The Lake by Banana Yoshimoto Page A

even Nakajima, who really wasn’t particular about what he ate and generally was fine with anything, blurted out, “Can we have something besides ham tonight?”
    Other than that, all I did was go with the guy I’d hired to help me work on the mural—a guy I knew from art school, younger than me—to buy the paints and assemble the various brushes I’d need, and then I sat at my desk working on preliminary sketches. It was a pleasant time.
    I love sitting at my desk drawing—it’s like painting in miniature. Since I never simply transfer my sketches to a wall, it’s all about getting a sense of the partially formed image I have in mind—I’m just doodling, basically. But drawing on a small scale has its own particular pleasures. It’s like when I used to play house as a kid. Tiny little utensils, tiny little people. And yet everything is blown up to actual size in my mind. That’s the kind of pleasure I get out of drawing.
    The wall I’d be painting was long and low, so I planned to do something bold with a lot of monkeys linked in a kind of flow, but I was having a hard time envisioning a design for it, something that would look good and fit well with the site. I couldn’t believe how poorly my imagination was serving me, and I started wondering if maybe it would be best to just go and start painting, or maybe take a survey of the kids. I was coming to the end of my rope.
    If I were just going to paint the sort of design an amateur could come up with, they might as well call in a bureaucrat from city hall to do the job. There needed to be a touch of eeriness in it, something private. But what? What sort of memories involving monkeys did I have—when, come to think of it, was the last time I had even seen a monkey? Should I go to the zoo to see some? Those are the kinds of issues I was grappling with. So when Nakajima asked if I would accompany him, it sounded like a great way to get my mind out of its rut.
    “Sure,” I said, eyeing a magazine. “Maybe we can have a picnic on the way!”
    But when I glanced up and saw the expression on Nakajima’s face, the lighthearted feeling with which I’d replied withered. I could see this was important to him.
    Until then, things had been going along the same as always, without any trace of progress. We had gotten up that morning, shared an omelet that I’d made with our last eggs (and ham, needless to say); just then, I was sitting in a rather shocking pose, in the middle of doing my toenails, and Nakajima was tapping away on his PowerBook, working on a report. I’d just been thinking that when he got to a stopping place maybe I’d make some tea when he mentioned his friends and wanting to go see them.
    Sayuri had been right: Nakajima wasn’t like us. She and I had gone to an art school that wasn’t very prestigious; he went to a university one district over that only people who are really, really good in school can get into.
    Naturally, I asked him about it. “How did you get so good at studying? Did you like studying from the time you were little? Was that it?”
    Nakajima sat thinking for a while without moving. Then he said, “One day, all of a sudden, I felt this powerful urge to study, as if I were trying to get something back that I’d lost.”
    “Was that … after your mom died?” I asked.
    “Yes. You see, during the time when I was away, my mother and father started arguing about all kinds of things, and then they started living apart, and in the end they divorced. Since then I’ve been in a situation sort of similar to the one you’re in now—I still get living expenses and tuition and stuff, and I still go visit my father from time to time, and … well, anyway, the point is that I was in high school when my mother died, and I decided I didn’t want to go live with my dad. I mean, he’d been living up in Gunma since the divorce—that’s the prefecture he grew up in—and I didn’t really feel like moving to a new place, just like