The Art of Us

by Hilaria Alexander

  I had so many things I wanted to ask her.

  There was so much I wanted to tell her.

  I wanted to ask why she’d never tried to come back after spending so much time in Japan. I wanted to ask her what had happened there that had broken her heart.

  I wanted to ask her if she’d try to make peace with it, and if her tattoo had anything to do with it.

  She was slightly buzzed, and her eyes sparkled with an energy I hadn’t seen in weeks.

  “What happened?” I asked out of the blue, emboldened by the alcohol.

  “What? When?” she replied with a frown.

  “What happened when you were here last? Something must have happened. Marty mentioned you not wanting to come back. What happened, Lena?”

  She raised her glass to her lips and paused.

  “I’ll have to be drunker than this to be willing to talk about it. Can we not just enjoy our first night here? As you might have guessed, it’s not a happy memory. I would rather not talk about it.”

  She pierced me with her blue eyes, and I broke our gaze, looking at the glass in my hand.

  I nodded. “I’m sorry. I’m just trying to understand.”

  “I know. In due time, I will tell you, I promise.”

  LENA

  In the morning, before our first meeting, I changed four times. I almost wanted to wear my Hot Mess t-shirt, because that was how I felt.

  Instead, I went for a more classic look of slim black pants, a white shirt, and a black jacket.

  I tied my hair in a ponytail at the nape of my neck and wore some small stud earrings. I added a cubic zirconia Hello Kitty pin to my jacket.

  I looked like a slightly more modern version of the Japanese OL, which was the acronym for office lady—in other words, an assistant or secretary.

  I met Amos downstairs in the lobby, and he looked sharp in a slim fit black suit with a white shirt and a black tie with white dots. In the open space of the lobby, he looked statuesque. From a distance, he almost looked like a Hollywood actor promoting the latest installment of a lucrative franchise.

  Upon closer inspection, the white dots appeared to be the Star Wars Death Star.

  “Star Wars?”

  He nodded and smiled, his lips pressed together almost in a pout. He gave me a once-over.

  “You look nice. Formal, but nice.”

  “My palms are sweaty,” I said, rubbing my hands on the sides of my legs.

  “I’m nervous, too,” he confessed, leaning toward me and circling one of my wrists with his hand. He started applying a little pressure on my veins, a couple of inches below my wrist.

  “What are you doing?” I whisper-shouted.

  “It’s an acupressure technique. It’s supposed to help with anxiety.”

  Our gazes met and then I lowered mine to his thumb on my wrist, my eyes tracking the circular motion.

  “Take a deep breath,” he coaxed.

  I did as he asked and after a couple minutes, I started feeling…different.

  Slightly less frazzled.

  “Better?” he asked in a gentle tone.

  “Better.” I nodded. His brown eyes studied me, and I was suddenly distracted by the way he smelled, the way his lips curled into a charming smile. When he smiled at me like that, his eyes crinkled at the corners, butterflies erupted in my stomach, and my heart galloped in my chest.

  When he looked at me like that, I wished I could be a different woman.

  I wished I could be the one to hold him at night.

  I wished he could be the one to make me feel safe and loved.

  I wished he could be the one to make me believe I deserved happiness.

  An employee from the Japanese publishing company, Supaa–, which meant super in English, came over and introduced herself.

  Megumi Hashimoto would be our guide for the next few days of meetings, until we moved into the house with Ishikawa and our translator.

  After exchanging bows and pleasantries, she accompanied us to our car and together we headed to Ginza, where Supaa– had its main offices.

  When Rika Ishikawa entered the room, I considered several scenarios to possibly get out of the situation.

  What’s it going to be, Lena? Are you going to hide under the table or run out of here saying you need to use the restroom?

  I wasn’t overreacting. I had reason to be scared.

  My teenage idol looked like she wanted to kill me, and she had every reason to feel that way. I couldn’t blame her. If I had been in her shoes, I’d have hated me too.

  The whole situation was bizarre and unprecedented. To her, it must have felt like an insult, an outrage. Hiring a foreign artist was the biggest kind of blasphemy.

  There she was, one of the most famous manga artists of her time, having to deal with working with a gaijin, an outsider, brought in to finish her masterpiece.

  For months, I didn’t understand why Supaa– even wanted to do this.

  They could have gotten anyone else. Aiko could have been finished with some of the younger talents Japan had to offer a long time ago.

  However, one thing was for sure: it wouldn’t have made as good of a story.

  Before we left, Marty told us that was the main reason why they wanted us. They were impressed by our fanfiction project and how popular it had gotten in just a few months.

  On top of it, the Japanese publisher liked the idea of this one-of-a-kind collaboration; it was great publicity for both Supaa– and Paz Media.

  It was a collaboration for posterity.

  As soon as our eyes met, I immediately bowed, aiming for a fifty-degree angle.

  The angle of your bow showed your respect—the more you bowed, the more respect you showed. Ninety degrees was common, too, but I felt it was overkill. I held my position for a few seconds, as a sign of reverence, and when I looked up, I noticed something.

  A slight tremor of her hand.

  As I straightened myself up, I kept my eyes down and looked at her hand again.

  Her hand kept shaking. It wouldn’t stop.

  Ishikawa’s mystery illness was Parkinson’s.

  She couldn’t draw anymore because of Parkinson’s disease.

  It finally made sense. What still didn’t make sense, though, was why she hadn’t given up the fight before. She could have worked it out with the publishing company and had someone else finish for her under her guidance before it came down to this.

  It was something she obviously didn’t want to do, and now we were there, against her will, forced on her by the publishing company. I suspected they must have had some sort of leverage on her, like her contract ending, fewer royalties, something. They must have had something to corner her and make her agree to this.

  My stomach churned. I felt sick, ashamed. I wanted to run out and never look back. When you’re growing up, you dream of meeting your idols, not making their lives miserable at a time when they’re already vulnerable.

  Ishikawa looked so frail, so much older than her sixty-two years, the smoke lines around her lips as deep as the ones around her eyes.

  Years prior, she’d always joked about how much of a chain-smoker she was, but that was a common thing in Japan. Manga artists notoriously lived on a tough schedule of deadlines and self-loathing, of stress, bad nutrition, and smoking.

  Parkinson’s was manageable to a point, but you had to commit to a healthy lifestyle. By the way she looked, I wasn’t sure Ishikawa had taken as much care of herself as she should have. My chest tightened and a knot formed in my throat, my eyes burning with tears.

  Shithead, you can’t cry now.

  I felt horrible. I didn’t want to do this to her. I sighed heavily, trying to blink my tears away and swallow past the knot.

  Amos’ voice distracted me. It sounds different, I thought, and then I realized he was saying something in Japanese.

  “Ishikawa-sama, yoroshiku onegaishimasu.”

  Nice to meet you, Ms. Ishikawa. Ha—literally, yoroshiku onegaishimasu meant, plea
se treat me kindly.

  Sure.

  Sure she was going to treat us kindly. I glanced at her again, her eyes narrowing on both of us, her thin red lips pursed together.

  Amos bowed, and I bowed again with him, because that was all I could think to do, given the circumstances. It was a sign of respect, and above everything else, I wanted her to know that we did respect her.

  I more than respected her.

  I adored her.

  She had created such a unique style over the years, one so detailed it could never quite be achieved or replicated by anyone else.

  Manga in Japan were the equivalent of newspapers or magazines. They were designed to be cheap and disposable, a product designed for fast consumption.

  Manga were the fast food of Japanese comics—well, at least most of them.

  As such, a lot of stories weren’t embellished. So many were drawn and written quickly, with little attention to graphic details.

  But her work was different. Her work was incredibly detailed. Her stories were microcosms of beauty and peculiarities. From the longlines-look of the characters to their hairstyles and the clothes they wore, each detail was so unique.

  Each one of her characters was infused with that certain Ishikawa look.

  One of the execs motioned for us to come forward and sit at the table. Amos and I took a seat across from Ishikawa, and a translator sat at her side.

  The meetings lasted a while, and in the next hours we went over what we were required to accomplish according to a very detailed schedule.

  It boiled down to this: we were to finish the manga under the direction of the original creator, without objecting to her wishes or straying away from her style.

  As if I would even dare to do that.

  My idol kept shooting daggers at me, so I started massaging the inside of my wrist the way Amos had done earlier. I must have been doing something wrong, because it didn’t seem to work as well as it had when he’d done it.

  I glanced his way and stared at his stunning, serious profile as he looked over some forms they had given us.

  He caught me staring.

  “What is it?” he whispered.

  “This is all your fault,” I mouthed, and an amused grin stretched across his face, lighting up his mischievous eyes in a way I couldn’t ignore.

  LENA

  Our arrangement was Big Brother-esque, to say the least.

  We moved into a house in a fancy part of Shibuya that was comparable to New York’s Upper East Side, with the difference that it was full of traditional Japanese homes, not fancy apartment buildings. Some of them had been built at the beginning of the twentieth century, while others had been built during post-war Japan. The one we moved into had white walls, and the roof was made of blue ceramic tiles. Both inside and out, it was absolutely stunning, and it made the fact that we had been “forced” into the arrangement a little bit sweeter.

  It took us about two weeks to find our footing.

  To make the process easier, prior to our arrival, Rika Ishikawa had been busy writing—actually, she’d been dictating the storyboard to her assistant, Akane.

  The Japanese storyboard had then been translated into English, but we were only given a few pages at a time. Rika Ishikawa did understand English and could communicate with us pretty well, but trying to convey the vision in your head to someone who was going to replicate your work was not an easy feat, let alone doing it in another language.

  I hadn’t loosened up around her yet. I seemed to be on edge whenever she appeared in our common area, the dining room we’d transformed into a work space.

  I acted like a scared young maid from some old Japanese play.

  One thing I was relieved about was that she didn’t mind if we spoke to her in a less formal tone. She knew our Japanese was limited, and she didn’t care too much about formalities.

  She even allowed us to call her the less obsequious Rika-san, instead of using the honorific sama. I was happy about it because even when I was in school, keigo, the Japanese honorific speech, had been my Achilles’ heel.

  When we couldn’t find common ground between English and Japanese, we resorted to the help of our translator.

  Hiroyuki Soseki was not only our translator, he was a renowned blues guitarist and Rika Ishikawa’s live-in boyfriend. The two had been together for more than fifteen years.

  Hiroyuki used to tour the US and had played with many famous American musicians before he decided to quit touring so he could take care of Rika-san.

  Apparently, it had taken the doctors a while before they figured out her symptoms were early onset Parkinson’s disease.

  We didn’t talk about Rika-san’s illness around her. Hiroyuki, however, was a good source of information, and actually shed some light as to how our collaboration had come to be. We knew that the Japanese publisher had hired us because of how popular our fanfiction had become in just a few months. What we didn’t know, was that Ishikawa had to agree to the deal because her economic situation had changed.

  “She hasn’t published a new comic or even just a few pages in…so many years. Between doctor’s bills and living expenses, most of her savings are gone, and it doesn’t help that I have no income. I haven’t worked in years, except for a few—how do you say it in English? Gig?”

  “Gig, that’s right,” I told him. “Do you still play a few gigs here and there?”

  “Sometimes, when I can be sure she doesn’t need me.”

  Hiroyuki gave me a melancholic smile, and I mirrored it.

  He was a couple years younger than Rika, but he could have easily passed for barely fifty. There was something youthful and childlike about his face.

  His slanted eyes were dark and soulful, and his chin-length black hair was sprinkled with just a few gray ones. His short salt-and-pepper beard and moustache were the only features that revealed his true age. He’d rub his chin whenever he got lost mid-thought, trying to translate a word or a sentence for us.

  “Nandarou?” he would ask himself and pause. It meant something along the lines of How can I explain this? I loved the way a single Japanese word could sometimes mean so much.

  Hiroyuki was a kind soul, I had no doubt about that.

  It was the first impression I’d gotten when I met him two weeks prior after one of the initial meetings. He’d first bowed at Amos and me, and then he’d stretched a hand in greeting. His soft, genuine smile illuminated his whole face, and his mannerisms—half-Japanese, half-American—fascinated me. The more I got to know him, the more I appreciated him.

  He refused to be called Hiroyuki-san by us, because he said whenever he traveled, he was just Hiroyuki. Accordingly, he called us Amos and Lena—well, actually my name sounded like Re-na, since the letter L didn’t exist in the Japanese alphabet.

  I could see how much Hiroyuki loved and cared for Rika. We’d only been there a couple of weeks, but it was palpable.

  I could see it in so many small gestures.

  He was always the first one up, preparing her breakfast or her tea and taking it to her room. He was the one making sure she was comfortable at all times.

  Rika’s mobility wasn’t the greatest, and on top of that, she suffered from bouts of vertigo, but when she was up and walking around the house, Hiroyuki followed her everywhere with his eyes. He kept a distance, always making sure he was there for her without being overbearing.

  It was safe to say that while I got along with Hiroyuki, I couldn’t bring myself to loosen up around Rika-san, even though she wasn’t as icy as she had been toward me on the day of our very first meeting.

  Unsurprisingly, Amos didn’t seem to have the kind of problem I had, maybe because she wasn’t his idol, or maybe because he didn’t care as much as I did.

  To me, this was the most important moment of my career, and the most terrifying one. I was scared pretty much every minute, and I knew Rika Ishikawa had noticed. I could tell she was making a real effort to be a bit friendlier, but that still wasn’t eno
ugh for me to be less of a frazzled mess all the time.

  Not only was I nervous about doing a good job, as we progressed with the story, I kept wondering what kind of resolution it was going to have.

  The last published volume had seen the two protagonists apart, living on opposite sides of the world after Aiko Matsumoto had lost everything. She’d lost her boyfriend in a tragic accent and had then lost her musical career, and she’d left Japan without a word to any of her friends about her whereabouts. Aiko Uemura was trapped in a loveless marriage to a rich music producer and had given birth to two kids.

  The readers were waiting for the two friends with the same name to finally reunite in the end, but I wasn’t sure how much more heartbreak Ishikawa was going to put her characters through.

  Maggie and I had started reading it years ago when we lived in Japan. As two young girls in their early twenties, we felt an incredible connection to the two protagonists.

  Just like Aiko and Aiko, our names were similar. Magdalena Pulaski was her birth name, and while no one in her family ever called her Lena, we thought it was a pretty big coincidence. On top of that, our personalities mirrored those of the characters in the comic.

  Maggie was the sunny Aiko Uemura—boy crazy, great friend, caring, giving, eternal optimist. I was the dark sheep, Aiko Matsumoto—moody and closed off.

  Ever since we’d met in Japanese class, Maggie had been the best friend anyone could ask for, always putting up with me, even when I was at my worst.

  She was always there by my side, even during my bouts of sour mood and my moments of drunken, self-destructive behavior.

  She was like a ray of sunshine in my miserable life.

  For the very first time since I was a child, I had someone who loved me for who I was, who accepted me regardless of my faults, regardless of what I couldn’t give.

  When I tried to date and briefly opened myself up to love, she was there to collect the broken pieces of my heart.

  Maggie was my best and only friend, the person who understood me the most, the one who would tag along on crazy adventures. It had been my idea to apply for a scholarship in Japan, almost on a whim, and I was the one who’d convinced her to apply.