Komachi’s Residence

An atmospheric painting of a rustic hut in a bamboo grove is vividly colored with rich blue to suggest the shadows of evening and bright yellow to represent moonlight breaking through clouds. The faintly glowing red seems to indicate that a small fire is still burning. No one can be seen, but the artist gave this work the evocative title Komachi’s Residence (Komachi no yashiki), so we know he must have been imagining one of the legends surrounding Ono no Komachi (小野小町, ca. 825– ca. 900), who is still regarded as one of the greatest Japanese woman poets of all time. Her waka (31-syallable court poems) on the theme of unrequited love, the anguish of loneliness, and the fading of beauty still speak to readers after more than a millennium. More research is required, but one interpretation is that the Nihonga artist Kawabata Ryūshi was recalling apocryphal tales that Komachi at the end of her life lived in poverty, her beauty faded, wandering the countryside in ragged clothes and living in a hut in the fields. Zuishin’in, a Shingon temple in southeastern Kyoto whose history dates back to the late tenth century, claims to be the site where Komachi once lived, and has erected a stone monument commemorating this association. Behind its main halls is an ancient tumulus roughly a meter high that is said to be Komachi letter mound (fumizuka), a grave, not of bones, but of letters. It is said that thousands of bundles of letters received by Komachi from her aristocratic suitors were buried within the mound.

The artist Kawabata Ryūshi initially studied Yōga, Western-style painting, and in 1913 traveled to the United States to continue to study Western-style painting techniques in greater depth. Yet, he was so impressed with the Japanese paintings that he saw during a visit to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, that upon his return to Japan a year later he immersed himself in the creation of Nihonga, or modern “Japanese-style painting.” He rebelled against the conservatism of the Inten (Japanese Art Institute) Exhibition guidelines, and established his own Nihonga art circle called the Seiryūsha in 1928. After World War II, together with Yokoyama Taikan and Kawai Gyokudō, he came to be regarded as one of the three great masters of Nihonga painting.