The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature: From Restoration to Occupation, 1868-1945: vol. 1 (Modern Asian Literature Series)

by J. Thomas Rimer

  So Shimaki, half-believing, half-doubting this description, decided to call on Koizumi.

  Koizumi was then renting a room in a temple in the Teramachi district of Osaka, working at improving his painting techniques. When Shimaki saw him, Koizumi was quietly sitting in a room of the temple annex wearing an Oshima splashed-pattern kimono—(he later adopted Western dress again after his trip to the West). There was a scroll of a Nara landscape painted in the style of the Japanese school hanging in the alcove, together with an oil painting of a nude woman and a picture made of embroidery that Koizumi himself had sewn. All this added up to an artistic ambience so completely unlike the surroundings in which he used to live before when he seemed so strange that Shimaki could not refrain from saying, “You used to be so uncommunicative, so cold.”

  “It was nervous exhaustion that brought it about,” answered Koizumi, and they both burst out laughing.

  Yet this laughter did not erase the impression that Koizumi’s strangely subdued way of speaking had made on Shimaki. Indeed, from that time on Shimaki was convinced that Koizumi was no ordinary person. And this impression never left him.

  As his sketch advanced and Shimaki began to apply paint, and the outlines and colors of the composition he had planned began to take shape, his thoughts drifted away from Koizumi. And there appeared before his mind’s eye two landscapes he had seen before: a snowscape by Monet, which he had seen when he was abroad, and a snowscape by Koizumi, which he had seen four or five years ago at a New School Association Exhibition. Both were remarkable: Monet’s for the colors and Koizumi’s for the drawing; that is, Monet seemed to have captured the beauty of the snow, whereas Koizumi had captured the cold of the snow. In earlier days Shimaki, too, had painted in the manner of Monet, but recently he had come to favor the Southern school of Chinese landscape painting and had tried, with oils, to express in colors as simply as possible the particular “atmosphere” that the school was known to promote. And so Shimaki preferred Koizumi’s to Monet’s snowscape. Shimaki’s forte was landscape painting, whereas Koizumi excelled in portraits. Because the subjects they painted were so completely different, it was easy for Shimaki to accept Koizumi the man and his art, and for Koizumi to do likewise.

  Shimaki resumed sketching, and his thoughts returned to Koizumi, to the time at the end of October the year before when he had called on him.

  Shimaki had left his house after noon and stopped by the research institute briefly before boarding the Hanshin Line train. Taking advantage of the good weather, he got off at Ashiya, one stop before Sumiyoshi where Koizumi lived, and started to walk the two and a half miles on the road that led to Koizumi’s house. The sea was immediately to the south and the Rokkō Mountains to the north. The foothills of the mountains sloped down all the way to the beach. The lay of the land reminded Shimaki of the region around Nice in southern France where he had once traveled. Unfortunately, whereas in southern France there had been red earth and dense stretches of olive groves, light green and black, to paint, here there was nothing but white sand and groves of black pine. And instead of a wealth of old-fashioned stone houses and villas, there were cheap bungalows and barrack-like dwellings. In short, southern France offered an inexhaustible number of subjects to paint wherever one looked, but here no matter where one looked, there was nothing but scenery to disappoint a painter. As Shimaki considered how Koizumi managed to find inspiration to paint in a landscape like this, in addition to painting the nudes and still lifes that were only natural for a painter who was cooped up in his studio, his respect for Koizumi’s unique talent was rekindled.

  This time his visit not only was motivated by his desire to see a friend whom he had not seen for some time, but he also wanted to see how he looked after being confined indoors for two years by poor health. Koizumi had told him that he was in poor health when he visited him in the fall and again in the spring of the preceding year. It seemed then that while he was getting physically weaker, his spirit and talent were gaining strength. But Koizumi had again canceled his trip to Tokyo to inspect the annual New School Exhibition at the end of August. And he had not shown up once at the research institute since September.—It could conceivably be a very serious illness, and then again, it was also possible that Koizumi was feigning illness. And that is why Shimaki was especially eager to see how he looked. His suspicion that Koizumi might not be all that sick was grounded in the following:

  When Koizumi was still in Osaka they saw each other quite often—their homes were relatively close to each other, and they got along well. They both were good conversationalists. Words came easily to Shimaki, and he had no difficulty making people laugh. Koizumi stuttered yet was quite eloquent in his own eccentric way. He had an especially strange sense of humor which compelled Shimaki, who liked to display his verbal talents whenever he was in the company of his other friends, to fall into the role of listener, and he remembered the stories that Koizumi told him long after he had heard them. Among the more memorable were two: “The Man Who Was Chilled to the Bones” and “The Stomach’s Sabotage”—a story about a man on a journey who nearly died on the wayside. Abridged and restated, “Bone Man” goes like so:

  It often happens that on mornings when there is a sudden chill in the air, dragonflies freeze and fall to the ground. The sight of them fills me with pity, and I pick them up and warm them at the hibachi, or in my hands; they revive quickly and start to breathe again, but they’re no match for the autumn chill, and in the end they turn into corpses. When autumn comes, I don’t turn into a corpse like the dragonflies, but a chill creeps into my heart and I’m utterly forlorn. I feel chilled to the bone every day from fall through winter and into early summer. The only time I’m not cold is midsummer—yet I remember having caught a cold on the Indian Ocean at the height of summer. It’s like that even when I’m at the art museum. Every year at the end of August, as I’m inspecting all those bad paintings, the aftereffect of looking at too many paintings combined with the undigested bread in my stomach produces a sort of food poisoning, and I get diarrhea. Placing a pocket heater on my stomach, even imagining that I’m climbing a mountain under a blazing late summer sun can’t keep me from shivering. Actually, the misery of the “Bone Man” is to be extremely susceptible to both cold and heat.

  “The Stomach’s Sabotage” goes as follows:

  As the saying goes, “the sick man likes other people to think that his illness is serious, even fatal.” Sometimes I try to take pride in the fact that my stomach trouble is different from the ordinary run-of-the-mill stomach ailment, and I’m annoyed when other people take it lightly. The doctor says I have gastric atony. The stomach muscles become powerless and provoke a kind of “sabotage.” This “sabotage” often causes cerebral anemia when it’s severe. Cerebral anemia is dangerous because it can happen at any time or place. I’ve collapsed twice on the roadside on account of cerebral anemia, The first time I was overcome with dizziness on a country road in Mejiro in Tokyo around eight o’clock at night, and I collapsed in a dark field. That time I was saved by a goodhearted rickshaw man. The second time I collapsed in Nara Park. I had felt a heaviness in my stomach all morning as I was sketching by a deserted pond. The day was the sort of cloudy, gray, cold, damp day that I hate most, and as usual I had forgotten to eat lunch. I think it was around three in the afternoon. I had put away my painting gear and had just made it up a hill when suddenly heaven and earth whirled as if there had been an earthquake, and my heart began to beat at the rate of an alarm bell. Before I knew what had happened, I had tossed away my painting gear and collapsed in a field. I remember looking up at the sky to see whether it was the sky of this world or the next. I knew I wasn’t dead yet when a large, familiar cryptomeria tree appeared above my head, but I still felt strange. I looked around to see if someone was there. Some workmen were busy repairing a road about half a block away, and I screamed twice, “I’m dying. Please come quickly.” The men just looked in my direction and continued with their digging. I got
very angry, thinking that they were unfriendly louts who wouldn’t put down their work even to come to the aid of a dying man. I yelled again, “Please come quickly. I’m dying.” That time they heard. The foreman gave orders and two of the workmen came running and carried me to the reception room of the inn where I was staying. That night the maid warmed my frozen hands and feet with her own hands ail night long, and I eventually recovered. Since then, I’ve disliked climbing hills with painting gear on my shoulder. My aversion for going out alone to paint scenery dates from that time, too.

  Shimaki continued walking. The scenery along the roadside that had reminded him of southern France and that he had enjoyed a little while ago bored him now, and he regretted that he had gotten off the train a stop too soon. He was angry at the foreigners—man and wife or simply a couple of lovers—who sped by him in a car, and in the end even the monotony of the splendid, broad national highway that he was walking along angered him. When people are angry, they become unable to think. But after he had walked more than thirty minutes from Ashiya station, something suddenly happened to distract him from his anger.

  At the very spot where the mountains to the right are closer and the sea to the left is farther from the road and where the saké storehouses are lined up diagonally to the road, he caught sight of Koizumi Keizō standing on top of a hill looking out to the sea.

  They noticed each other at virtually the same moment; Shimaki could see that Koizumi was holding what looked like a sketch pad—at that distance he couldn’t see exactly what it was—and Koizumi could tell that the conscientious Shimaki was carrying a package that was probably a house gift. Koizumi motioned first, with his sketch pad, and Shimaki approached him. “Where are you going?” “To your place.” “Why are you walking? And why here?” After Shimaki had explained why he was walking and asked, “And you?”

  Koizumi said, “I came out for some sun,” then added, “If you’re going to my place, this way is closer” and started to walk at a hurried pace. Shimaki followed, then pulled alongside him.

  From the beginning to the end of the visit, Shimaki was the passive one.

  They walked side by side without speaking for a while, as neither of them had anything to say. Then Koizumi broke the silence by asking about the current state of affairs at the research institute. “I’ve been away lately myself, so I couldn’t say; things seem to be the same as usual,” Shimaki replied. Koizumi continued, stammering all the way: “If Yata decides before it’s too late to become a teacher at a school, he can get by without exposing his weaknesses by specializing in teaching aesthetics or the history of fine arts or methods of Western painting and showing one or two or, at the most, six or eight small works once a year at the New School Association Exhibition. Irii is a very good man; he’s kind and well liked by the students, and he likes the work, and we can entrust him with the entire management of the institute. And unless he develops extraordinary ambitions, he will be best off specializing in Osaka landscapes. And we will be best off assuming the role of advisers for the research institute while pursuing our own artistic interests.”

  Shimaki was in complete accord with this idea, and he concurred but thought that coming from Koizumi, it was a rather commonplace reading of the situation. He had, however, quite a surprise when he arrived at Koizumi’s house.

  Completed paintings, paintings in progress, and sketches for paintings to come were scattered pell-mell all over the studio as if a toy box had been overturned. What astonished Shimaki even more were more than ten identical oil paintings of a French doll that Koizumi had brought back from his trip to the West. When Shimaki asked about them, Koizumi said, “They all were painted to fill orders that my wife took.”

  An inexplicably pained expression flickered across Koizumi’s face as he spoke. Was it an expression of sadness or misery? Shimaki couldn’t tell, but he did not fail to notice it.

  The words “orders that my wife took” made Shimaki think of what a friend had told him several years ago. According to him, Koizumi’s wife was a resourceful person who helped her husband and took it upon herself to find buyers for the paintings he showed at exhibitions. This friend also told him that she herself had been a painter, and he traced their past back to the time when she and Koizumi were married—they married for love (Shimaki knew that already). He said that such a match held both advantages and disadvantages for a painter like Koizumi. One of the advantages was her understanding of painting (which could also be a drawback) and another, her sociability. The biggest advantage, however, was the fact that she found buyers for Koizumi’s paintings and kept him busy working.

  Shimaki had been envious when he first heard the story and again each time when he recalled it. But now when he saw more than ten copies of the same painting lined up before his eyes in the corner of the room as if they had been produced by a printing press, it pained him to think that Koizumi had been forced by his wife to work like a craftsman and wondered whether the real cause of Koizumi’s illness was not somehow related to this. But what astonished him most was that Koizumi’s painting technique had not deteriorated at all but had improved so much that of the ten paintings of the French doll, not a single one was poorly executed.

  Nor was that the only surprise.

  Lined up among the scattered pieces there were, in addition to several oil paintings that Koizumi had exhibited at the New School Association Exhibition that year, oil paintings and rough sketches that he apparently had done more recently. What especially caught Shimaki’s attention were two sketches that seemed to be drafts of fairly large paintings: one was a portrait, the kind of painting in which Koizumi excelled; the other was a landscape—a kind of painting that Koizumi seldom executed.

  Although both were hardly more than sketches, Shimaki did not fail to note the unique features of the two unfinished works. In keeping with the portraits that Koizumi had done in the past, they were notable for the underlying keen observation and the precise technique with which they had been painted. The compositions, however, were now decidedly bolder. Until now, Koizumi’s paintings of people, including both nudes and ordinary portraits, had been based on photographs but rendered in a decorative style. In this portrait he had put a nude woman together with a man (a portrait of himself).—The nude was lying in the foreground, that is, the lower part of the picture’s plane, and in the middle, Koizumi, depicted in profile, was drawing the nude, facing a large easel as big as himself. And in the background to the left, part of a stove with a stove pipe attached to it was facing a segment of wall hanging. The upper part of a Chinese bed was visible beneath the nude in the foreground.—While the decorative pattern of the painting was typical of Koizumi’s work, the composition aimed at a realistic depiction of life.

  Shimaki felt chilled as he gazed, fascinated, at the sketches, forgetting about Koizumi seated beside him.

  Koizumi seemed to guess how he felt from the way he was staring at the sketch, and as if he wanted to dispel Shimaki’s mood, he said, “I’m thinking of calling th-th-this: Painting of a Nude when it’s finished. What do you think? It’s a bit in the style of Umehara. . . .”8

  Shimaki repeated, Painting of a Nude, adding, “Isn’t that an appropriate title though,” then shifted his gaze to the landscape. It seemed to have been done after Painting of a Nude; Shimaki guessed that he had probably started it two or three days ago.

  Although only about a third of the sketch had been done, it was enough to prompt Shimaki to say, “I remember having seen this scene before. . . .”

  “You should remember it; indeed, you saw it before. I painted it before. I called it a landscape then, but it’s just a place near my house. . . .”

  “Oh really? What about Suburb in the Summer, which you painted four or five years ago?”

  Instead of answering, Koizumi nodded. “It’s not here. I’ve already sold it. The paint on it was applied too thickly, so I’m thinking of using less paint on this one. Fortunately, now, unlike summer, there are no flowers and grasses.
If there were, I think I’d turn into the kamisama of winter and shrivel up and blow away whatever I don’t need in the painting. . . .”

  Koizumi paused for a moment. Stuttering so much seemed to have tired him. He had always stuttered, but Shimaki noticed that in the past two years he had trouble getting out even short words, and now on this visit, he felt that the stuttering had become much worse; yet Koizumi had not lost a bit of his detached composure.

  He continued. “So in this next landscape I’m thinking of taking out all those extraneous things and placing four or five logs on the ground, next to this reclining nude.”—He pointed to Painting of a Nude.—“I’ve decided that much. The rest is still in the planning stage. . . . I’m thinking that for the time being I’ll stop painting in my usual style . . .”—again he pointed to Painting of a Nude—“and try experimenting with a cocktail of realism and imagination in the manner of Bashō. What do you think of Landscape with Withered Tree as a title?

  “Hmmmm . . .” Shimaki grunted.

  That night Shimaki hardly slept. He kept repeating to himself, “I’m thinking of experimenting with a cocktail of reality and imagination in the manner of Bashō,” and he repeated these words all day long, from the time he left Koizumi’s house until he got home. He also saw again and again Koizumi’s eyes staring at him as he said, “in the manner of Bashō.” He even saw those eyes in his dream.

  It was strange . . . those were not the clear intelligent eyes of the days when Shimaki had frequently met Koizumi.

  Over the past two years Koizumi’s eyes had gradually become bleary, and he blinked often, as if he were suffering from lack of sleep or nervous exhaustion. What was stranger yet was that Koizumi was painting more than ever before, and all those paintings were superior to what he had done before his health started to decline some two years ago.