when sad, write Tezu/ Fuji.
Fuji hates that Tezuka is so inscrutable, but if he wasn’t he wouldn’t be as interesting. Things of value require effort, waiting, patient unravelling; constant force applied on lines of stress, on faults in a rock will shatter it.
Only Tezuka never shows his stress and if he has any faults, Fuji cannot find them; he is like water, not the wave crashing in bursts of white foam but the insidious liquid trickle of a brook, passing around the rock, over the rock, all-encompassing, looking for a weakness - that in this instance, perhaps, is not there.
*
Tezuka hates that Fuji is so evasive, the slip-slide of silk on skin. They are like a graph and its asymptote, tending towards and never intersecting, on and on and on until the end of the page, to infinity and beyond.
To make the equation equal one must apply the same steps on either side, but Fuji is unpredictable; he is the physical expression of a one-to-many function, which technically does not and cannot exist. Under any given circumstance there are many things he could do, but the one he picks is always the unseen possibility.
*
Fuji is five again, remembering when he took art classes because Yumiko had to go for piano at the centre anyway and his mother didn’t know what else to do with him. The rest of the children in his class painted summer scenes: beaches and parks full of people, clumsy beige strokes and a stripe of red for the mouth, a buttercup-yellow sun sending visible UV rays (a paradox, that), haphazard streaks of acid green meant as grass.
He waits for the all the children to finish squabbling over the colours and then takes what is left of the watercolours, charcoal grey and dull brown and ice blue and the pale green of moss agate. When the teacher wanders over she smiles at his picture as if to say very nice, dear, but Fuji reads the puzzlement in her gaze as clear as day. He’s divided the paper in two lengthwise and drawn the exact same thing on either side, carefully mirroring every detail, down to the wistfully drooping willow tree leaves and the crumbling stones at the bottom-left-corner of the castle; the only differences are the blue of sky on one half and the silver-grey of lake on the other, the drawing on the latter is smudgier, edges blurred and less defined.
Years later when he finds the painting again between the pages of an old exercise book he smoothes out the wrinkles in the paper, yellowed with age and flaking at the edges, colours faded like an overexposed photograph, and pins it up on his wall. For every blessing he thinks of, he dabs a brush into a little round pot of pink paint, a delicate colour that awakens remembrance of the scent of dying roses, and adds a tiny sakura petal to the lake.
Eventually the lake becomes a whole sea of pink, and the castle reflection is no longer visible. Fuji likes it better that way, because it is no longer symmetrical; the lake is now more than a mirror, it is in itself a thing of beauty to be admired, no longer secondary to the castle.
*
When Tezuka is eight he learns an important lesson about responsibility because several of the koi in the pond die when he cleans the filter carelessly, being in a hurry to go for tennis practice; this upsets the chemical balance in the water.
Nobody scolds him, because that is not the way his family works, but what is left unsaid says more than any words could. It goes without saying that even tennis is no excuse for irresponsibility; Tezuka is more sensitive than he is given credit for, and his mother’s slightly grieved look and his grandfather’s unusual terseness at the dinner table cut deeper than he admits.
Responsibility, therefore, is something due to all living things; a fundamental principle of life, as is the need to do things well. It is from this lesson that he derives yudan sezu ni ikou.
Will continue this after next week, as pointlessly plotless as it might be.