I, on the other hand, wil never be an artist in the true sense as long as the detectives are stil at work counting my farts. I can turn to the easel, I can take up the palette, but I cannot be a painter. Only by bringing myself to this unknown mountain vil age and steeping myself deep in its late spring world have I at last found within me the attitude of the pure artist. Once I have crossed this frontier, al the beauties of the earth become mine.
Though no drop of paint nor jot of brushstroke ever meets the pure white canvas before me, I am nevertheless an artist of the highest order. I grant I do not equal Michelangelo in artistry, nor Raphael in skil , but my artist’s soul can take its place alongside those of the great men of antiquity, proud and equal. I have not made a single painting since arriving, indeed I almost feel that to have brought the painting box along at al was a mere whim. And you cal yourself a painter? you may say with a sneer. But sneer though you may, I am for the present a true artist, a magnificent artist.
Those who have attained this state don’t necessarily produce great works—but al who produce great works must first attain it.
These are my meditations as I savor a cigarette after breakfast. The sun has risen high above the trailing mists. I slide open the screen doors to gaze out onto the mountainside beyond. The spring green of the trees seems almost transparent in the sunlight and glows with an astonishing richness.
I’ve always felt that the relationship between air, form, and color is the most fascinating study that the world affords. Do you focus on color to evoke air, or on form? Or do you focus on air, and weave color and form through it? The slightest shift in approach can alter the feel of a painting in any number of ways. It wil also differ, of course, depending on the tastes of the painter himself, and be limited by the strictures of time and place.
The landscape paintings of the English contain no hint of brightness. Perhaps they dislike bright works, but even if this weren’t the case, nothing bright could be produced in that dismal air of theirs. The paintings of the Englishman Goodal , however, are a completely different matter, and justly so.1 Though he was English, he never painted a single English landscape. His subject was not his native land but exclusively the landscapes of Egypt and Persia, whose air is by contrast marvelously pure. Anyone seeing his paintings for the first time wil be astonished at their clarity and wonder that an Englishman could produce such bril iance of color.
Nothing can be done about individual tastes, of course, but if our aim is to paint the Japanese landscape, we must depict the air and colors peculiar to it. No matter how fine you think the colors of French paintings, you cannot simply borrow them wholesale and claim that your painting depicts a Japanese landscape. You must immerse yourself in the natural world, study its multifarious forms, the shifting ways of cloud and mist, morning and evening, and only then, when you have at last lit on the very color you need, should you seize your tripod and rush outside to paint.
Colors change from moment to moment. If you once lose the opportunity, you must wait a long time before your eyes fal on precisely this color again.
The mountainside to which I now lift my gaze is flush with a marvelous hue rarely seen in these parts. It’s a great shame to have come al this way to be confronted by this moment, and to let it slip. Let me just try to paint it. . . .
I open the door to leave, and there at the second-floor window, leaning against the sliding paper door, stands Nami. Her chin is buried in the col ar of her kimono, and only her profile is visible. Just as I am on the point of greeting her, her right hand rises as if lifted on a breeze, while the left hand continues to hang at her side. Something—is it lightning?—flashes swiftly up and down at her breast, there is a sharp click, and the flash is gone again. In her left hand I now see she’s holding the unvarnished wooden scabbard of a dagger. The next instant she has hidden herself behind the screen door. I leave the inn with the il usion that I have stopped in briefly on a morning performance at the Kabuki theater.
Turning left directly outside the gate, I’m soon confronted with a steep path that sets off almost perpendicularly straight up the mountainside.
Cries of bush warblers echo here and there among the trees. On my left the gentle slope that descends to the val ey is planted with mandarin trees; two low hil s stand to my right, apparently also devoted entirely to mandarin orchards. How many years ago was it that I visited here? I can’t be bothered counting. I remember it was a cold December, and it was the first time I’d come across a landscape of hil s swathed everywhere with mandarin trees like this. I asked one of the mandarin pickers perched in a tree if I could purchase a branch of them, and he replied cheerily, “Take as many as you want,†and began to sing an odd song. Back in Tokyo, I remember reflecting wonderingly, you had to go to a herbalist to come by so much as the skin of a mandarin. I heard a frequent sound of gunshot, and when I asked what it was, I was told that hunters were out shooting ducks. On that visit I had not the faintest inkling of Nami’s existence.
As an actor, she would make a marvelous female impersonator on the Kabuki stage. When most actors appear onstage, their performance is that of someone outside the home setting, but she spends her everyday life performing, and she doesn’t even recognize the fact. She’s a natural actor. Hers could truly be cal ed “the artist’s life.†Thanks to Nami, I am wel on the path to true painting.
Unless I view her behavior as performance, its unsettling nature wil doubtless plague me to distraction al day. An ordinary novelist, equipped with the standard tools of reason or human sentiment, would quickly find the study of this woman overstimulating and retreat in disgust. If any emotional entanglement were to develop between us in the real world, my suffering would no doubt be unspeakable. But my aim on this journey is to leave behind the world of common emotions and achieve the transcendent state of the artist, so I must view everything before me through the lens of art—apprehending people in terms of the Noh or other drama or as figures in a poem. Viewed from my chosen artistic perspective, this woman’s behavior is more aesthetical y satisfying than that of any woman I have come across, and it’s al the more beautiful for the fact that she is unaware of the beauty of her art.
Don’t misunderstand me. I maintain that it’s quite unreasonable to judge behavior such as hers simply as unbecoming in a citizen of our society. Yes, to do good, to be virtuous, to preserve chastity, to sacrifice oneself for the sake of duty are no easy matters. Al who attempt these things must suffer to achieve them, and if we are to brave such suffering, somewhere must lurk the promise of a pleasure great enough to defeat the pain. Painting, poetry, drama—these are simply different names for the pleasure within this anguish. When we once grasp this truth, we wil at last act with courage and grace; we wil overcome al adversity and be in a position to satisfy the supreme aesthetic urges of our heart. One must disregard physical suffering, set material inconvenience at naught, cultivate a dauntless spirit, and be prepared to submit to any torture for the sake of righteousness and humanity. Defined on the narrow basis of human sentiment, Art could be said to be a bright light hidden within the heart of us men of learning, a crystal ization of that fierce dedication that cannot but repel evil and cleave to the good, shrink from the warped and align itself with the straight, aid the weak and crush the strong—a crystal that wil shoot back the flashing arrows of the daylight world that would pierce it.