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outside, so as a rule I didn’t agree to requests regarding the subject matter. I would talk things over with people, and to some extent I’d take general suggestions, like if someone said they wanted fruit, or animals, or the ocean or something. So far I had painted about twenty pictures on walls, warehouses, and playground equipment.
    That said, I wasn’t passionately committed to earning a living this way or anything. I tried it once and people liked it, so I kept doing it. That’s all there was to it.
    Basically, I just liked the lifestyle I had when I was painting my murals. I didn’t think my work necessarily had much value as art.
    Sooner or later they were bound to be destroyed or painted over for bureaucratic reasons, after all, so there was no point obsessing over details. All I wanted was to have fun painting, to chat and make friends with people who came by while I worked, and for my mural to add just a little bit of warmth to the lives of the people in the vicinity.
    The wall I’d been asked to paint this time was on the grounds of my old art school. It was a fairly low wall that divided the campus from a place that used to be a preschool and was now a privately run Infant Development Center. There was already a mural on the art-school side, one from a long time ago, but the side facing the center was just plain yellow. The people who hired me said I could paint whatever I wanted there.
    I had nice memories of the building itself, since it was near my school and I had seen it all the time when I was taking classes, so I accepted the job immediately when an old classmate of mine, Sayuri, offered it to me. She was the center’s piano teacher.
    The building that housed the center was a bit old but really charming: it had been designed by an architect who grew up in the neighborhood, and he had worked hard to make it special so that future generations of children could go to school in a fresh, innovative structure.
    Even when I was a student, I’d loved the center, I loved it more the more I saw it—the shape of the walls; the contour of the building itself; the yard, specially landscaped for children, with a little manmade hill—and I used to have my lunch leaning against that wall, watching the kids. The building had such an aura of warmth to it that I thought if I had been young enough, I would have wanted to go to school there myself.
    Apparently it was getting dangerously run-down, though, and since it would cost a fortune to fix it up, someone had suggested that the whole structure be torn down. A TV crew came to report on it and everything. They presented it as the story of a community trying to save a local building and a painter they had hired to help. I agreed to do an interview.
    I wasn’t particularly involved with the political stuff, though. I just wanted to have fun with the kids who had to pass by to get in and out of the building, and to look into their eyes, and put the things I saw in them up on that wall. I figured this job would keep me busy all spring; beyond that, I couldn’t say. There’s no point thinking about the future.
    That’s what it’s like when you’re creating things. On the one hand, it really seems like you’re keeping it all moving on your own, and you can tell yourself that you’ve got inspiration raining down on you, but ultimately you can’t make anything happen on your own.
    I knew the kids would make it work. They would help me put something eternal onto that wall. Something that would last forever, even if the wall did end up being knocked down. And that was enough for me.
    I’d been through so many unfamiliar things recently, looking after my mom and managing her funeral and so on, and it was like this worldly grime had rubbed off on me from dealing with all that. I wanted to wash it all away, throwing myself into my work.
    Caring for my mom had taken all the energy I had, and I hadn’t had the mental space to think of anything but how overwhelmed I was.