There is a bar that the members of my university laboratory frequently visit. I heard a rather strange story there from an alumnus of the lab.
When I was in college, I had a girlfriend for about half a year. She was a year older than me and majored in fine arts. We happened to work at the same part-time job, so we just sort of naturally started dating.
She showed me the paintings she was working on a few times. They were avant-garde, I suppose—I don't know much about art, so I couldn't really tell—but every single one of them was "a painting of a human with one abnormally large body part."
Her completed works for group exhibitions and the rough sketches in her sketchbook were almost all like that. Of course, she was capable of drawing properly, but around that time, she seemed to prefer drawing only those kinds of things.
For example, there was a painting of a semi-nude white man facing forward, but only his left eye was about half the size of his face, sticking out past the outline of his head. There were other paintings where just the tip of the right foot was gigantic, or the left hand, the nose, the mouth, the right ear... Every single piece featured just one specific part of the body blown up out of proportion.
It wasn't realistic; the style was abstract, yet it had an indescribable, unsettling creepiness to it. There were times I felt so nauseous I had to press my hand over my mouth. Whenever that happened, she would look at me with a troubled expression.
After we started dating, I suddenly realized something. I stopped having a dream that I had experienced over and over again, countless times since I was a child.
Should I call it a nightmare? It wasn't the kind of coercive threat where you're chased by a ghost, which is common enough. It was a quiet, quiet dream.
As soon as I fell asleep, it would arrive abruptly. I would see a bag. A large bag with a seductive pattern, like a drawstring pouch. Big enough to hide a child inside.
It didn't matter what kind of dream I had been having right before. Whenever I realized it, the scene would shift to a single room in the apartment where I used to live as an elementary school student. The evening sun was streaming through the window, and the bag sat all alone on the tatami mat.
That was all the dream was. And yet, I was utterly, terribly terrified of it.
Dreams are supposed to be wild and constantly shifting, but once I entered this room, everything froze in place. For some reason, there were no doors leading in or out of the room. I just stood there, facing the bag on the tatami. I wanted to look away, but I was rooted to the spot as if under a spell.
Before long, I would find myself staring intently at the shadow cast in the slightly parted opening of the bag, driven by something akin to a feeling of negative anticipation.
*Ah, hurry. Hurry, or I won't wake up from the dream.*
The room was always bathed in the evening sun. When the light began to fade, I felt as though the mouth of the bag was slowly opening...
That was the kind of dream it was.
I would wake up, take a deep breath, and think that I never wanted to go back to that room again. But no matter how pleasant a dream I was having, sometimes opening a door would lead me straight back to that room. And when I turned around, the door would be gone.
That dream continued until I entered university, and even after that, though with decreasing frequency.
I often thought about what the dream meant, but I didn't recognize the bag at all. That tatami-room apartment should have been completely demolished by now. It lacked context and made no sense.
That was precisely why it was so terrifying, and I had never spoken about it to my parents, my friends, or anyone else.
For some reason, after I started dating her, I stopped seeing it entirely.
While I felt relieved, I also felt an odd sense of unease, like when a long-lasting hiccup suddenly stops.
Around the time I was thinking of bringing this up to her, she invited me: "Do you want to sneak into the art building at night?"
The art building was locked up tight at night and off-limits, but the students apparently had their own secret entryways, and groups of them would sneak in to hold covert night meetings. It sounded interesting, so I immediately agreed.
Late at night, as we stood in front of the pitch-black art building, she smoothly and familiarly scaled the wall using the scaffolding and vanished through one of the windows. A moment later, there was a click, and the back door opened.
It was my first time ever stepping inside the art building, and the interior was far more cluttered with random things than I had imagined. I couldn't help muttering, "Man, this place is a dump." She nodded in agreement.
Shining the flashlights we brought to light our way, we pushed our way through half-finished paintings, woodworking projects, and other student creations down the hallway, and entered a room on the third floor.
"This is the storage room where I keep my works."
Sure enough, one corner of the room was packed tight with paintings in that familiar style. Seeing them at night like this, illuminated by a faint light, gave the room an unspeakably eerie atmosphere.
"I've been wondering about this for a while," I blurted out, finally working up the courage to ask. "Why do you draw people with just one giant body part?"
She answered while shining her flashlight on a portrait of a person with an abnormally large right eye.
"You know, when I was a child, my family went to a southern island. Somewhere in Polynesia. I heard a local folktale there. Long ago, when humans were much larger and more arrogant, angry spirits cursed them and shrank their human bodies. The people wept with grief and offered heartfelt apologies to the great spirit that governs all things in this world. Taking pity on them, the spirit allowed just one part of the human body to remain as it was: A big hand. A big nose. A big eye. A big ear. A big foot... But eventually, the people grew to despise these giant eyes, hands, noses, and ears. So they begged the spirit once again: Please shrink the rest of our bodies, too."
I found myself staring fixedly at the painting.
"In other words," she continued, "this is a giant who has been shrunk down. He sees the true world with just this one huge right eye. But that was actually a hindrance for living in the world as it is now. Humans chose for themselves to become foolish and diminutive creatures—that was the story. I thought it was a really fascinating motif..."
There was a faint shadow on her face as she said this.
"You might not believe me, but I actually saw them. All over that island—people just like the ones in these paintings. I was the only one who could see them. And then, I saw them after I came back to Japan, too. They were all around me. I kept wishing they would just disappear so I wouldn't have to see them anymore. But they didn't. You know *GeGeGe no Kitaro*, right? It appears in the manga. A method for defeating invisible ghosts. The story goes that by asking questions of the possessed person and connecting dotted lines drawn on a stone, the true form of the ghost is revealed, and it can be trapped inside that stone. When I was in elementary school, I read that, and I drew. Paintings like this."
She slowly moved her finger, tracing the surface of the canvas. I watched her movements intently.
"And then I couldn't see them anymore. The people with one giant body part. But after that, I started seeing all kinds of other strange things. Huh? You wouldn't believe me if I told you anyway. All I know is, I didn't want to see stuff like that. See, it's just like that folktale, isn't it? I wanted to live a normal life, so I threw away what might have been the truth. And I stopped painting the things I saw. I just pretended not to see them. The only reason I'm still painting these pictures now is simply because I truly thought it was a fascinating motif."
Do you think it sounds ridiculous? She wore that same troubled expression of hers.
It was an unbelievable story. One could even call it absurd. And yet, I held my breath, desperately trying to stop my knees from shaking.
Halfway through her story, I had already seen it. At the very back of the shelf lined up behind her back, there was a painting. It was a painting of that very bag from my dreams.
---
《II》 This is a story I heard from Mikacchi-san.
"One of my upperclassmen was someone with insane spiritual sensitivity. Well, I say 'upperclassman,' but she graduated before I even entered university, so I never met her directly. Anyway, she was a woman who only drew weird pictures—like humans with freakishly huge hands and stuff like that. She completed all her assignments and was actually an amazingly talented artist, but how should I put it? She was someone who could *see* things. Apparently, those paintings of people with giant hands were based on actual weird entities she was seeing. And when I say huge, I don't mean twice the normal size. They were impossibly massive. Plus, there were versions with ridiculously huge eyes or ears, and she'd seen all of those, too. Even if you believe in the supernatural, weird ghosts like that don't just exist, right? It makes you wonder what on earth she was looking at.
Well, anyway! There's a legend handed down in our Special Fine Arts Course. A total legend! Aptly named by who-knows-who: 'The Nightmare School Festival Exhibition Incident'!
During the university festival a few years back, the students of the Special Fine Arts Course apparently rented out a classroom and held an exhibition. The course doesn't do things like that anymore; nowadays, our art club just runs a yakisoba food stall and does portrait sketches every year. Back then, though, the professors weren't very fond of us, and the Special Fine Arts students apparently didn't join the regular art club much. Whether that had anything to do with it or not, the Special Fine Arts students held their own independent festival exhibition at the time.
And that upperclassman exhibited her new work there. The one of the person with the giant hands and feet. But if it had just been that, it wouldn't have been a big deal. The thing is, alongside those people with giant body parts, she'd also painted something else—some other creepy thing. For some reason, the people who saw it went into a panic. You know, like a domino effect? Everyone started collapsing in a heap, and some people even got hurt. It became a huge uproar with ambulances showing up and everything. In the end, the Special Fine Arts Course hasn't been allowed to hold festival exhibitions ever since, up to the present day.
What kind of painting was it? I haven't seen it, so I can't say for sure, but from what I heard, it was a painting of a monster. People in our course call it a cursed painting and pass it down as lore. It's so scary, though. I totally believe in painting curses. Huh? That upperclassman's name? Um, if I remember correctly..."
---
《III》 This is a story I heard from the Master.
It was the autumn of my second year in university.
The season of the university festival—my second one in life—had arrived. As I walked across the campus, the paths blanketed in fallen ginkgo leaves, food stalls and various booths were being set up everywhere, and the whole place felt cheerfully restless and buoyant.
As for myself, I hadn't joined my club's food stall. I easily brushed off the jeers directed at my way and wandered around, searching for something much more entertaining than that.
"Move aside! Move aside!"
A pair of guys with towels wrapped around their heads like pirates sprinted past my side, carrying some kind of signboard. The surroundings were packed with a buzzing commotion.
Feeling suffocated, I scratched my head.
Sucked dry and laughed out until nothing was left by the cheerful folks around me, it felt as though there wasn't much air left in this area. I walked, weaving through that layer of thin air. In the end, the place where I stood and walked was probably just a tiny bit askew in a metaphysical sense from the places where ordinary people lived.
And so, I called out.
"Master."
To me, things that were actually fun usually originated from him.
"Hey. Let's go to the university festival tomorrow."
Yes, the university festival, for instance.
The university festival?
"Why?" I asked, slightly flustered. I never expected words like that to come from a man who should scoff at festivals meant for ordinary youths. Isn't that, well, a *date*?
"A friend of mine invited me. A girl who draws pictures in the Special Fine Arts Course. She said she's holding an exhibition of her work."
It was a date. A completely legitimate date. Normally, students belonging to clubs would be drafted to run some kind of attraction for the university festival. Yet there are some monsters of human beings who completely ignore such hardships to guarantee themselves a date with their boyfriend or girlfriend, and who even have the sheer audacity to go mock the food stalls of their own clubs. Impossible. Is that kind of behavior even allowed?
"I'm going."
"See you tomorrow, then."
During this season, our campus is yellow. It is dyed entirely in yellow by the ginkgo-lined paths and their fallen leaves. Breathing in a chestful of the dense air that carried a faintly sweet scent, I began to walk away with buoyant steps.
◆
That very night. When I got home and thoroughly ruminated on the day's events, I reached the conclusion that there *had* to be some kind of punchline to all of this. With that thought, I visited the Master's apartment.
"What is the meaning of this?"
As soon as I broached the subject, the Master—who understood everything immediately—began to speak.
"I have a junior in the Special Fine Arts Course. Her name is Yuko Fukutake. She's a senior now, I suppose? About to graduate. Even though we're in different departments, we got to know each other over something small and became friends. I sometimes help her out with advice, too. She's an unusual girl. Draws weird pictures."
With that, the Master shoved his head into his closet.
"Is it still in here? ...Ah, found it."
When he turned back around, he was holding up a painting housed in a simple frame.
The moment I saw it, an indescribable feeling of unease washed over me. A creeping sickness began to rear its head inside my neck.
"Fukutake gave this to me; she painted it last year. What do you think this is?"
It was a portrait of a person lingering in front of a mirror. An oil painting, perhaps? A young woman was sitting in front of a large vanity mirror, painted from behind, and her face was reflected in the mirror over her back. Still a young woman. She wasn't smiling, nor was she staring at her own face; she was just sitting there with a completely blank expression. That kind of painting. It might have been a self-portrait. On its own, it would have been an ordinary enough picture.
However, right next to that woman, there was *another* person.
That person was sitting right beside the woman, with their back turned toward the viewer. In other words, they were both facing the mirror side-by-side. At least, they should have been. But their back was *also* reflected in the mirror. Both sides showed the back of the head. There was no part representing the front of the body—no face, no feature symbolizing their identity as a person—anywhere to be seen. It was an anomalous painting, far too ghastly to simply call "anonymous."
Was this surrealism? As I wondered if I had ever seen such a motif in René Magritte's works when looking through art books, the Master continued.
"According to the artist herself, this painting isn't surrealism. It's realism. She said she actually saw someone like this—someone who only had a back."
A chill ran down my spine.
*She saw one? Something like this?*
"Fukutake apparently often sees things that aren't of this world, ever since she was a child. Whenever that happens, she paints what she saw. She believes that by doing so, she can protect herself from the supernatural. She said she traps them inside her paintings... but well, who knows if that actually works."
The Master chuckled faintly as he traced the surface of the painting with his finger.
"If it's just seeing ghosts, you and I do that too. But when the person is a painter, somehow it all clicks into place so well. The word 'visionary' comes to mind."
*Visionary.*
Indeed. Rolling the word around in my mouth, I thought the same thing. The color-less back in the painting, and the color-less back reflected in the mirror.
"The subject Fukutake paints most often is humans with one giant body part. Humans where only one eye, one hand, or just the nose is abnormally large. Back in the old days, she said she saw them. Such humans. No, she put it this way: They are giants who shrank, leaving only a single part of their bodies behind. After that, she said she painted pictures of those things over and over, and eventually, they stopped appearing to her. Happily ever after."
Hearing the Master recount this in a joking tone suddenly made me tense up. I felt like something was about to connect. Something terrifying.
"However, she said that recently, they've started appearing to her again. Not that she's seeing them clearly right in front of her eyes, but she can tell that such things exist somewhere out there. A true vision, you could say. What's more, they were slightly different from the ones she saw when she was a child. At first, she didn't realize it. She only felt a tiny sense of discomfort. But eventually, Fukutake noticed. The things with only a giant eye, or only a giant hand—a new common denominator had appeared on those creepy creatures."
The Master lowered the vanity mirror painting and stared at me as if testing me.
"They weren't single-eyed anymore; they had *both* eyes. Possessing a size abnormal relative to the body. The ones with giant hands didn't have just one giant hand, but both hands. Not one foot, but both feet. Not one ear, but both ears."
*Imagine it,* the Master said.
A human whose both eyes alone are abnormally large, bursting out of their face. Someone who looks like they stepped right out of a child's drawing. Such a person walking down the street. With a tiny body and tiny limbs. And looking through those huge eyes. The scenery visible from down there. *How small it is.* The world.
"That's..."
I was left completely speechless.
It was this past summer. That was when I encountered events related to pygmies and giants. Could this have something to do with that? My heart raced.
"Fukutake is exhibiting her work at the university festival starting tomorrow, and she said there's a specific painting she wants me to see."
The Master grinned as he said that.
◆
The next day, the Master and I met up and headed together to the general education department building. They were apparently holding the Special Fine Arts Course festival exhibition by renting out one of the lecture rooms.
Cutting across the campus lined with various food stalls, leaving the commotion of the university festival behind, filled me with a slightly lonely feeling. On the way, a modest sign for the festival exhibition caught my eye, and I found myself needlessly worrying whether anyone would actually bother to make the trip out for something like this.
The open lecture room was on the second floor. After climbing the stairs and walking down the hallway, we stepped through one of the lined-up doors. White-legged boards covered all four walls, and numerous paintings were displayed upon them.
"Urai-san."
A woman standing at the back of the exhibition hall noticed us and approached. She was petite, with refined features and long hair. Was this Ms. Fukutake? She was thin, but not to the point of looking sickly. Even so, she gave off an unhealthily somber impression.
"Thank you. For coming."
"Yo, Fukutake. Looks like business is dead."
The Master looked around the venue. The other woman with Ms. Fukutake was likely another Special Fine Arts student. Was she on hall duty today? Other than them, the only person in the venue besides us was a single visitor. It was an elderly woman, not a student, who had a plastic bag—probably containing yakisoba bought from a food stall—draped over her right arm. She was browsing the paintings one by one without much enthusiasm.
Ah, wait. While I was thinking that, the headcount went up by one. A young man in student-like attire had entered, looking around nervously. Still, it was a lonely affair.
"Oh? Urai-san. Is this your boyfriend?"
Ms. Fukutake asked, looking over at me.
"He's my retainer," the Master said, leaving me with no choice but to say, "I'm his retainer." I would have preferred him calling me his disciple, at least.
Brushing off her curious gaze, I approached a painting near the wall. Even if drawn by a student, the level was naturally different from high schoolers. As I gazed at a transparent evening cityscape and a precise painting of fruit piled high in a basket, I felt a total lack of any emotional resonance stirring within me. I'd never really liked art to begin with.
Still, it seemed the visitors had increased again. A couple had entered, making strange, excited noises.
"So, which one is the painting you want me to see?" the Master asked.
With a slightly tense expression, Ms. Fukutake pointed to the wall in the left corner from the entrance.
"That one over there. When did you—"
Comments (-)