Better Than Wine (3)
"This is... how do I put it. It feels awfully different from the date I was expecting..."
"Come now. I'm not sure those words hold when you've a paper bag in each hand."
"Pfft—!"
Hitomi bit her lip as if she'd been caught in a blunder. The reaction was exaggerated enough that it was surely only teasing—and yet the feeling that something had gone a little wrong was genuine. Somewhere along the way her eye had been caught by merch from a game she loved, and then she had happened upon the goods said to be releasing for the first anniversary, and before she knew it, this was the result.
"You did seem to be enjoying yourself, though."
"I was! But this is pretty far from what I originally had in mind...!"
"Hmm."
Is it really so different from the original plan? From the start, the idea had been to walk wherever their feet took them and step into any shop that caught the eye. By that measure, it was hard to call the outcome very different at all.
"Whatever the rest of the world may think, if the two of us are enjoying ourselves and satisfied, isn't that enough?"
"Uuugh, well, I suppose that's true, but..."
Ninomae Hitomi muttered it as she stuffed the paper bags of merch into a coin locker. There was no hauling them around for the whole of a date, so they had decided to leave them in storage for the time being.
"Even so, having a merch shop as the first stop on a first date is just... I don't know..."
"There's still plenty of time. Let's try somewhere else."
Han Seoyeon patted her shoulder, consoling. Just as she had said, any course was fine by her so long as Hitomi liked it. If, on the other hand, Hitomi was nursing something like a romantic ideal of what a date ought to be, then that ideal deserved an effort. Smiling faintly, Seoyeon glanced about, and her gaze came to rest before a certain building.
"Then... how about over there?"
"Uh... an art museum?"
Hitomi looked where she was pointing, and her eyes went round.
"Do you like art and that sort of thing, Shion?"
"No. Not especially. I only thought a museum date sounded reasonably proper."
She had not thought very deeply about whether it was truly a good course for a date. Both of them were near enough to amateurs in this field anyway. One might pick up a little culture, and the atmosphere was quiet—didn't that seem pleasant enough? That was the whole of her appraisal.
"And I had the impression you took some interest in this sort of thing yourself, Hitomi. Was I wrong?"
"You're right. I did grow up watching my father paint, after all..."
She rarely went out of her way to a museum just to look, but she was interested enough that if a related documentary happened to come on, she would leave the channel where it was. As a place to drop in while they were already out, it was not a bad choice.
And so the two of them drew near the museum—only to break into wry smiles the moment they saw the banner hung out front.
"This is..."
"Ahaha... of all the coincidences."
A promotional banner for an exhibition running in one wing of the museum. The theme, which doubled as the exhibition's title, was this:
And Madness.
An unusual subject, perhaps. But that was not what had seized their attention. Beneath the title, printed small, were the names of the artists who had contributed work, and wedged among names that looked comparatively ordinary, that one was striking enough to make a person wonder if it was a pseudonym chosen to stand out.
Both of them, of course, knew perfectly well that it was no pseudonym. They knew the man who bore it as his true name.
"...That's your father, isn't it?"
"Y-yeah. I don't imagine there are two painters in Japan with a name like that..."
Ninomae Hajime. The name belonged to the father of Ninomae Hitomi, who stood just then with her arm linked through Han Seoyeon's.
"Now that I look, one of Father's friends is listed too... so I think it really is him."
"I'd heard that painting was a hobby of his, but I didn't know he was well-known enough to exhibit in a place like this."
She remembered the name perfectly, Hitomi added, it being one of her father's few friends.
"In any case, we'll have to go in. I'm personally curious to see your father's paintings."
On the very day they had come out, the museum they happened to wander into was hosting her father's exhibition. It would hardly be too much to call it fate.
"Do you suppose your father might be here himself?"
"Hmm, I don't know. I never heard he was coming up to the city... but Father almost never bothers to tell us about things like this..."
Hitomi answered with a bitter smile. He would probably come up to Tokyo at least once while the exhibition ran, but even then he would only stop by the house briefly on his way home, once his business was done. She could picture it all too clearly. Han Seoyeon nodded as though she understood. The time she had spent face to face with the man called Ninomae Hajime had been very short, but it had been enough to take his measure.
An artist, in the good sense and the bad. The sort of temperament you might get by stirring a taciturn man, an eccentric, and a madman into one vessel and portioning the mixture out by thirds. To borrow his daughter Hitomi's own words, he was someone "whose thoughts you can never begin to guess, and yet who sees straight through everyone else."
Even so, a certain affection for his family showed through, and on that point his character ranked high within the category of eccentric artist. Such was the judgment of Seoyeon, who in her work as a Holy Knight had looked upon every variety of human being there was.
There was a saying that genius and madness were separated by a single sheet of paper, and those regarded as exceptional geniuses even in the hidden world were especially given to that tendency. If a proper respect for the law was even firmly seated in you, that alone put you somewhere near the average; harbor a real humanity toward others, and you stood unmistakably in the upper ranks. The other direction had no floor.
Han Seoyeon thought of a few among those once called the Seven Sisters—otherwise, the Seven Great Madmen. That Professor Senjoji, notorious as an eccentric even at the university, was the most ordinary of them on personality alone said everything that needed saying. It was not for nothing that their epithet had been not the Seven Great Minds of the World, but the Seven Great Madmen of the World.
"...Ugh. It's a little creepy in here."
"Well... the theme of the exhibition does lean that way."
They had come into Gallery Three, where the show was hung, and Hitomi murmured this with a small shiver. Death, rebirth, madness—a theme that could produce nothing, on the whole, but paintings dark and uncanny. Had it been death and rebirth alone, a brighter work might have appeared, for there were ways of seeing that did not treat death as purely negative. The moment madness was added, the exhibition's direction was fixed.
"...This doesn't seem to have been a good choice for a date, either."
Han Seoyeon said it in the same calm voice as always. Threaded through it, very faintly, was the worry that she might have disappointed the person beside her.
"Th-think of it like a haunted house. Those aren't strange as date spots, so..."
Having caught what lay underneath, Hitomi said this while drawing Seoyeon's arm in even closer. In her heart she was half tempted to squeal kyaa, I'm so scared and fish for a little affection, but even she thought doing that in an art museum would be poor manners, so she let it go. At her words Seoyeon let out a soft breath of a laugh. She had surely not taken them at face value; more likely she had simply understood that Hitomi meant to comfort her. And so Seoyeon swept as much of the gloom from her manner as she could and carried the conversation on.
"Ah. I believe those are your father's."
"Oh. They really are."
A signature made of nothing but two straight strokes. Seoyeon indicated several paintings that bore it: one that seemed to take the nine phases of a body's decay for its motif, one that set skulls out like so much furniture, one of an old man locked in an expression of raw anguish. In atmosphere they were not so different from the other works they had just passed. And yet perhaps some remnant of her father lingered in them. Those paintings alone Hitomi regarded as if she were meeting something she had missed. She reached out without thinking, then snatched her hand back in a fluster the instant she remembered they were works hanging in a museum, and, as if satisfied, was just about to turn her gaze toward another artist's paintings.
"Huh?"
An instant later a familiar shape flickered at the corner of her vision, and her eyes flew wide.
"...Dad?"
"Yes?"
At the voice she had let slip without meaning to, Han Seoyeon whipped her head around as well. A man stood where both their gazes ended. Perhaps because he was out, he looked far neater than when she had seen him before, but it was unmistakably the Ninomae Hajime from her memory.
Startled by the sudden appearance of her lover's father, Seoyeon was on the point of bowing in greeting when Hajime moved first.
"Sorry. I intruded."
"...Pardon?"
"Dad?!"
He took one look at his daughter and, as if he already understood everything, turned his back without a shred of hesitation and made to flee. Had Hitomi not rushed after him and caught his arm, he would almost certainly have walked straight out of the museum.
"I mean—come on, who just leaves without even saying hello?!"
"Daughter. Keep your voice down in a museum. And I do not consider it a good idea to shift, without warning, from a date into a formal meeting of the families."
"Eh? W-wait... I haven't even told you we're dating yet...?"
She had not yet told her family that she had a lover. It was not that she had meant to hide it; it had simply been a matter of timing. When she asked in surprise all the same, Hajime drew his brows together and looked at his daughter.
"...In that outfit, and it isn't a date?"
"...Ah."
He had a point. Unless it were a date, there was no world in which Hitomi would have worn something this bold—bold, at least, by her own reckoning. A truly terrifying insight, Ninomae Hitomi thought, just as she had felt since she was small.
"No. At least in this, it was only that you failed to think it thr—"
"Nnh—be quiet...!"