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

Playing in the Camellia

It’s never plan or forethought that brings me back every few months to the writing and painting of Tomihiro Hoshino. As a writer and artist he hasn’t published an especially large canon, but then how many living artists have an entire museum dedicated to their work? After a horrible paralyzing accident while practicing gymnastics at the age of twenty-four, Hoshino learned over the next few years how to work with a paintbrush held in his mouth to produce poems and pictures. The former physical education teacher spent nine years in the hospital before being able to go home. The first exhibition of his poems and flower paintings came in 1982, a touring exhibition that enthralled over one million visitors in its first months.

Hoshino’s style and simply stated expressions of doubt, awakening, wonder and love are characteristics that his mostly Japanese audience finds familiar and heartfelt. His perspective is thoroughly Japanese in its sentiment and manner of expression, but at the same time a perspective and style that have enchanted non-Japanese for long years. His work sounds a chord as precisely the kind of poetic expression that first attracted me to Japan. Totally without qualification or apology, one recognizes the journey this man traveled in reaching the day finally when life returned to him through the medium of brush, ink and paint. Hoshino’s work would be outstanding had it been done with hands, arms and fingers, but we are startled to discover that while arms, hands and fingers are unmoving, it is art achieved without that advantage. Obviously, the heart is able to compensate where limbs fail.

Now sixty-six, Tomihiro Hoshino continues to write, paint, publish and exhibit his art. He lives in Gunma Prefecture northwest of Tokyo with his wife of many years. His work is a glowing example of human endeavor in the face of almost insuperable hardship. The pictures above all come from the book, Road of the Tinkling Bell, published in 1986.

For those interested in other examples of Hoshino’s work…

Thorn Flower

Changing Voices

Munching on Flowers

Changing Voices

Most of the time, one is content to read books start to finish over the course of a few days; finish one book, let it settle for a spell, then start something new. Nothing unusual about that. On the other hand, there are weeks when I’m not quite so straight-lined about reading, and graze on two or three books alternately—an afternoon visit with one book, a bedtime read with another. Surprisingly, there are no twinges of impatience in this manner of reading, and the shift from one title to the next comes easily enough, with no confusion of characters or plot. Thought I would give a brief sample of three books under my eye this week, each one exceptional in its way.

The Practical Heart by Allen Gurganus

A quartet of novellas, I’ve only so far gotten through three-quarters of the title story, and because of that my perspective is incomplete and my comments limited. The writing is frequently luminous, but I’ve had that same feeling about other books by this North Carolina writer. The first of the novellas revolves around a Scottish immigrant to Chicago in the late 1800s who dreams of having her portrait painted by John Singer Sargent. Her desire to be seen as worthy of the reigning master gives wing to her solid practicality, and her imagination produces events that may or may not be true. Here is a snippet describing what perhaps the narrator saw in the painter’s gaze…

‘And the slight pressure of her pianist’s hand caused the petals of the lowest peony to drop, with half a humid sigh, around her tense white forefinger and thumb on which all weight now pivoted. The chin was lifted, accidentally displaying the long pale neck that her crippled mother had mercilessly and often described as, “along with Muriel’s hands, her one distinguished feature.”’

The prose of Allan gurganus is very special, very singular. If nothing else, the next time you’re at your bookstore or local library, give a look to his prizewinning 1989 novel, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All.

•

Love From the Depths by Tomihiro Hoshino

Writing about another of Hoshino’s books in this blog a few days ago rekindled my interest in his unusual life story. I first read Love From the Depths in 1994. The writer’s whole life has been about heart and spirit, and he records it in a simple style that scores a direct hit on the reader’s heart. The words in the extract below describe his fear and despair during the early weeks after his crippling injury at the age of 24.

‘I could not hold back the tears. Around my bed, doctors stood watching me. I did not want them to see such a pitiful-looking face; but the tears continued to flow like water from a broken dam. When I could not take it any longer, I tried to wipe my face with my hand. But where was my hand? I could not even turn my head to hide my tears, and a little round lamp over my face illuminated them mercilessly.’

If you want a look at human drama Japanese style, but universal in its pain and celebration, then search this book out.

•

Going Native by Stephen Wright

I’m not beyond the first twenty-five pages in this film noire road story down a dark and violent highway. The Village Voice quote on my copy’s cover says: “Wright broadcasts an English as electrically intoxicating as a mescaline Slurpee…” Yeah, I’d say so. Sharp, slightly abrasive sentences that quickly snag onto your interest about where the character is heading. Here are the opening lines…

‘Rho is at the kitchen sink, peeling furiously away at a carrot when she draws her first blood of the day, and, of course, it’s nonmetaphoric, and her own. A sudden blossoming of color in the drab plot of one ordinary afternoon. She watches herself spilling out across a trembling forefinger as if in a hurry to be gone, a hollow red staccato in the brushed-steel bucket of her sink. For a time she is simply a wide pair of mesmerized eyes, lost in the facts of the moment and strangely, no longer present to herself. But the spell breaks, the cut is plunged into the aerated stream of her Puraflo faucet, the finger wrapped in a floral blue paper towel. The show’s over.’

This 1994 book is something a friend passed on to me. I stuck it in the bookshelves until the other night. Glad now I pulled it out.