Fujiwara no Okikaze

So here we are, at the beginning of the final year's work on the Hyakunin Isshu Hanga Series. There will be an emperor in this set, but instead of putting him first I'm going to save him for the end of the year (you'll see why when you receive the print). In his place, we have the prolific poet Fujiwara no Okikaze. He was a member of the 36 Famous Poets, and has many poems in the Kokinshu and other collections. His poem doesn't seem too difficult to understand:

I suppose it is written from the viewpoint of an elderly man, many of whose friends have passed away. Perhaps I will eventually be in that situation too, although of course it's impossible to say. But even if I do find myself left 'alone', at least I'll still have these 100 friends of mine to pass the time together ...

The image in the poem of those old pines has many resonances for me. Before I arrived in this country my ideas of what Japan would be like came not only from books but also of course from the prints I was studying. Many of the prints of Hiroshige and Hokusai I looked at were populated by pine trees, tall and twisted objects that stood with an aura of unreality. Could trees really look like that? Of course, I knew that the artists had taken great liberties with the things depicted in their prints; the mountains were greatly stylized for example, as were the human figures. I assumed that these strange trees too, were mostly objects of the artists' imaginations.

I was thus greatly surprised when after living here in Hamura for some months, I was out on my bicycle one day and passed by an undeveloped area of land in a far corner of the city. There in front of my eyes, were a dozen trees transplanted directly from a Hiroshige print! The trunks rose, not in straight shafts like the cedars that fill the nearby mountainsides, but in twisted curves and loops; their lower parts bare of branches. Out from the top portion of the trunk stretched the branches, also twisted and looped. They were the most ungainly and strange looking trees I had ever seen - but I realized at that moment that those old artists hadn't been 'inventing' their own brand of pine tree, but had simply drawn trees from the world around them.

Since that day, I have come across these trees in many different parts of the country, and on a hike into the mountains in Kanagawa recently, came across a whole mountain top that was covered with groves of them. This was exactly like a scene from one of those old prints! We rested for lunch under a group of the trees, and for an hour or so up on that quiet, peaceful mountain, we were able to believe that we had slipped back in time a couple of hundred years ...

I passed by the trees in Hamura again one day, and was horrified to see that a construction fence now surrounded the entire block; it seemed that 'my' trees were about to be destroyed. But when the construction was finished and the fences taken down, I was relieved to find that the designers of the new building (the local swimming centre) had spared many of the trees, and they still stood there dotted here and there around the building and the parking lot.

I visit the pool a few mornings each week, and as I turn my bicycle into the parking space, I see them standing there. I haven't quite come to get used to them yet - they still look a bit strange to me. I can't escape the feeling that instead of modern cars and bicycles parked underneath those twisted branches, it should be a procession of some Edo-era daimyo, resting for a few minutes while on its way to the capital. And of course, once I return from my swim, I step into my workroom and continue carving another one of these old-fashioned images ... What a strange way to make a living, here in 1998!

As you may expect, I'm quite excited about this year's work; I hope I can make ten prints that you will enjoy.

February 1998