One Hour of Fervour E-Book

Muriel Barbery

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 272

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

From the bestselling author of The Elegance of the Hedgehog comes the story of one man's promise to keep a secret that may hold him from the greatest joy possible.Haru, a successful Japanese art dealer, appreciates beauty, harmony, balance and good sake.One evening at a party he meets Maud, an enigmatic Frenchwoman, and after a brief intense romance he learns that she is pregnant with his child. But Maud issues him a heartbreaking warning: if he ever tries to see her or the child, she will kill herself.Quietly devastated, Haru resigns himself to loving his daughter from afar. And Rose grows up on the other side of the world, without ever knowing her father. Is it too late to change things?From international bestseller Muriel Barbery., this is a stunning tale of friendship, secrets and a father's enduring love.

Leseprobe

Muriel Barbery is the author of critically acclaimed novels, including the IMPAC-shortlisted bestseller The Elegance of the Hedgehog. She has lived in Kyōto, Amsterdam and Paris and now lives in the French countryside.

Alison Anderson is an author and the translator of around 100 books from French, including Muriel Barbery’s previous novels and works by Amélie Nothomb and J. M. G. Le Clézio.

Praise for A Single Rose:

‘Melancholy is gradually transmuted into joy’ New Yorker

‘Rich with atmosphere and character and drawing on themes of grief and second chances, this is a delicate delight’ Living Magazine

‘Muriel Barbery crafts a moving tale of emotional awakening and blossoming love, set among the vivid colours and mesmerising scenery of Kyoto’ Woman’s Own

‘[A] multi-layered novel of self-discovery, grounded in richly evoked landscapes and experiences . . . An enjoyable, immersive read’ The Lady

‘A fascinating maze of emotional release’ Foreword Reviews

‘A lyrical and opaque story’ Publishers Weekly

‘An ode to Japan . . . a magnificent, resonant, finely crafted novel’ Le Monde

‘Muriel Barbery sows beauty on every page’ Elle

‘A small miracle’ Lire

‘A moving, accomplished novel . . . thoughtful, ethereal and inspired’ L’Obs

Praise for The Elegance of the Hedgehog:

‘A profound but accessible book . . . which elegantly treads the line between literary and commercial fiction . . . The Elegance of theHedgehog is, by the end, quite radical in its stand against French classism and hypocrisy . . . Clever, informative and moving’ The Observer

‘Its appeal is obvious . . . a feel-good book with philosophical aspirations’ The Guardian

‘At once absurd and lyrical, cheery and bleak, contemplative and tender . . . It is the revelatory joy the characters afford each other – with recognition, with friendship, with love – that quietly rises to the top’ New Statesman

‘Many authors dream of getting their books onto best-seller lists, but few pull it off with the panache of French writer Muriel Barbery’ Time

‘Muriel Barbery . . . commands the sophistication, polish and mental agility that often distinguish French fiction . . . Barbery has a warm heart and a heart moreover that knows that great art and the best philosophy may (just possibly) possess redemptive qualities, or at least make life bearable in a materialistic and selfindulgent world’ Sydney Morning Herald

Praise for The Gourmet:

‘An exquisite French black comedy’ The Times

‘A foodie’s delight; just don’t read it when you’re hungry’ Daily Mail

‘Barbery has a knack for describing food, and for evoking the physical and emotional sensations it produces’ Financial Times

‘The exquisite descriptions of eating are like nothing you’ve read before’ Good Housekeeping

‘An ode to the pleasure of good food . . . mouth-watering from beginning to end’ Paris Match

Also by Muriel Barbery

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

The Gourmet

The Life of Elves

A Strange Country

The Writer’s Cats

A Single Rose

A Gallic Book

This book is supported by the Institut français (Royaume-Uni) as part of the Burgess programme.

First published in France as Une heure de ferveur

by Actes Sud

Copyright © 2022 by Actes Sud

English translation copyright © Europa Editions 2024

First published in Great Britain in 2024 by

Gallic Books, Hamilton House, Mabledon Place, London wc1h 9bd

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention

No reproduction without permission

All rights reserved

A CIP record for this book is available from

the British Library

ISBN 9781913547608

eISBN 9781805333708

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

CONTENTS

Dying

Before

After

A Long Time

Elsewhere

Birth

Acknowledgments and thanks

to Chevalier

to all those from Kyōto

Akiyo, Megumi, Sayoko

Keisuke, Manabu, Shigenori, Tomoo

Kazu, Tomoko

and Éric-Maria

Dying

As he lay dying, Haru Ueno was looking at a flower and thinking, It’s all been about a flower. There were, in fact, three threads to the narrative of his life, and only the last one was a flower. Stretching before him was a small temple garden that sought to be a miniature landscape, scattered with symbols. It was a wonder to him that centuries of spiritual seeking had ended in this precise arrangement – so much striving for meaning and, in the end, pure form, he thought, too.

For Haru Ueno was a seeker of form.

He knew he was about to die, and he thought, At last I’m in accordance with things. The gong at the Hōnen-in sounded in the distance, four times, and he felt so intensely alive to the world that it made him dizzy. There before him, the garden enclosed by white-washed walls topped with grey tiles. In the garden, three stones, a pine tree, an expanse of sand, a lantern, some moss. In the distance, the mountains of the East. The temple itself was known as the Shinnyo-dō. Every week for almost five decades Haru Ueno had taken a walk around the same loop: he went to the main temple on the hill, through the cemetery below it, and back to the entrance to the complex, where he was an important benefactor.

For Haru Ueno was a very rich man.

He had grown up watching the snow fall and melt on the stones of a mountain torrent. The little family house stood firmly on one bank. On the other was a forest of tall pine trees in the ice. He had long believed it was matter he loved – rock, water, leaves, and wood. Once he understood it was the form this matter took that he loved, he became an art dealer.

Art: one of the three threads of his life.

Of course, he didn’t become an art dealer overnight. It had taken time to move to another city and meet a man. At the age of twenty, he had turned his back on the mountains and his father’s sake business, and left Takayama for Kyōto. He had neither money nor connections, but he possessed a rare piece of good fortune: while he knew nothing of the world, he knew who he was. It was the month of May, and, seated on the wooden floor, he caught a glimpse of the future with a clarity that was close to the lucidity sake gives. All around, he could hear the bustle of the complex of Zen temples, where a cousin who was a monk had arranged a room for him. The encounter between the force of his vision and the immensity of time made his head spin. This vision did not say where, or when, or how. It said: A life devoted to art. And: I shall succeed. The room looked out on a tiny shady garden. In the distance, the sun gilded the stalks of tall grey bamboo. Water irises grew among the hostas and dwarf ferns. One of the irises, taller and more slender than the others, was swaying in the breeze. Somewhere a bell was tolling. Time contracted, and Haru Ueno was that flower. Then the moment passed.

On this day, fifty years later, Haru Ueno gazed at the same flower and was astonished that once again it was the twentieth of May at four o’clock in the afternoon. One thing, however, was different: this time, he was looking at the flower in himself. Another element was the same: everything – the iris, the bell, the garden – was there in the present. A final observation was remarkable: in this total present, the pain faded away. He heard a sound behind him and hoped he would be left alone. He thought of Keisuke, who was waiting somewhere for him to die, and told himself, A life can be summed up in three names.

Haru, who did not want to die. Keisuke, who could not die. Rose, who would live.

The private quarters where he was lying were those of the temple’s head monk, who was the twin brother of Keisuke Shibata, thanks to whom he’d found his vocation. The Shibata brothers descended from an old Kyōto family who, for as long as anyone could remember, had provided the city with monks and lacquerers. Since Keisuke despised both religion and – because of its shine – lacquer, he had opted for pottery, but he was also a painter, calligrapher, and poet. What was remarkable about Haru and Keisuke’s encounter was that, at the very beginning, there had been a bowl between them. Haru saw this bowl and knew what his life would be. He’d never come across such a work of art: the bowl seemed both new and very old, in a way that he’d thought was impossible. Next to it, sprawled on a chair, was a man of indeterminate age and – could this make sense? – of the same alloy as the bowl. On top of it, he was dead drunk, and Haru found himself confronted with an equation that was equally impossible: on the one hand, perfect form, and on the other, its creator: a drunkard. Once they’d been introduced, they placed the seal, with sake, on what would become the friendship of a lifetime.

Friendship: the second narrative thread in Haru’s life.

And now death stood before him in the guise of a garden, and all the rest, with the exception of those two instants a half-century apart, had become invisible. A cloud touched the summit of Daimon-ji and left the scent of iris in its wake. Haru thought, All that remains are these two moments, and Rose.

Rose, the third thread.

Before

Haru Ueno and Keisuke Shibata had met fifty years earlier at the home of Tomoo Hasegawa, who produced art documentaries for national television. Although the Japanese, as a rule, rarely entertain at home, at Tomoo’s you could meet both Japanese and foreign artists, and all sorts of people who weren’t artists. The place looked like a sailing ship beached on a mossy shore. On the upper deck, the wind came in through the windows, even in the depths of winter. The rear of the vessel clung to a flank of the Shinnyo-dō. The prow faced the mountains of the East. Tomoo had designed it and had it built in the early 1960s, then kept an open house for anyone who was hungry for art, sake, and partying. The partying included friendship and laughter late into the night. The art and the sake were pure. They kept forever, just as they were. Nothing ever came to alter their essence.

And so, for almost ten years, Tomoo Hasegawa had reigned from his hillside. People called him Hasegawa-san or Tochan, the latter an affectionate diminutive reserved for children. People came and went at all hours, regardless of whether he was there. They loved him. They wished they could be like him, but no one held this against him. Beyond that, he adored Keisuke, Keisuke adored him, and, almost as if it were meant to be, they both enjoyed the cold. No matter the season, they would wander along the paths of the temple half-dressed, and, on 10 January 1970, at dawn, Haru joined them for the first time. In the pale light the hill was like an ice field, its stone lanterns glowing and the air redolent of flint and incense. The other two were chirping away in their thin garments, but Haru, who was wearing a thick coat, found himself shivering. Yet he didn’t mind, and in this glacial dawn he came to see he was a pilgrim. His family home was in Takayama, but the place where he had lived and would live his true life was Shinnyo-dō. Haru didn’t believe in past lives, but he did believe in the spirit. Henceforth, he would be a pilgrim. Forever returning to his true origins.

The Shinnyo-dō: a temple adjacent to other temples, perched on a hill in the northeast of the city; by extension, Haru referred to the hill by the same name. There were maple trees everywhere, old buildings, a wooden pagoda, stone walkways. And, naturally, set on the summit and sides of the hill, there were cemeteries, including those of Shinnyo-dō and Kurodani, to which Haru, once he had money, would give with equal generosity. Every week for nearly fifty years he would go through the red gate and climb up to the temple, go around it, and continue south along the side of two cemeteries and through a third one, gaze out at Kyōto below him, head down Kurodani’s stone stairway, and wind his way northward between the temples until he reached his starting point. And, at every instant, he would know this was his home. Since he was only a Buddhist out of respect for tradition but wanted to join everything in his life together, he had forged the conviction that Buddhism was the name his culture had given to art, or, at the very least, to that root of art called the spirit. The spirit embraced everything, explained everything. For some mysterious reason, the hill of Shinnyo-dō incarnated the essence of that spirit. When Haru went for his circular walk, he was going through life, the bare bones of it, stripped of all obscenity, cleansed of triviality. Over the years, he’d come to realise that these enlightened understandings were born of the configuration of the place itself. Over the centuries, man had brought together buildings and gardens, had laid out the temples, trees, and lanterns, and, in the end, this patient labour had given rise to a miracle: to stride along the walkway was to converse intimately with the invisible. Many people attributed this to the higher presences that haunt sacred places, but Haru had learned from the stones of his torrent that spirit arises from form, that there is only form, the grace or disgrace resulting from it – eternity or death contained in the curves of a rock. And so, during that winter of 1970 when he was still a nobody, he decided that one day his ashes would be buried in that place. For Haru Ueno knew not only who he was, he knew what he wanted. He was only waiting to understand the form it would take.

Consequently, when he made the acquaintance of Keisuke Shibata, he saw his future as clearly as an earthenware bowl in broad daylight. That evening, Tomoo Hasegawa, playing patron of the arts, was holding a launch party at his home for a handful of atypical young artists. As was customary, they brought their work to the Shinnyo-dō sailing ship, and then everyone who was anyone in Kyōto came, drank, and chatted before they left again to spread the artists’ names. Most of these artists were free spirits. They did not belong to a school or a family. They sought to be – a culturally complicated thing – exceptional. They didn’t copy contemporary Western art. They worked the clay of their native land, giving it a totally new cast that always looked Japanese, without belonging to any artistic lineage. In fact, these artists were very much to Haru’s taste, because they resembled the individual he himself would like to be: young, yet deep; loyal, yet free of any bonds; thoughtful, yet full of audacity.

In those days, the few galleries dealing in contemporary art only survived by selling traditional work, as well, which was a very exclusive market requiring an entrée. Haru, the son of a modest sake brewer from the mountains, had no hope of getting his foot in the door. He paid for his room at the Daitoku-ji by helping out with the temple’s maintenance tasks, and for his studies in architecture and English by working evenings at a bar. His entire worldly possessions consisted of a bicycle, a few books, and the tea service his grandfather had given him. Finally, the fourth thing he owned was a coat, which he wore from November to May, indoors and out, suffering as he did from the cold. And yet, even if he had nothing, back in that glacial January, a magnificent compass had just been placed in his bare hands. He said to himself, I’ll do the same thing as Tomoo, but on a grander scale.

And he did. But first, after a certain number of other sake-filled nights, he described his project to Keisuke and declared, I need your money to get started. In the guise of an answer, Keisuke told him a story. In around 1600, the son of a merchant wanted to become a samurai, so his father said to him, I am old and have no other heirs, but samurai honour the way of tea, and, for that reason, I will give you my blessing. The next day, Haru invited Keisuke into his room, and with his grandfather’s tea service, he prepared tea for him, performing a casual yet nevertheless somewhat solemn ceremony. Then they drank sake and conversed, laughing all the while. The snow falling on the temples covered the curving roofs of the lanterns with immaculate ravens’ wings, and then, without warning, Keisuke launched into a tirade on the inanity of religion. Buddhism is not a religion, said Haru, or else it’s the religion of art. In that case, it’s also the religion of sake, Keisuke asserted. Haru agreed, and they drank some more. In the end, he specified the amount he would need, and Keisuke lent him the money.

Subsequently Haru would excel at circumventing obstacles. He had no premises for his gallery, he rented a warehouse. He had no network, he used Tomoo’s. He had no reputation, he went about making other people’s. He charmed everyone, and Keisuke’s assumption proved correct: deep down, Haru was a tradesman, but unlike his father, he would be a great tradesman, because he had a good instinct not only for business but also for tea – or, to put it differently, for grace. The fact is, there are two sorts of grace. The first is that which results from a spirit that is born of form, and, for that, Haru went to Shinnyo-dō. The second is merely the first seen from a different angle, but because it takes on a specific appearance, it’s called beauty. For that type of grace, Haru went to Zen gardens and spent time with artists. His tea eye probed their works and broke through to the soul of each one, something he summed up by saying, I don’t have talent, but I do have taste. But he was wrong about that, because there is also a third sort of grace, in which the other two are steeped, and in this, Keisuke saw supreme talent. And even if, in Haru’s case, it was rooted in a paradox, it was no less powerful: his whole life long, he would fail at love, but when it came to friendship, he would be a master.

Friendship: and yet, it is a part of love.

One day, after Haru had dwelled at length on his predilection for Western women, Keisuke said, ‘For me, everything – life, art, the soul, woman – has been drawn with the same ink.’

‘Which ink is that?’ asked Haru.

‘Japan,’ said Keisuke. ‘I can’t imagine touching a foreign woman.’

For Haru, that was inconceivable, even though he understood Keisuke’s love for his wife. And to be honest, who would not? Sae Shibata was everything a heart could desire. When you met her, you felt a spear lodge in your heart. It didn’t hurt but, instead, was like watching the slow unwinding of an ineffable act. What sort of act? You didn’t know, you actually didn’t know much at all – was she beautiful, petite, lively or serious, no one could have said. Pale, yes. But otherwise, nothing lingered, just an intense presence with whom you’d come a long way. And then one November evening in 1975, on a coast road near Kaseda, where their mother and grandmother lived, an earthquake brought down a tree, and Sae and little Yōko with it. A slight trembling of the earth – then all was gone. The tree falls on the car, and infinity dies.

‘It’s just the beginning,’ Keisuke told Haru.

‘There’s no reason it should continue,’ Haru assured him.

‘Cut the crap,’ said Keisuke.

‘All right,’ Haru replied.

And he was by the potter’s side, with no useless words, when ten years later, on 14 February 1985, Tarō, Keisuke’s eldest son, died, and again twenty-six years later, on 11 March 2011, when it was the turn of Nobu, his youngest son.

‘But I cannot die,’ said Keisuke, after Tarō’s death. ‘It’s called fate,’ he explained, reaching for the cup of sake Haru held out to him.

‘How do you know that?’ asked Haru.

‘The stars,’ said Keisuke. ‘If only you knew how to listen. But you don’t know how to listen – mountain folk are real dumbasses.’

In fact, if anything, Haru Ueno was blunt, the way mountain folk sometimes are, and in a little less than ten years, he had succeeded beyond all expectation. He had stuck to his early habit of renting ephemeral spaces to exhibit his artists. The only thing he had bought was a warehouse. In other aspects, everything had changed: he was rich, he was powerful, his artists were praised to the skies. There were various reasons for this, including his knowing when to seize a market opportunity. And once he was well-positioned, he was not only clever at finding his protégés but also chose his buyers with an equal mixture of sincerity and calculation. It was hard to imagine how much this kindled desire: not only did people want the art, they also wanted to be Haru Ueno’s clients. In the beginning, he officiated on his own, although Keisuke was often hanging around, off in some corner while a sale was being finalised. There was always sake on hand, and they would drink until late in the evening, when Haru took everyone out for dinner somewhere. Once the others had been drunk under the table, Keisuke and Haru walked home in the moonlight. In those deep hours, they spoke about things that mattered. Why do you drink? Haru would ask, long before his friend’s wife had died. Because I know my fate, said Keisuke. And when Sae and little Yōko died he said to Haru, I told you so. Another time, Haru said, Which would you keep, the invisible or the sublime? Keisuke didn’t come by for several days, but when he did, he brought Haru the most beautiful picture he’d ever painted. Sometimes they simply stood in wonder gazing at the stars, smoking and talking about art. At other times, Keisuke told stories that were equally threaded with classical literature and personal lore. Finally they would say good night and go their separate ways, their homes only a stone’s throw from each other on the banks of the Kamo-gawa.

The Kamo-gawa: the metronome of Haru’s life was his weekly walk to Shinnyo-dō, but his anchor was set by the banks of the river that runs north to south through Kyōto, slicing it into two distinct entities. All the locals know as much: it is on its banks, along its sandy pathways, among the wild grasses and herons that the pulse of the old city can be felt. Give me water and a mountain, said Keisuke, and I’ll make the world for you, the valley where the unfathomable winds its way. Haru bought an old riverside ruin that turned its back on the west and faced the mountains of the East. He had not yet finished his architecture studies, but God knew he could draw a house. In place of the crumbling dwelling he built a marvel of glass and wood. Outside, it gave onto the water and the mountains. Inside, it opened onto tiny gardens. In the middle of the main room, in a glass cage open to the sky, there lived a young maple tree. Haru’s furniture was sparse and tasteful, and he brought in a few art works. For his bedroom he sought total asceticism, his only concessions a futon and Keisuke’s painting. In the morning he drank his tea while gazing at the joggers along the riverside with its maple and cherry trees. In the evening he worked alone in a study with slanting bay windows that faced the mountains of the East and the North. Then finally he would go to bed, after another day spent in the valley of the unfathomable. Half of the time, however, he was not alone: at the warehouse, he threw parties, with dancing and drinking among the storage chests; at home, he hosted friendly gatherings, with drinking and conversation by the maple tree cage. People went just as often to Tomoo’s place – where Haru was sure to be found – as to Haru’s, where Tomoo was always welcome. Keisuke was there on every occasion.

20 January 1979. Of course Keisuke is there. Sae and Yōko have already died, but Tarō and Nobu, his two sons, are still alive. In their company, in the newly unveiled house by the Kamo-gawa, Haru is celebrating his thirtieth birthday. As usual, there are the regular guests, a few strangers, and a great many women. Sake is being served, there is light-hearted laughter, time resembles a palm leaf caressed by the breeze. Outside, it is snowing, and in the maple tree cage, the stone lantern is wearing its immaculate ravens’ wings. A woman comes in with Tomoo, and Haru sees her from behind, sees her ginger hair coiled in a loose chignon, her green dress, the gems at her ears. She is speaking with Tomoo. She observes the maple tree, turns around, and he sees her face for the first time. Then, all at once, like the fog that sometimes steals in without warning, that was the end of light-heartedness.

You cannot fan away the fog,’ Keisuke is saying to a young sculptor, not looking at him, because it’s Haru he’s looking at.

He falls silent, and after a moment, the young sculptor, puzzled, slips away, mumbling an excuse, but Keisuke, absorbed by the fire that is spreading, pays no attention to him. He knows how to see the stars, and he knows fires – so he has no doubt: this woman has a fire inside her. He’s not afraid for Haru, not yet. He’s afraid for her. He has never met anyone who was such a non-presence.

‘This is Maud; she’s French,’ says Tomoo, and Keisuke thinks, The fog.

Haru is next to them, and Keisuke thinks, The fan. He meets the Frenchwoman’s gaze, with those green eyes and their elegant shadows. She says something in English, and Haru makes a comment, with a few words and a laugh.

‘I don’t speak English,’ says Keisuke in Japanese.

She gives a wave of her hand that might mean either, It doesn’t matter, or Who cares. They all have the feeling that space, or perhaps, time, has been distorted, then things return to what, apparently, is normal, and Keisuke knows she will spend the night at Haru’s. There are several women in the room tonight who are, or have been, his mistresses. Haru is the most charming of men and the best of friends, for whom love branches out from friendship and the branch of family is too low down – before Sae and Yōko died, he was in the habit of saying, You bump your head, I prefer the higher branches. At the funeral, as friendship is a part of love, he said, Fate is no good at choosing branches.

That evening, however, that very same Haru tries to dispel the fog. With a cup of sake in his hand, deprived of visibility, he flutters his fans, that of his conversation in perfect English, the envy of all the Japanese, and that of humour, which he deploys in a bantering European manner that he owes in particular to the time he’s spent with the French. But nothing dispels the mystery. She tells him she’s the press attaché at a cultural institute, so he ventures a lesson in Japanese art. She listens, impassive, and at one point, she murmurs, I agree, the way you might say, I am dying. Haru is lost in this woman. She seems infinite to him, and, at the same time, she isn’t there. He finds himself facing a void inhabited by dead stars. He notices that she has a beautiful mouth, its corners curled into a comely fold, and he senses that he will get what he wants and, at the same time, that there’s something he cannot grasp.

At the far end of the room, something is alarming Keisuke, although he cannot see exactly what it is, and so, because sake is a torch placed at the root of things, he drinks. An hour later, the only clear result is that he’s dead drunk, sitting on the floor, his back against the maple tree cage, his legs stretched out, his head crowned and backlit with glittering ravens’ wings. It’s a beautiful night, lacquered with snow. The sky has iced over, the stars light the ink of it without shining. Haru and the Frenchwoman are on the other side of the tree, and once again Keisuke is struck by a hollowness about her that leaves the sake powerless, since evanescence has no roots. And yet this non-presence, these fluid, indifferent gestures give off a scent of something burning. He is aware of her emerald-green dress, the gems at her ears, her lipstick, her fine features. Everything else is undefined – proportions, articulations, cohesion, the way the whole is put together. Keisuke cannot imagine this woman as a whole, and he knows that this is not the effect of alcohol but of the absence, in her, of those invisible joints that connect the scattered fragments of a human being. He is overwhelmed by the memory of Sae: they are in the house by the Kamo-gawa, he recognises the room, the light, his wife’s body, and in the fluid fire that is Maud, he can see her opposite. To be honest, he cannot make out either form or contour, and he feels as if he has been afflicted by a certain blindness, but this inability to grasp the usual parameters of vision is what gives him this unprecedented discernment. In this way, he sees through the mist to where what is visible is hidden and what is invisible is revealed. He is sworn, forever, to his widowed state and to art, the only territory where he can still create presences. Sometimes, after a great deal of sake, friendship adds its own presences, and of all its clan, Haru shines brightest in the dark. There is something incarnate about that mountain yokel, although Keisuke detects in him some endearing marks of cracking. As for all the rest, art in particular, they find themselves on different ranges of the spectrum: Haru is eager for form, which Keisuke seeks to erase: he hunts for the invisible in hiding places where neither features, nor texture, nor colours exist. All are erased so that the naked thing – no longer thing, but presence – might be grasped, and in this blindfolded race, Keisuke always hopes to see spirit itself.

‘But in the end, it’s either a woman or a bowl,’ Haru says.

‘You’re blind, because you only look,’ Keisuke replies. ‘You must learn not to look.’

So there is Keisuke, sprawled against the maple tree cage, his gaze calibrated by the scale Sae left him. He is terrified by the fire that Maud has lit, and thinks, What does it do, a fire burning in a vacuum? It doesn’t rise higher, it doesn’t flare up, it slowly consumes itself. And as his vision grows sharper, the certainty that he is missing something intensifies; he finds it strange to be there so close to the heart of tragedy without being able to see it. Alas, he’s too drunk to interpret the scene, and he looks at Haru, who is wittering on while she listens, dreamily, her head tilted slightly to one side. Haru is not aware that Keisuke is watching him. He is very intoxicated, not with alcohol but with the favour of this foreign woman. She surprises and enchants him, he is besotted with her profile, fit for a cameo, her light complexion, her ginger hair. Confusedly, beyond that – beyond what? – he sees another oddity, decides he will examine it after. All he wants is to kiss that mouth, caress those shoulders and breasts, penetrate that body, and he thinks, The rest will be revealed after.