Kintsukuroi || Dazai Osamu x Reader

1. Carpe Noctum

I'm an artist. An eccentric, even among the creative types, choosing to spray up walls for nothing but the satisfaction of turning a blank wall into something worth looking at. That's who I am. I want people in places as depressing as these to see something vibrant and alive. I paint absurdly detailed works out of spite, blowing all my money on supplies and tools. I live without many obligations, so I'm free to live for what makes me happy without pressure to conform. I'm very lucky. This kind of life makes me happy, plain and simple. I'm free to do as I please. The only time I was broken was when I was under the control of other people.

I sighed and wiped the sweat off my forehead, but my eyes shone with excitement. After glancing both ways to make sure I was alone, I began.

So, step one of making a wheatpaste poster — prepare a thin poster beforehand and find a spot to put it: check. Step two; make some wheat paste by boiling a mix of flour, water, and sugar that acts as an adhesive: check. Step three: gather supplies (gloves, a large paint roller or brush, and tape). And then, step four —application.

I stretched out my arms to unroll the large vertical poster I'd spent a week preparing, and paused to admire it before pressing it against the wall with my hands. I hastily taped it to the wall at shoulder's height, and stepped back to make sure it was even. It was an acrylic painting of a small, brightly colored dandelion weed with a yellow flowerhead just barely blooming through the cracks in a sidewalk. The flower in itself looked delicate and fragile, like it could be blown over by too harsh a breeze, but resilient, for miraculously finding a way to live on a concrete pavement. A metaphor for the residents themselves.

Once I was sure the poster was perfectly level, I taped each edge to the wall and opened the lid of wheatpaste, putting on rubber gloves before grabbing my paint roller. I began the tedious task of tearing off the tape and smearing a layer of the gloppy whitish liquid beneath it that looked sort of like diluted semen (gross), waited for it to dry, and applied a second layer.

The process of wheatpasting is tedious and tires the hell out of your arms, but it's worth it. For one, your art can be way more detailed and intricate as opposed to spray paint (spray paint is tricky, easy to mess up). If you're not artistically gifted, you can always print out a design. Once wheatpaste posters are on, they're very hard to take off, so law enforcement and competing artists usually just wait for it to peel off, which can take several months depending on what the wall is made of. That's a downside of graffiti art: it doesn't last forever. You have no idea how frustrating it is to spend a dizzying amount of time on an piece only to have it removed or sprayed over, but that's how it is.

But luckily, few people try to erase the art I put up. I'm well known in this area. I go by the moniker Kintsukuroi, after the Japanese art of repaired pottery. After a ceramic bowl or vase was broken, people would glue it back together with a gold or silver adhesive, lining the once ugly cracks with precious metal, and the bowl would become something more beautiful and intricate. Symbolic, even. I chose the name because it's representative of my own life. I have a tattoo running down my entire right arm of a giant, golden crack running down my arm to honor that. My circle of graffiti and tattoo artist friends (those two groups often overlap) in the area gave me the pet name Retsu, short for kiretsu (meaning a crack or fissure).

I've made several murals in this area, and people tend to like my work. Four years ago, I started making street art to cover up the suspicious stains and whitewashed walls that sucked the life out of the place. Not to toot my own horn, but since I and a few other artists moved in, this place has become a more homely place for the poorest in our city.

It took about fifteen minutes to finish sealing up my poster. A quick and easy crime. After the poster dried at bit, I lined the edges of the poster with gray spray paint so that the picture's gray pavement blended with the brick wall, disguising the fact that it was wheatpasted. Once finished, I dropped to the ground and cast away my paint roller with a sigh. I looked up at the dimly lit painting, and was about to smile when my ears picked up the just barely audible grind of loose dirt — a footstep.