After the woman left, I felt at loose ends. The bed still showed the hollows where she had lain. I didn’t feel like doing anything, so I lay out on a lounge chair on the terrace and killed time reading a book. All the books on Mr. Amada’s bookshelf were old, among them a few unusual novels that would be hard to get hold of these days. Works that in the past had been pretty popular but had been forgotten, read by no one. I enjoyed reading this kind of out-of-date novel. Doing so let me share—with this old man I’d never met—the feeling of being left behind by time.
As the sun set, I opened a bottle of wine (drinking wine was my one and only luxury at the time, though of course this was inexpensive wine) and listened to some old LPs. The record collection was comprised entirely of classical music, the majority of which was opera and chamber music. All of them looked like they’d been lovingly cared for, without a single scratch. During the day I listened to opera, while at night I favored Beethoven and Schubert string quartets.
Having a relationship with that older married woman, being able to hold a real live woman in my arms regularly, brought me a certain level of calm. The soft touch of a mature woman’s skin eased the pent-up emotions I’d had. At the very least, while I made love to her I was able to shelve the doubts and problems I’d been carrying around. Yet I still wasn’t able to come up with an idea of what to paint. Occasionally in bed I’d do a pencil sketch of her in the nude. Most of these were pornographic. Pictures of my cock inside her, or her sucking me off. The sketches made her blush, but she enjoyed looking at them. I imagine that if these had been photos most women wouldn’t have liked them, and would even have been disgusted with the man who made them, and on their guard. But I found that with rough sketches, if they were done well, women were actually happy to see them. Because they had the warmth of life in them—or, at least, they didn’t have a mechanical coldness. But still, no matter how well I managed these sketches, not even a fragment of an image of what I really wanted to paint came to me.
The kind of paintings I did as a student, so-called abstracts, no longer appealed to me. My heart wasn’t drawn to them anymore. Looking back on it now, I see that what I’d been wrapped up in back then was nothing more than the pursuit of form. Back when I was young, I was completely drawn to the beauty of form, and to balance. Nothing wrong with that. But in my case I didn’t reach the soulful depth that should lie beyond. Now I see it very clearly, but at the time, all I could grasp was the appeal of shape at a superficial level. Nothing really moved me. My paintings were smart but nothing more.
And now I was thirty-six. Forty was just around the corner. I felt that by the time I turned forty, I’d have to secure my own unique artistic world. Forty was a sort of watershed for people. Once you get past that age, you can’t keep going on as you were before. I still had four years to go, but I knew that those four years might flash by in an instant. Painting portraits for a living had taken me on a wide detour. Somehow I had to get time on my side once again.
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While I lived in that house in the mountains I found myself wanting to know more about Tomohiko Amada. I’d never been interested in Japanese-style painting, and though I’d heard the name Tomohiko Amada, and he happened to be my friend’s father, I had no idea what kind of person he was, or what kind of paintings he did. He might be a heavyweight in the world of Japanese painting, but he had totally stayed out of the limelight, turning his back on his worldly renown, and alone, quietly—or one might say stubbornly—focused on creating his art. This was about the extent of what I knew about him.
But as I listened to his record collection on the stereo he’d left behind, borrowed his books, slept in his bed, made meals every day in his kitchen, and used his studio, I gradually became more interested in Tomohiko Amada as a person. Something close to curiosity, you could say. The path he’d taken aroused my interest—the way he’d been focused on modernist painting, traveled all the way to Vienna to study, then after returning to Japan made a sudden return to Japanese-style painting. I didn’t know the details, but in general you would think that it couldn’t have been very easy for someone who’d done Western painting for so long to shift over to Japanese-style painting. You’d need to decide to abandon all the techniques you’d spent so much time and effort mastering, and begin again from zero. Despite this, Tomohiko Amada had chosen that arduous path. There must have been a compelling reason.
One day, before my art class, I went to the Odawara city library to search out collections of Tomohiko Amada’s artwork. Probably because he was an artist living in the area, the library had three beautiful volumes of his work. One of them included some of the Western paintings he’d done in his twenties as reference material. What surprised me was that the series of Western-style paintings he’d done as a young man reminded me somewhat of the abstract paintings I’d done myself in the past. The style wasn’t specifically the same (in the prewar period he’d been heavily influenced by Cubism), yet his stance of “greedily pursuing form” in no small way had something in common with my own approach. As you might expect from someone who went on to become a first-class artist, his paintings also had much more depth and persuasive power than mine. Technically, too, there were things about them that were, simply, astounding. I imagine they must have been highly acclaimed at the time. Still, there was something missing.
I sat there in the reading room at the library and carefully examined his works for a long time. So what was it that was lacking from his work? I couldn’t pinpoint it. But if I had to give an opinion, I’d say they were paintings that weren’t really necessary. The kind of paintings that, if they disappeared somewhere forever, wouldn’t put anybody out. A cruel way of putting it, perhaps, but it’s the truth. From the present perspective, some seventy years on, I could see that quite well.
I turned the pages and followed along, in chronological order, to see how he shifted gears to become a painter of Japanese-style art. In his early period these works were still a bit awkward, imitating the methods of previous artists, but then gradually, and undeniably, he discovered his own unique style. I could see how it progressed. A bit of trial and error at times, but no hesitation. After he took up painting Japanese-style art, his works all had something unique that only he could paint, and he himself was well aware of this. He always strode confidently toward the core of that special something. No more did you get the impression, as with his Western paintings, of something missing. It was less a shift and more akin to a conversion.
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