It was during the shading of the tattoo that Kentaro really began to lose his mind.
Naomi would talk during their sessions, asking him to describe the parts of the city he was working on. She would tell him the season she wanted for each location, and he would then colour the maple trees red for autumn, or the bright yellow of the gingko trees, or shade in the soft pinkish white of the sakura in Ueno Park in spring.
‘Where are you now?’ she’d ask.
‘Ginza. I’ve just done the Nakagin building.’
‘Good. It’s winter in Ginza.’
‘I see.’ And he would begin shading and colouring the fine white snow that had fallen overnight. The city was becoming like a patchwork quilt of the seasons.
Often when Kentaro had been working on a part of Tokyo and talking to Naomi about that place, she would come back for her next session having visited that part of the city. She would bring a small present or souvenir for him – sweets from Harajuku, gyoza from Ikebukuro – and he would feel his face going red in embarrassment.
They’d sometimes drink green tea together and she would tell him stories of things that had happened, or things she’d seen – how the building of the new Olympic stadium was progressing each time she walked past it – she told Kentaro stories of all the people she saw going about their lives in the city, and he would listen quietly without interrupting.
One time, during a break in a session that had gone on for hours, as Kentaro was cleaning his instruments, Naomi had pointed at a large art book of Utagawa Kuniyoshi ukiyo-e prints and asked about it. Kentaro had got it down from the shelf and let her take it to an armchair and sit down with it. Utagawa had always been an artistic inspiration for Kentaro – his master had introduced his work to him and had made him practise for months copying Utagawa’s paintings before he was allowed to even touch a piece of skin. Naomi sat with the book on her lap, turning the pages slowly.
‘These are so great,’ said Naomi, examining each painting in detail, her finger on the page sometimes tracing the lines of numerous cats and skeleton demons.
‘He was a legend.’ Kentaro sighed.
‘I love this one.’ She tapped her finger on the page, and Kentaro looked across to see the courtly scene with a ghostly cat head floating in the background. Cats stood on their hindlegs and danced like humans with handkerchiefs on their heads and arms flung wide.
‘Yeah.’ Kentaro swallowed a chuckle at the thought of the trick he had played on Naomi by tattooing the cat on her back.
‘And look at these ones.’ She held up the book to him. ‘He’s turned these kabuki actors into cats!’
‘Now that’s an interesting story,’ said Kentaro, pausing while putting away his tools and coming over to look at the book over Naomi’s shoulder.
‘Go on.’ She looked up at him with her strange eyes.
‘Well, back then, kabuki had become a raucous and decadent affair – almost like an orgy.’
‘Fun,’ she said, grinning cheekily.
‘Well, the government didn’t think so. They outlawed any artistic depictions of kabuki actors.’
‘That’s crazy!’
‘It is. Anyway, Utagawa replaced the human actors with cats. That was his way of sidestepping the censorship.’
‘Clever guy.’ She glanced back down at the image of three cats dressed in kimono, sitting around a low table playing shamisen.
‘My old master was obsessed with him.’
‘Where is your master now?’
‘He passed on.’ Kentaro pointed at a photo on the wall. ‘That’s him.’
Naomi looked at the photo of the gruff-looking man standing with a younger Kentaro in front of the same tattoo parlour they were both in now. ‘Looks kind of serious.’
‘He was. So strict. Had me waking up at 4 a.m. and sweeping and cleaning the parlour all day. Wouldn’t let me so much as touch a needle or a bit of skin until I’d done that for two years. Mad old bastard.’ He shook his head and smiled.
Naomi gazed at Kentaro thoughtfully. ‘How come you don’t have a disciple?’
He sighed, softly, without the usual condescension. ‘Where to begin . . .’
‘At the beginning?’ She shrugged.
‘Well, the government did another great job of giving irezumi a bad name – just like the old kabuki censorship. They’ve associated the practice with criminals, so fewer people want to get into the trade. You know, it was once an honourable thing to get a tattoo in the old days – it was the mark of a fireman. The public loved and respected firemen – not like these crude gangsters who show off their tattoos these days. Anyway, I’m getting off the point . . . what was I saying?’
‘You were saying why no one wants to be a horishi anymore.’
‘Oh, yes. Now, of course you’ve got your amateurs in Shibuya who use all this new-fangled technology to tattoo. No one wants to learn the old tebori method. No one wants to do hard work. Everyone wants to do things the easy way. But none of them are true artists.’
‘Like you.’ She smiled at him.
Kentaro blushed and looked at the floor. ‘Come on, Naomi,’ he said, finishing his tea. ‘We’d best continue.’
And that was the day it first happened.
When Kentaro was halfway through colouring the tattoo, his eyes happened to pass over the Shibuya section of the city that he had already completed. He saw the statue of Hachiko the dog, his eyes carried on to the shopping streets of Harajuku, but then something clicked in his mind. He flicked his eyes back to the statue.
The cat was gone.
He blinked and shook his head. Maybe tiredness was finally getting to him. But he looked again: no, the cat was not there anymore.
Perhaps he had imagined drawing the cat on her body? Yes, that was the simplest explanation for its absence. He had probably dreamt of drawing the little cat in, and it had seemed so vivid he had imagined it to be reality. Yes. Everything was surely fine. Dreams could sometimes invade reality, couldn’t they?
But that very same day, when he was about to shade the area around Tokyo Tower, he caught sight of something that gave him a cold shiver. He was making his way with his eyes up the street from Hamamatsucho Station towards the area around Tokyo Tower. And just down a side street branching off the main road, he saw the cat.
‘What the . . .’
‘Is everything all right?’ Naomi stirred.
‘Oh, yes,’ he replied. The needle in his hand was shaking a bit, but he steadied himself. Perhaps he had misremembered the location he had originally put the cat in. Surely that was the explanation. He ignored the cat and began to work again, colouring the red and white pattern of Tokyo Tower.
But the next session, before working, he searched for the cat in the side streets near Hamamatsucho Station again, and could not find it. And then when he was colouring in the trees of Inokashira Park in Kichijoji, he saw the cat lurking by the lake in the middle of the park.
It was definitely moving.
Kentaro began to dread his regular sessions with Naomi. He couldn’t begin work until he had first found the cat, and he would sometimes spend an hour scouring the city in search of it before he could get to work with his needles and ink. This, in turn, was delaying the overall progress of the tattoo, which had begun to take longer than he had planned. Naomi never commented on how much time he took, and gradually their sessions grew exhausting as he became haunted by the spectre of the cat. He would dream about it roaming the city, and he would spend most of the night in a waking nightmare, sweating in dread at the scramble to find the elusive cat. Can’t catch me, the cat taunted, blinking its steady green eyes at him. Stupid old man. Can’t can’t can’t. He wanted to grab it by the scruff of the neck and shake it, carve it out, pluck it clean away from his work – his art, his Tokyo and his Naomi most of all.