe it was just that all Makoto ever saw was Hiroka Kuwabara. At any rate, from then on, I was plagued by this Shoko Sano.

  She was utterly convinced that Makoto was not the real Makoto (and you know, she was right on the mark there), and she was incredibly persistent, constantly underfoot, as if she were trying to rip off the monster’s mask.

  “If it wasn’t a seminar, then maybe hypnosis?”

  “There’s no way . . . I mean, I feel like there’s no way, but just be honest and tell me the truth, okay? Did you get exorcised of demons in Sri Lanka?”

  “Got it! You went swimming with dolphins?”

  “This guy my dad knows, okay? He turned into this totally different person the second his baby was born. But I mean, you couldn’t possibly have had a baby at your age, Kobayashi.”

  She came at me with one new theory after another. I had no idea where on earth she was getting all these wild ideas from.

  “I don’t believe in hypnosis.”

  “Exorcising demons? If I was going to do that, I’d ask an angel.”

  “I’m a terrible swimmer.”

  “I have no recollection of it, but I would use birth control.”

  At first, I refuted each one in turn, but it gradually got to be too much of a hassle and pointless in the end, anyway. So I started to run away the second I so much as sensed her presence. The safest place of refuge turned out to be the art room. Strangely, the only time she didn’t bother me was when I was painting. She never failed to stay back a fixed distance, quietly peering at my canvas from behind. I guess for someone into art, this room was a kind of sacred space.

  Embarrassing confession here but, yes, I kept going to art club even after that. What can I say? I had nothing else to do, and I couldn’t bring myself to go straight home. Staying late after school was a hundred times better than getting all annoyed having to deal with that family.

  I was also curious about Hiroka Kuwabara. Long story short, like Makoto, I started to hold my breath and wait for her to come over and talk to me. I was completely aware that this was not the greatest of ideas—I knew she was one of the people who had made Makoto suffer. Even so, Hiroka had an appeal that was hard to pin down. I wanted her to shower me with her senseless babbling in her baby voice. She even made me daydream about being the man she’d been with that night instead.

  Still, the main reason I was always in the art room was simply that I’d come to appreciate the pure pleasure of painting. I intended to take my time finishing Makoto’s blue picture. Maybe because my physical body had indeed belonged to him, I quickly grew accustomed to the oil paints and my skill grew by leaps and bounds. It wasn’t so much that I was acquiring the techniques; it felt more like gradually getting back a thing that had always belonged to me.

  Put the brush to the canvas carefully.

  And then a little something was born, something that hadn’t existed a second ago.

  As I repeated this one step, the little something turned into a big something.

  Soon, the something began to form a vague world.

  It was my world.

  Mine and Makoto’s.

  Only when I sank into the world of the painting did I forget Makoto’s mi
sfortunes, his life, his loneliness, his misery, and his height. With each passing day, I grew more entranced by the oils. The second-term midterm exams were fast approaching, but I still faithfully kept going to the art room after school, even when no one else did.

  Which led to my homeroom teacher, Mr. Sawada, calling me into his office right after exams were over.

  “Listen, Kobayashi. I know you were absent for a while there, all right? Must’ve been a rough time mentally, too. But even taking that into consideration . . .” Sawada waved the list of exam results. “This is beyond awful.”

  I couldn’t have agreed more.

  After school in the gloomy teachers’ room, Sawada and I sat together with huge headaches over the very serious issues Makoto faced at the moment. His academic performance was outstandingly poor; his average in the three core subjects of Japanese, math, and English on the midterm exams had been 35 percent, and that dropped to 31 percent when the rest of the term’s subjects were added in.

  “Aah, well, sure.” Sawada shrugged. “You could say this is consistent with the grades you were getting in the first term. But, listen. Ninth graders normally start to panic by the time they get to the second term. Are you aware that high school exams are coming up? If you keep noodling along like this you won’t have a chance.” His thick eyebrows hung low on his face. Sawada was deeply troubled.

  I, too, was deeply troubled.

  At the end of the day, these were Makoto Kobayashi’s exams. They were testing him on all the things he should have already learned before I took the wheel. So even if I barely paid attention in class, I was sure that once I opened the exam booklet, Makoto’s brain cells would just take over from there and do their thing. But when I did actually have the booklet in front of me, I’d had this faint sense of dread sink into the pit of my stomach. I couldn’t believe his brain cells were this useless.

  “This here?” Sawada rapped a sharp finger on the paper in front of him. “You’re in real danger of not getting into high school at all.”