When I Draw a Woman in Torment (女の責場を描く時の心境)

When I first decided that I wanted to draw women in scenes of torment, I was only seventeen years old. To put it frankly, I had reached the age when sexual desire awakens. At the time I was a young apprentice to a sculptor, earning twenty sen a month. Since I could not collect as many images of women being tormented as I wished, I would steal moments from my work to trace illustrations from the Tokyo Asahi Shimbun and add ropes to the women's bodies. Once, a fellow apprentice discovered me secretly enjoying this activity, and I turned red with embarrassment. Later, when I was able to make a living with my brush, I tied up my young newlywed wife with a shigoki sash and sketched her. I have never forgotten the pleasure I felt then, although she was not a beautiful woman. After that, I concluded that the theater was the only place to study scenes of women in torment. I began going in and out of theatrical dressing rooms, where I tied up onnagata actors and made sketches or took photographs of them. In the course of this, people who did not understand what I was doing attached the label “sexual deviant” to me. I let it go in one ear and out the other. Call it research if you like, or call it a hobby, but for more than forty years I have pursued the single subject of “women in torment,” and that is how I have arrived at the present day. It was not because I possessed special foresight, nor was I motivated by material gain. I simply loved scenes of women in torment so much that, alongside my ordinary work as an artist, I became absorbed in drawing them again and again. It is just like an enthusiastic angler searching for a fishing spot. I went farther and farther into deep waters because I found it interesting; there is no difficult theory behind it. I therefore imagine that my state of mind when drawing a woman in torment is much the same as Utamaro's state of mind when he drew shunga. A scene of a woman in torment is not itself shunga, but the two agree in one respect: both transform ugliness into beauty. The fact that a magazine called Kitan Club, specializing in seme-mono, was born in Kansai rather than Tokyo demonstrates the intelligence of Kansai people, or, to put it another way, the sharp commercial awareness of people who live in a mercantile city. When I look at the drawings of a woman named Kita Reiko, I see conscientious work, but also a weakness peculiar to women. Tokyo magazine companies and certain connoisseurs have become interested in her because she is a woman artist. Their attempt to turn a newly launched female painter, still wholly unproven, into a person everyone competes to engage is likely to destroy Kita Reiko as an individual. Modern businessmen and publishers do not know how to cultivate people with a future. They too often have the bad habit of overrating only those who are already established. To educate Kita Reiko thoroughly and raise her into a person of real accomplishment will require at least another ten years. I did not even complete elementary school satisfactorily. As a painter, I have not yet escaped the realm of amateur work. An artist who cannot construct a composition without first making a nude study cannot draw the human figure in action. Only after one has driven the structure of the human body deeply into one's mind and become able to compose scenes of torment freely in every direction can one be called fully competent. Beyond that, it becomes a question of skill. In drawing women in torment, one may then reach what Laozi supposedly called “the realm of great subtlety after nine years.”