Nature’s Consolation

The work of Japanese poet and painter Tomihiro Hoshino is something of a recurring thought in my mind and on three occasions his poems and paintings have been featured in the pages of this blog, the last as recently as last month. A return to that theme so soon is only because on my recent trip to Louisiana I was lucky enough to come across in a New Orleans bookstore Hoshino’s fourth book, Journey of the Wind, published first in Japanese in 1982, with an English translation following six years later. But each time I sit with a book by this artist a sense of freshness and renewal lifts off the pages and into my heart. His words, as well as his pictures are the very essence of simplicity, but perhaps it is that humble plainness, the spareness of his art that engulfs the reader.

To recap briefly, Hoshino suffered a paralyzing accident as a young man of twenty-four and spent nine years in the hospital before regaining the strength and abilities to make a life at home possible. During those years in a hospital bed, able to move only his head he taught himself to write and paint holding a brush in his mouth. Even to this day forty-two years later someone must assist him by holding his palette within reach of the brush in his mouth. He has inspired a generation of Japanese and others around the world.

In Journey of the Wind Hoshino opens his forward with these words…

‘I am very happy to begin a new journey to faraway places by means of the brush held in my mouth.

The winter mountains are ranged before me. Covered with the fallen leaves of trees, they are warm-coloured like the tail of a squirrel. Perhaps this is Nature’s consolation to us in the cold weather.’

Pear Blossom (1980)

Camellia flowers, I hear,

drop down like severed heads

People say that under cherry trees

dead bodies are buried

Gold-banded lilies, I hear,

like the sound of people moaning

People say that the spider lily

blooms best in grave-yards

Flowers, beautiful as you are,

why is death so near you?

What are the bonds between beauty

and human life?

Sasanqua, or Japanese camellia (1981)

I felt someone was looking at me

I turned my wheel-chair

A small flower was blooming there

Cherry Blossoms (1977)

Pushing my wheel-chair under a cherry tree

my friend pulled down a branch in full bloom

burying my face in blossoms

With a surge of ungovernable joy

I bit off a mouthful of blossom

eating the pink-white petals

munching and munching

The links below are to other poems and paintings by Tomihiro Hoshino.

March 7, 2012

May 4, 2011

May 27, 2010

Munching on Flowers

A couple of occasions have seen in Scriblets thoughts on a contemporary Japanese poet-painter I have long admired, Tomihiro Hoshino. Born in 1946, he was only two months out of university when a catastrophic accident left him paralyzed from the neck down. Despite overwhelming odds the young man fought and struggled to raise himself from the depths of physical and mental despair, to find the joy in life that overcomes even the darkest conditions.

Hoshino was a newly hired twenty-four year-old gymnastics teacher when he severely injured his neck while demonstrating a double somersault to his junior high school students. In one afternoon he went from an active life of gymnastics and mountain climbing, to lying motionless in an orthopedic hospital, where he remained for the next nine years completely paralyzed from the neck down. Complications brought him close to death several times and there were also days when he wanted to die, but gradually his physical condition stabilized and with that his desire to live returned.

Two years after his accident a fellow patient was being transferred to a different hospital and asked those in the ward to sign his canvas beach hat as a memento. Paralyzed, Tomihiro was at a loss how to sign the hat, until he managed with the help of his mother to hold a pen in his mouth and painstakingly write “Tomo.” Those four written letters were the beginning of a new life.

Now long married and living with his wife in Japan’s Gunma Prefecture, Hoshino is still paralyzed yet continues to produce paintings by holding a brush in his mouth. He has produced hundreds of works, many of them published in illustrated books of poems and essays. Among a dozen or more of his books are: Love From the Depths (1981), Journey of the Wind (1984), Here so Close But I Didn’t Know (1988) and Road of the Tinkling Bell (1990).

Hoshino’s writing has a simplicity that is familiar in much of Japanese poetry, old and new. With only a few lines he brings the reader into an almost tactile closeness with his subject, at the same time illuminating some small wonder or quality connecting him (and the reader as well) to that subject. Here are two poems from his first book, Love From the Depths.

WRITING ABOUT CHERRY BLOSSOMS IN 1977…

My friend pushed my wheelchair outside

under a cherry tree

And bent down a branch in full bloom

burying my face in blossoms

Filled with irresistible joy

I began

Munching on the flowers

blooming closest to my mouth.

ABOUT A BLOOM OF PEACH BLOSSOMS IN 1979 HE WROTE…

I lay face up

Griping about

One person after another

Then, from the corner of my right eye

I saw some peach blossoms

Laughing