Drawing Commuters at a Cafe Window

There is a café near Demachiyanagi where the owner lets me sit for three hours on one cup of coffee. I take the seat facing the window, where the light comes in flat and grey before nine. Commuters cross the bridge in twos and threes. I draw them badly and quickly, and by the fourth page someone always looks like they are walking with purpose.

I do not draw faces. I draw the way a coat hangs when a person is tired, the angle of an umbrella, the small hesitation before someone steps off the curb. Faces give too much away and take too long. A shoulder can carry a whole morning.

A Cat in Every Corner

There is a rule I made for myself and never wrote down: every drawing gets a cat. Not because clients ask for it. Because a cat gives the eye somewhere to rest. In the café sketch it sits on the ledge outside the window, ignoring everyone. Nobody in the picture has noticed it yet.

A cat is not decoration. It is the one thing in the frame that refuses to perform.

People sometimes lean over and ask what I am drawing. I show them, and they laugh, mostly at the cat. Once a man in a grey suit asked if I could draw him thinner. I said I only draw what is there. He seemed relieved, which I did not expect.

Paying in Sketches

The owner keeps my drawings pinned behind the register — four so far, all cat, all different windows. She says the coffee is free after the fifth. I am not sure she means it. I am also not going to ask, because the possibility is worth more than the coffee.

By ten the café fills and the light changes and the drawings stop working. I close the sketchbook, pay, and walk along the river to the studio. The cat in the last sketch is still there on the page, waiting for me to decide which window it belongs to.