Insurgencies / 2

On my way out of the park which surrounds Senzoku Pond, I stopped in shock at the street corner. Two workmen, their heads wrapped in pastel dish towels, stood painting an apartment house. One man’s paintbrush was steeped in red, the other’s steeped in blue and together they were painting over twenty years worth of gray. That gray which is the official color of industry, despair and Tokyo.

The apartment house was the usual jumble of haphazard angles, but now the curb and first storey were blue and the staircases on both sides, red. A triangular outcropping which jutted toward the street had turned an uncompromising green.

The remaining gray, commandeered on the second storey, served as a charming accent beneath the blue eaves. The mismatched angles of the apartment house, which had seemed ugly and careless, had been rendered as awkwardly appealing as a child’s set of building blocks.

In order to survive Tokyo, a secret internal reserve of color must be maintained. The small park at Senzoku Pond is an essential cache. For the red shrine, the iridescent pigeons and the orange carp. In this season for the yellow gingko leaves pressed to every path.

Now, however, it appears that color is spreading.

Is it too dangerous to hope that color may be making advances, might be making inroads even here in this gray city? In clear December air, the color sweeps silently down from the shrine to the carp in the stream and out to the street and the color bursts unstoppable up the red staircase and into our lives.