Mr. Kosugi Misei
In this compact and characteristically wry portrait, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke considers the painter Kosugi Misei, whose rugged, imposing appearance seemed at odds with the delicacy of his art. Akutagawa argues that the contrast is only superficial: beneath Kosugi’s bold exterior lies a sensitive, considerate, and distinctly modern temperament, and his paintings grow naturally from that inner character. Moving between anecdote, psychological observation, and playful literary allusion, the essay evokes both Kosugi’s Western-style work and his paintings in the Southern School tradition. Akutagawa finds in them not lightness but a persistent loneliness—a faint chill produced by the pressures of modern life. The closing aside on Kosugi’s small body of Chinese-style poetry adds a final note of teasing uncertainty and self-deprecating humor.
The winter before last, when Mr. Katori Hotsuma treated us to wild duck from Lake Teganuma, Mr. Amaoka Kin’ichi, who happened to be there, abruptly greeted Mr. Kosugi Misei, whom he had never met before, with the remark: “Kosugi, compared with you yourself, your paintings are altogether too gentle, aren’t they?” At the time, I felt that old Amaoka, too, had been deceived by Kosugi’s outward appearance.
To be sure, at first glance Kosugi possesses a bold and heroic countenance, entirely befitting a member of the Tengu Club. When I first met him, I too sensed in his rugged bearing the miasmatic air of some remote frontier—a man more likely to style himself “Misei the Barbarian” than “Misei the Mountain Recluse.” But after spending some time with him—though hardly enough to call it truly knowing him; still, after having at least some contact with him—I began to feel that beneath his appearance lay a gentle man, endowed with nerves far more delicate than one might suppose. Of course, further acquaintance may cause me to change my opinion again. For the present, however, the Kosugi Misei I have seen is a sensitive soul unexpectedly close in temperament to people like us: timid, richly considerate of others, and at times, it would seem, capable of intense aversions.
Thus, as I see it, there is no disharmony between the man and his paintings of the kind old Amaoka imagined. Like bamboo, his art has grown straight and true from his essential nature.
Kosugi’s paintings, whether Western-style oils or works in the Southern School tradition, are equally gentle in manner. Yet they are never lighthearted. They are always wrapped in a strangely lonely, faintly chilling shadow. In this I seem to see Kosugi himself, his nerves buffeted, like ours, by the winds of modernity. To put it rather affectedly: even if one peers through the window of his Plum-Blossom Studio, the Chinese gentleman within is not sitting at ease, chanting poems by the recluse Lin Bu. Instead, he seems to be sitting alone before the hearth, lost in melancholy thought: “Rêvons… le feu s’allume”—“Let us dream… the fire is kindling”—or something of the sort.
I might add, incidentally, that Kosugi is also an accomplished poet. Yet for some reason he has written nothing but five-character quatrains, and only ten or fifteen of those in all. In that respect he closely resembles me. Judging by their quality, however, his poems may perhaps be better than mine. Then again, of course, they may perhaps be worse.