Last Winter We Parted Read Online Free PDF Page A

quietly.
    “Well, uh …” He speaks with a certain determination. “Why are you writing a book about him?”
    He looks me directly in the eye until it seems he can’t stand to anymore, and then he drops his gaze. The waitress passes by his side. Her white legs stick out under her short skirt.
    “Because it’s what I decided to do.”
    “But why? Are you fascinated by him? He …”
    As he speaks, he meets my gaze again, then looks down again.
    “He burned two women to death.”
    The coffee shop is poorly lit. I wonder why I chose this place.
    “Akiko Yoshimoto and Yuriko Kobayashi. They were both so young. Why write a book about a man like that?”
    “… Because I have my doubts.”
    “About what?”
    I light my own cigarette. I exhale the smoke. As if that is all I can manage. Katani goes on before I say anything.
    “… I had a bad feeling. He had transferred his obsession with his sister onto butterflies. That would have been fine. But then it shifted to dolls, before finally coming back to people. I thought it was risky. He put too much of himself into his photographic subjects. I recognize that’s precisely what made him a brilliant artist. But it’s a thin line, and dangerous if he were to cross it.”
    I am silent. Katani starts to speak again.
    “Shall I guess what your doubts are?”
    He is no longer looking at me. He keeps his gaze down.
    “Why would Kiharazaka have murdered and burned his beloved photographic subjects? No, that’s not quite right … It’s horrific, but here is probably where your doubts really lie. When those subjects, I mean, when those women wereon fire,
why didn’t Kiharazaka photograph the scene
?… Isn’t that it? Especially if that was
the reason why he burned them
in the first place.”
    I am positively speechless. I can feel sweat break out on my back.
    “Are you familiar with the story by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa called ‘Hell Screen’?”
    I nod.
    “It tells the tale of a crazed painter, who watches as his own daughter literally burns to death, and then he paints the scene. Afterward the painter commits suicide, but the folding screen that he leaves behind, with its depiction of hell, evokes a terrific artistry … Is this what you had in mind? If that were the case—if it were the mad act of a person crazed with his art—in a way it would be easier to understand. But that’s not what he did. He simply burned them. Despite the fact that he was an artist, he didn’t take a single photograph.”
    No longer able to stand it, I tear my gaze away from Katani for a moment and from a distance catch the eye of the waitress. Not having been listening to our conversation, she smiles. Unsuspectingly.
    “… I studied mathematics at university. I mentioned Akutagawa just now—I became interested in him and read some of his work because he had said that his writing required certain mathematical skills … Still, there is somethingfamiliar to me about that thin and dangerous line … Numbers are beautiful. They seem to line up coherently, but behind their logic lies an overwhelming chaos. And there is a pleasure to be found in proceeding to create beautiful order out of that chaos … Only, I knew the limits. I don’t mean something as simple as the limits of my own mathematical ability. I mean the limits of my brain. Have you ever grasped the limits, not of your own skills, but of your brain’s capabilities?”
    “… I don’t think so.”
    “Most people are unaware of the true limits of their own brain. In reality, though, what would they do with that knowledge anyway? In certain areas of expertise, it’s necessary to use the brain at the utmost limits of human potential … There’s a fear of knowing just what that is. The brain tries to deny its own limits. Then numbers get distorted. Once, among the numbers, I discovered a formula that shouldn’t have existed … It really was an odd formula. Not a breakthrough—because the equation was