Taka’s marriage had ended so, on his third visit to London, he came on his own. I was curious as to whether or not a spark would kindle between us, given this second opportunity. It didn’t and, with some relief, we learnt to enjoy each other’s company safe in the knowledge that we would be just good friends.
It was with Taka that I had stood before paintings in the Tate and in the National Gallery and it was he, whose interest had moved from the moving image to the still, who had taught me to consider paintings critically. The dissolution of his marriage had given him a quality of introspection that, to my mind, had found its counterpoint in his discovery of art and painting. It was as though, no longer certain of his life’s trajectory, he no longer wanted the world to move before his eyes, as it did when he watched a film, but to stay still, so that he could better grasp it, examine it and understand it and, ultimately, make sense of his marriage’s wreckage. I had suggested this to him but he had only shrugged and encouraged me to visit London’s free museums more frequently.
So it was that one Sunday, not long after Taka had returned to Japan, I was standing in front of a painting in the Tate when I heard Sebastian’s voice over my shoulder. ‘Well, well.’
‘Hello,’ I replied in greeting. Blushing, as though caught in some illicit act or, perhaps, intuiting the painting’s extreme yet corrupt intimacy that it would embarrass me to share immediately with him, I didn’t turn to face him.
The label to the bottom left of it read, Salvador Dali (1904-1989) Autumnal Cannibalism 1936 Oil paint on canvas. The painting, about 50 centimetres high and as wide, is of two grotesque, near androgynous figures, of two legless, featureless, plasticine torsos in a heads-together loving embrace (‘her’ extended, bulbous, distorted head supported by a crutch) in which she gently sinks a knife into his butter-like shoulder and he lovingly spoons some of hers while raising a fork to her head and, with his third hand (he has gained the hand she has lost) he squeezes a fistful of her fleshy, creamy waist. She, to the left of the picture, resides in a shallow earthenware dish; his chest is a drawer (with another fork and spoon protruding from it) on top of what appears, in the very foreground, to be a desk that morphs, as it recedes, into a desert landscape with a house and rocks and mountains on the horizon.
‘What do you think?’
What did I think?
‘Do you like it?’
My critical faculties, when it came to Western art, were muted relative to literature and to cinema. I struggled for context, for history, for points of reference or, having them, they were useless to me. We studied the painting in silence, me aware that that I still hadn’t turned to look at him and feeling silly for it. When I did, I was startled to note that this was the first time I had seen him not wearing a suit and I had to make a mental readjustment as I spoke – uncertain, in the immediate moment, as to whether I found him in his jeans, trainers, T-shirt and bomber jacket, in what appeared to me to be an imitation of Japanese trendy teenagers’ dress, endearing or exciting.
‘I do like it,’ I said.
He looked at me for more.
‘It’s beautifully executed and, although the two forms are engaged in a most horrible act of eating each other –’
‘There’s a tenderness in their embrace.’ He finished my sentence for me.
‘Yes, it’s like love consumes the lovers.’
His fair hair was relatively unkempt, and it occurred to me that he added something to it on workdays in order to bring it under control and make himself presentable. I fought against the impulse to run my fingers through it and to pat it down.
‘Yes!’ He appeared delighted. ‘I’m so glad you like it. I love Dali. Art critics tend to dismiss him because he’s occasionally sensationalist or scatological or’ – he sought a word – ‘vulgar in other ways but, in doing so, they do his composition, his brushwork and his palette no justice.’
We left the Tate and rambled, with the sun in our eyes, along Millbank and then turned onto Vauxhall Bridge and crossed the Thames. A long way ahead of us, on the other side of the bridge, was another couple, two people of indeterminate sex (from this distance), side by side like two inverted commas; we must have looked the same to them, and the bridge a long equivocal statement between two pairs of quotation marks.
‘Are you in a rush to get home?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I replied, turning to look at him. The sun was low in the sky and the light bright so that his face, framed in its halo of fair hair, remained in shadow; my eyes couldn’t adjust.
‘Let’s go there,’ he said pointing down the road to a lonely, tired-looking Georgian house that appeared out of place amid the jumble of building works that were going on around it. ‘It’s a strange place. A mix of architectural salvage and café.’ We toured rooms full of reclaimed chimneypieces and fire grates, dining tables and chairs, lamps and chandeliers, glass and brass door knobs, kitchen dressers and obsolete kitchenware, pots, jars and cracked porcelain and old paintings and carpets before settling down and ordering tea and scones. He said, ‘It’s ironic, really.’
‘What is?’
‘Our meeting in front of Autumnal Cannibalism.’ He pronounced the last two words distinctly.
Well, it was autumn. Still, I said, ‘Why’s that?’
He uncrossed his legs and leant forward. ‘What is the only developed country in the world not to have outlawed cannibalism?’
‘I don’t know. You tell me.’
‘Go on. Guess.’
‘Japan?’
‘Yes!’
‘That’s simply not true!’ I retorted, uncertain of what my confidence was based on.
He held his hands up. ‘Okay, not the only country. I was being facetious. Still.’
‘Still what? Where’s the irony?’ Even if what he’d said was true, the fact that I was Japanese and had been looking at the painting didn’t register as worth commenting on, in my view.
‘Okay, maybe there’s no irony,’ he said and then, as though to justify himself, he added, ‘But, you know, there’s a long history of anthropophagy in Japanese literature. And I’ve long had this thing about cannibalism and Japan.’ He stopped talking as tea was brought to the table, and allowed the waitress to pour once he had checked that it had sufficiently brewed. By way of explanation, he continued, ‘My mother had a friend who studied in Paris, where she befriended a student who was murdered and in part consumed by a Japanese student.’ He paused as though to gauge the effect this had on me. ‘The police found parts of her body in his fridge. Anyway, he confessed to the murder. You must have heard about this.’
I had.
‘It was in all the papers. They called him The Paris Cannibal. He never served much of a jail sentence and was acquitted on a legal technicality.’
I blew on my tea.
‘You know, it’s strange,’ he conceded. ‘My knowing the woman second hand, as it were, makes the story feel so much more immediate. I only later read about it. The man was clearly crazy, but this idea he had that someone could absorb some of the qualities of another by eating them – well, that’s just mad.’
‘There’s this expression, that you are what you eat.’
‘Yes,’ he laughed, ‘but I think that refers to food quality and provenance.’ He held up a scone and said, ‘I am a scone!’ before biting into it. He offered me one. ‘And then,’ he said, having swallowed, ‘there’s another story –’
‘A true story?’
‘Oh, yes, a true story of a Japanese man who had, well, what would you call it, identity issues, gender issues? Anyway, he decided he would have a sex change but, not only that, he would cook his amputated private parts and serve them for dinner to six paying guests, and he put an advertisement in a newspaper to that effect.’
‘No!’
‘Yes!’
‘And he did it?’
‘Yes! He underwent his operation and sold six tickets for this dinner. In the event, only five diners showed, but about twenty journalists did, so this is well documented. Now, the authorities weren’t too happy about it but they could do nothing to stop him going through with it. However, they felt they had to arrest him for something, and they did so: for indecent exposure!’
‘No!’
‘Yes!’ He drank some tea, clearly still amused.
‘How did he cook it? His, you know?’
‘His meat and two veg? I don’t know! Coqauvin perhaps?’ He looked at me as though he found me curious. ‘That’s a question it would never have occurred to me to ask.’
The to and fro on a subject for which I had little enthusiasm, feigning an interest I did not have, had tired me. My shoulders sagged. I looked around me. I was irritated by Sebastian’s comments about cannibalism and Japan; I couldn’t decide whether they were simple observations or pointed in some way.
‘I didn’t mean anything by that, by the way. It’s just, well, peculiar, I suppose. You know, it’s funny seeing you out of your work clothes.’ He looked at me appraisingly. ‘I mean,’ he added hastily, ‘in clothes that are not your work clothes!’
‘I know. I had the same thought about you,’ I said, hiding ineffectually behind my raised teacup while reappraising my day’s rather plain wardrobe of jeans, boots and a large woolly jumper.
We didn’t go Dutch, as the English call it, warikan, as the Japanese do; Sebastian paid for both of us, for which I simply thanked him. While he waited for his change, I toured around a huge pine table on which were laid ill-assorted, second-hand sugar spoons, cake forks, fish knives, cruet sets, sherry glasses and cooking utensils.
‘What have you found?’ he asked, once again standing just behind me and breathing over my shoulder. Placed like boxes within boxes, like matryoshka dolls, were three slightly rusty, different-sized but otherwise identical steel cookie cutters. ‘Cookie cutters,’ he said. ‘For gingerbread men.’
I was struck by the fact that these cookie cutters had precisely the same proportions as Takumi-san’s silhouette of the filleted man, as though that outline had climbed off the poster and down the wall and followed me to London with his wife and child where, shrunk by the long journey, he had rested on this old kitchen table waiting for me to find him. Dizzyingly, momentarily, the café and bric-a-brac receded and my nostrils filled with the smells of sawdust, congealed blood and bleach.
‘You’re not going to buy them!’ Sebastian exclaimed, and I realised that while I was supporting myself on the table with the outstretched fingers of one hand, I clutched, in the other, the largest of those three steel-edged figures – so present, solid and, to my imagination, certain of themselves that I envied them. ‘But you can get new ones – clean ones – at any department store!’ he said as I paid for them.
Once home, I washed and dried my cookie cutter men and stood them one behind the other on the window sill above the kitchen sink. I had moved into my own apartment, the top-floor flat of a large Edwardian house on the north side of Clapham Common. I knelt, my chin just by the sink, so that, from that low angle, I could see through the gingerbread men’s outlines in silhouette against the edges of an anaemic sunset. Their straight and fisted arms and solidly planted feet amused me; their posture echoed that of an obstinate child. There I was, the closest to me, my mother behind me and my father behind us. I rested my forehead against the cool sink. I should have called them today. I stood, considered my reflection in the window a moment and set about tidying my already tidy kitchen in a desultory way before ironing the blouse I’d wear tomorrow.
The day had unnerved me; Sebastian, I saw, risked disappointing me. Physically and professionally, I had long admired him, impressed by a manner more genial than slick with his colleagues and more capable than ingratiating with the bank’s clients. When I had first known him, I had respected and applauded the extent to which he appeared to value his privacy and maintained his social defences – he didn’t give himself away cheaply. I knew where his politics lay (little different to most other bank employees), which films he enjoyed (more mainstream than Taka, David and me) and which authors and genre of books he favoured. Here, he was different to most City employees who, to my surprise, read little that was not work related. Jonathan, leaning back in his chair and looking over his shoulder whenever I happened to be depositing my handbag’s contents on my desk, would exclaim, ‘A novel! Another novel! Now, what I want is facts!’ in an unknowing caricature of Mr Gradgrind.
‘Jonathan says he only wants to read facts,’ I had told Sebastian.
‘Good for Jonathan. He can stick to non-fiction books. They may deliver facts but novels deliver truth,’ had said Sebastian, who, on every plane and train journey I made with him would read a novel, rarely by an author I knew. I had continued my literary education in England so that after a decade I had read all I could find of Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, George Orwell and E. M. Forster who, particularly, touched a chord with me in contrasting the English with the foreigners around them. Sebastian approved, once patronisingly telling me that he would let me know what I should be reading once I had finished my self-imposed syllabus. So I knew about him, but did I know him? I didn’t know. I decided I would say as much to him.