She didn’t not paint people, she painted the gods.
If I’d heard that thoroughly confounding statement the night before, I’m sure I would’ve been totally baffled─it probably would’ve only served to fuel my confusion.
But now that the mystery of the giant painting in the auditorium had been solved, and Ms. Towai herself was standing there before us, those few words were enough.
Anyone could see that there were no human figures depicted in those thirty-three canvases, of course─the people had been removed from the masterworks each painting was based on, there was no other way to interpret it.
But at the same time, you could put it differently.
The artist had painted everything other than the human beings.
Other than the human beings.
Landscapes, scenery, nature, plants and animals, angels and deities.
There was no shared element whatsoever among the thirty-three wildly varied paintings, and the artists and eras were all over the place. No shared element─or so it seemed.
But once you noticed a premise so fundamental it could hardly even be called a unifying theme─the presence of human figures in all of the original paintings─then the artist’s intentions also came into view.
The thirty-three paintings had been chosen specifically in order to not paint human figures─or to put it the other way around, the chances that the artist had chosen them because she didn’t like to paint people or was bad at it were vanishingly slim.
Because if that were the case, she could simply have copied paintings that didn’t have people in them to begin with─but she hadn’t.
Ms. Towai had exclusively chosen paintings with people in them─and then asked them to withdraw from the locked rooms of the canvases.
And the point of it all?
It wasn’t about the humans who had been removed─it was about the locked rooms that had been left behind.
“So…you’re saying she did it because she hated people?” Mr. Bare-Legs asked, tilting his head quizzically. But that wasn’t it.
Of course, you had to be pretty warped to try an experiment like that, but Ms. Towai wasn’t a plain old misanthrope─after all, she’d painted every single student at the school into The Auditorium in the Auditorium all by herself, which made me tired just thinking about it.
What we had to focus on now was what the thirty-three canvases had in common, the shared element that we’d previously decided didn’t exist─no, you know what, we were right. It didn’t exist after all.
It really just boiled down to a question of Ms. Towai’s tastes.
But her tastes alone didn’t explain the issue Sotoin had raised─it was unimaginable that she wouldn’t have included Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa when she set out to choose her subjects. And maybe Munch’s The Scream as well.
There were probably others, too─I could think of plenty of paintings whose absence from the collection seemed strange.
Then what did they share?
What did the paintings she hadn’t chosen have in common?
Landscapes, nudes, historical paintings, genre paintings, war scenes, Japanese paintings, ink wash paintings, abstracts… The thirty-three canvases included all kinds of artists and eras, styles like Impressionism and Cubism, even a variety of media from oil paintings to watercolors to woodblock prints. Yes, they all depicted human figures, but what did the historically important works she hadn’t chosen have in common?
It was obvious.
It became obvious as soon as I envisioned all thirty-three paintings─Ms. Towai hadn’t selected any self-portraits, no matter how famous or how universally recognized they were as masterpieces.
There were portraits, but no self-portraits─so to take it a bit further, she hadn’t painted any paintings of artists.
When she removed the human beings from all manner of paintings spanning genre and era, East and West, she made an exception for the tribe of artists─because they were exceptional.
It was as if.
She was likening the great artists to gods.
…If that was the case, then it explained the absence of the Mona Lisa. There’s a popular belief─probably apocryphal, but so widespread that even I’ve heard of it─that Leonardo’s Mona Lisa is actually a self-portrait. And no matter how unreliable that rumor might be, if there was even a one-in-a-million chance it was true, she would want to avoid the risk of accidentally eliminating that universal genius from the canvas.
Munch’s case is even more cut and dried.
Although you can’t really call it a self-portrait, The Scream is the artist’s depiction of his own terror at the scream of nature─in other words, the central figure is Munch.
If she had made studies of those two works, she would have been forced to paint them as they were, and the theme of her series would have lost its meaning.
Her theme.
That is─her faith.
She expressed that faith not by deifying artists in her paintings, but by choosing not to paint people who weren’t artists─and while it may have been twisted as a mountain path, the impartiality of that choice to ultimately paint neither artists nor non-artists was also an act of tenderness. So if she had chosen a work by Leonardo or Munch, it would’ve had to be something other than the Mona Lisa or The Scream.
When the child genius said there were at least thirty-three more canvases, he must’ve been thinking of the self-portraits by the artists who painted the first thirty-three─and needless to say, she wouldn’t have removed the great artists from those paintings.
But her versions of those paintings didn’t actually exist.
Her approach wasn’t “I don’t paint what I can’t paint,” but rather “I paint what I want to paint by not painting it.”
The images of those figures Ms. Towai worshipped weren’t in any crawl space; they existed only on the canvases of her heart─
“Come on, come on, stop it. Enough already.”
Up to this point Ms. Towai had been acting so brazenly that you’d never guess she was a trespasser, but all of a sudden she was flapping her hand in embarrassment.
“I never imagined you’d guess the truth,” she said. “I figured I’d just get a good laugh out of whatever cockamamie answers you came up with. Damn, if I’d known you were going to embarrass me like this I never would’ve come.” But there was a redness in her cheeks that had nothing to do with the paint all over her face, and she looked somehow pleased.
“You, what’s your name?” she asked the child genius.
He had returned to silent mode, however, so Sotoin answered for him.
“Sosaku Yubiwa. We call him Sosaku the Artiste, creator of beauty.”
But he didn’t stop there.
“He’s the heir to the Yubiwa Foundation, the same organization that chased you out of this school.”
Um, I think that qualifies as TMI?
But maybe he thought it wouldn’t have been fair to conceal that information from her─maybe it would have violated his aesthetic.
Ms. Towai nodded with a chuckle, and just said, “Is he now? If a guy like you had been around seven years ago, maybe I wouldn’t have gotten the axe.”
Short and sweet.
I’m pretty sure her attitude was genuine, but I also imagine her life as a teacher seven years ago felt like ancient history at this point.
“…There’s one thing I still don’t get,” the delinquent broke in.
I was suddenly overtaken by the desire to point out that there was likely a lot more than one thing he didn’t get, but I restrained myself─I’m not that low.
“I get now why you painted those pictures, but why’d you hide ’em in the art room crawl space when they fired you?”
Oh yeah. That mystery still wasn’t solved.
Those canvases were an expression of her inner self, so how come she’d left them in the art room? Don’t tell me she simply forgot them or something?
No.
Just like Fudatsuki hadn’t really forgotten those contact lenses on the bench, there was no way those thirty-three paintings just got left behind by accident.
“No, I mean… There’s no deeper meaning to it.”
She wiped her hands with the kerchief wrapped around her head─which was probably another attempt to cover up her embarrassment.
“I imagined if I hid them in the crawl space, somewhere down the line when the art room was being used again, some weird kids might find my paintings─and I wanted them to be like, ‘What the hell are these?’”
I bet she never thought it would actually happen.
I bet she thought the art room would never be used again, and even if it were, no one would make a point of inspecting the ceiling, and if for some other reason the paintings were discovered, no one would think twice about tossing them in the trash.
No matter what kind of artist she was, no one could’ve expected this.
That seven years later, a crazy bunch of kids would commandeer the art room, discover the canvases in the course of painting a mural on the ceiling, take them down and think, “What the hell are these?” and end up getting pulled into the mystery just like she’d planned.
“You the one that found them, Sosaku Yubiwa?”
“Young Dojima was the one who discovered them. Mayumi the Seer, she of the beautiful eyes,” Sotoin said, kindly introducing me to the artist.
“Yeah? She’s the one who solved the mystery of The Auditorium in the Auditorium, too, wasn’t she? Must be some kind of child genius.”
Um, no. That’s Sosaku.
And anyway, it was mostly thanks to borrowed wisdom that I was able to solve the mystery at all.
“This is Michiru the Epicure, he of the beautiful palate, otherwise known as Michiru Fukuroi. This is Hyota the Adonis, he of the beautiful legs, otherwise known as Hyota Ashikaga. And this is Nagahiro the Orator, he of the beautiful voice, otherwise known as Nagahiro Sakiguchi.”
Sotoin introduced our members one by one─looking genuinely pleased as he did so.
“And who are you?”
“Manabu Sotoin. Manabu the Aesthete, lover of beauty, president of the Pretty Boy Detective Club. I think it’s a wonderful thing that a teacher like you was here seven years ago. And I’m delighted to have met you today,” he replied.
I assumed he was delighted because we’d been able to promptly confirm the accuracy of our theories, but it wasn’t so.
“You see, there’s a favor I’d like to ask of you,” he continued. “Ms. Towai, it’s your art room. But as a reward for solving the mystery, would you be willing to pass it on to us? The Pretty Boy Detective Club would like to carry on your beautiful vision.”