A Quiet Evening Begins
To be alone with you like this, in the corner of an empty room, relying only on the light of a small lamp to talk, makes me a truly fortunate person.
Outside, it has grown completely dark, and the sound of the wind only knocks gently against the window from time to time.
Tonight, let us share a very special, secret conversation, meant for your ears and mine alone, which must not be overheard by anyone else.
Would you please lend me your ear for just a little while?
When I gaze into your eyes—eyes that look somewhat sorrowful, yet are startingly beautiful—my heart swells with an indescribable tightness.
Tell me, have you been sleeping well lately?
In fleeting moments, does your chest ache with a sudden prick, or do you find yourself gently crushed by a profound loneliness that cannot be put into words?
I know, you see.
I know how gentle you are, and how many tears you have held back, never showing them to a soul.
Tonight, I wish to gently wrap your wounded heart and carry you away to a world far, far away, a world of exquisite beauty.
This is a desperate service of mine, one where I am shaving away my very life.
If you would offer even the faintest smile at the end of this tale, I would not regret losing everything I own in the slightest.
Now, take a deep breath, and surrender your body to the rhythm of my words.
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
── Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
The Beginning: A Certain Man’s Bizarre Paintings
Now, you have likely heard the name of the painter Marc Chagall at least once.
People of the world seem to call him by a very beautiful, refined title: “The Painter of Love.”
Lovers flying through the sky, vibrant blues, dancing bulls, and a strange goat playing the violin.
Every single one of them is like a romantic fairy-tale dream, and everyone praises them in unison, calling them enchanting.
But, tell me, is that really all there is to it?
Why do you think his painted blues are so deep, violently shaking our hearts as if looking into a bottomless ocean floor?
Why do the lovers flying through the sky wear such sorrowful colors, appearing so fragile, as if they might vanish at any moment?
In truth, Chagall’s real story was never such a sugary fairy tale.
It was a miraculous escape drama that began from a hellish world, painted in blood, fire, and despair.
Have you ever despaired, thinking your own life was locked away in a darkness so deep you could no longer move forward?
If so, please follow the direction of Chagall’s gaze along with me.
“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”
── Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract
The Town of Mud and the First Light
Chagall was born in a truly small, wretched town called Vitebsk, at the very edge of Russia.
The roads were always muddy; it was a lonely place where your feet would sink completely whenever it rained.
To make matters worse, he came into this world bearing a painful destiny—being Jewish, which at the time meant facing fierce persecution just for existing.
His father worked every single day, carrying heavy barrels of herring, covered in mud in the freezing cold.
His hands were always stained with the smell of fish, and his wages were meager.
Chagall existed within a suffocating poverty, where merely feeding the family took everything they had.
Normally, if one is born into such an environment, no one could complain if they cursed their fate and lived their life hating the world.
In fact, the adults around him all carried exhausted faces, desperate just to survive another day.
Yet, only the young Chagall was different.
He would climb onto the roofs of that mud-covered town and gaze intently at the sky.
To him, the gray, filthy town appeared filled with colors as beautiful as heaven itself.
Don’t you find it mysterious?
In a darkness where everyone else despaired, why was he the only one who could see a beautiful light?
“Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.”
── Helen Keller
Paris: A Cold Heaven
Eventually, harboring the grand dream of becoming a painter, he journeyed to Paris, the capital of art.
“With this, my true life is finally beginning,” he thought, his heart pounding as he knocked on the gates of the great metropolis.
Yet, what awaited him there was not a warm welcome, but a terrifying loneliness and the cold reality of being ignored.
Paris at the time was a glittering battlefield where cutting-edge painters like Picasso and Braque were forging the new trends of modern art.
Into that world, a young Jewish man from the Russian countryside who could barely speak French was suddenly tossed, all alone.
Nobody spared a glance for his paintings of hometown cows and old churches.
“Outdated,” “clumsy paintings,” they laughed coldly at him day after day.
He had no money at all, and his days were filled with hunger and cold, sometimes eating nothing but bread crusts.
His studio lacked a fireplace; in the winter, it grew so cold his paints would freeze.
Imagine, if you will.
The loneliness of shivering through the night all alone in the corner of a city where the language doesn’t reach, where no one recognizes your existence, and where everyone around you is a stranger.
“What did I come here for?”
The tears Chagall wept through the night as he asked this question were what transformed into that unique, deep “blue.”
“Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.”
── John Lennon
A Miraculous Encounter and the First Great Twist
However, God never truly abandons a human being who risks their very life to continue expressing themselves.
Here, an unbelievable event occurs that changes the very foundation of his life.
One day, during a temporary return to Vitebsk, he met a beautiful woman.
Her name was Bella.
She was the daughter of a wealthy jeweler, highly educated, and a noble, beautiful person, much like an angel.
She was from a social standing far too different from a penniless painter like Chagall.
Everyone around them opposed it fiercely, saying, “There is no way we can hand our precious daughter over to a alley-cat of a man like him.”
Yet, Bella alone had seen through to the eternal light in the depths of Chagall’s eyes.
The two fell into a burning love and, pushing past all opposition, they married.
The moment Bella stepped into Chagall’s room, the world of his paintings transformed entirely.
The colors that until then had been dark, lonely, and suffocating began to shine all at once, as if under a magic spell.
This was the very beginning of those “lovers flying through the sky” that everyone knows so well.
Just because the person you love is before you, even gravity vanishes, and your body floats gently up into the night sky.
What a wonderful, dramatic turn of events.
A human being, simply by being truly loved and recognized by a single person, can turn hell into heaven.
“To be loved is a great thing. But to love is something much more wonderful.”
── Rainer Maria Rilke
The Looming Shadow of the Red Demon
However, the terrible thing about this world is that stories do not end with “and they lived happily ever after.”
Just as the two reached the peak of their happiness, a colossal storm—a great war and the Russian Revolution—shook the world.
In an instant, the world transformed into a mad battlefield where blood washed blood.
Chagall and Bella were swept up in the fierce waves of the era under the newly born Soviet regime.
For a time, he seemed to have achieved success, being appointed as the director of the art school in his hometown, but that did not last long.
What the revolutionary government demanded was “easy-to-understand propaganda art to enlighten the workers,” not the expressions of dreams, love, and the free soul of the individual that Chagall painted.
“Your paintings are useless to the revolution,” “Why do you paint a cow blue when real cows aren’t blue?” they began to fiercely denounce him.
Betrayed even by the artists he thought were his comrades, he was driven out of the school he had built.
Stripped of his freedom of expression by political power, he was once again plunged into the darkness of utter isolation.
Tell me, have you ever tasted the terror of the world you believed in suddenly flipping upside down, where every single person who was your ally until yesterday becomes your enemy?
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
── Edmund Burke
A Wandering Traveler Stripped of His Homeland
Sensing danger to his life, Chagall took the hands of his beloved Bella and their young daughter, Ida, and fled Russia by the skin of his teeth.
He might never step foot on the nostalgic soil of his homeland again.
Bearing that heartbreaking realization in his chest, he headed for Paris once more.
Yet, even there, further trials lay in wait for him.
In the 1930s, the worst dictatorship in history—the Nazi regime—was born in Europe, and a storm of relentless massacre against Jewish people began to rage.
Chagall’s paintings were designated as “degenerate art,” removed from museums, and burned in public.
The very works that were his soul were turned to ash in the flames.
Their evil clutches eventually reached France, and Chagall’s family was forced once again to pack their bags and flee for their lives.
Stripped of his nationality, stripped of his home, chased around the world for no other reason than “being Jewish.”
No matter where he went, he was unwelcome. No matter where he went, there was no place to belong.
What the sadness and bottomless loneliness in his heart must have been like during this time, it wrings my heart just to imagine.
“Everyone carries their own cross as they walk. And its weight cannot be measured by another.”
── Sophocles
The Worst Tragedy Falls Upon the Darkest Night
Though Chagall finally secured physical safety by exiling himself to New York in America, God presented him with a cruel trial, the likes of which could not be surpassed.
It was the autumn of 1944, just as the Second World War was drawing to a close.
His beloved wife Bella—the source of all his inspiration, who had sustained him throughout their grueling life of flight—suddenly collapsed from illness.
Because it was wartime, the fact that medicines were not fully available also brought misfortune.
Holding Chagall’s hand, Bella passed away from this world far too abruptly.
Chagall’s despair at that moment was truly the end of the world.
He became like an empty shell, having completely lost his soul.
“My eyes were her eyes. My brush was her hand. In a world without her, what on earth am I supposed to paint?”
Chagall cast away all his paints and brushes, sat down on the studio floor, and simply wept for days, for months.
For nine whole months, he could not draw a single line.
Could there be a tragedy greater than losing the one you love most in an artist’s life?
Most people think of success as something to get. But in reality, success is giving. Henry Ford said so.
Chagall had kept giving “love” to the world, yet his most precious “love” was stolen from him.
Tell me, why must a person with such a gentle soul suffer such a fate?
“Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o’er-wrought heart and bids it break.”
── William Shakespeare, Macbeth
The Paint of Resurrection, and the Gaze Toward Eternity
Yet, the story does not end here.
From this point begins the deepest, most mysterious miracle of the human psyche.
What saved Chagall, who had fallen completely silent, was none other than the very art he had spent his life shaving his existence to paint.
Sustained by the desperate support of his daughter Ida, one day, with a trembling hand, he gripped his brush once more.
And what he painted was that series of mournful yet overwhelmingly beautiful religious masterpieces, sending Bella off to heaven.
He was reborn from a painter who merely depicted “earthly love” into a true master who painted the “salvation” and “resurrection” of the human soul.
The blue he painted deepened even further, beginning to emit a sacred radiance, as if reflecting the truth of the universe itself.
Chagall realized something.
Even if the flesh perishes, even if nations fall, and even if eras change, the “love” and “prayer” he infused into the canvas will never fade, even after 100 or 200 years.
That is because the human psyche has not changed one bit since ancient times.
Every person is lonely, harbors sorrow, and wishes to be loved by someone.
It is precisely because his paintings speak directly to that unchanging human heart that they strike the chests of those of us living today so violently.
“Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.”
── Paul Klee
Endless Devotion to You
My dear, thank you so much for staying with my story for so long.
As we traced Chagall’s long, trial-filled journey together, what thoughts crossed your mind?
His suffering, his loneliness, and the countless beautiful colors he risked his life to protect.
It seems to me that all of it was prepared precisely to console the heart of none other than “you,” living in this present age.
I hold you so dear.
I want to gently embrace your lonely shoulders and tell you, over and over, with all the words I can muster, that it is alright, that you are not alone.
Every bit of this text is a genuine, life-shaving love letter from me to you.
May the rhythm of my words continue to burn like a tiny lamp inside your heart, even after this night yields to the dawn.
When your finger touches
The cold glass of the window,
The song of a lost, ancient city
Will quietly fill the room.
Even if everyone forgets you,
Only that blue bull of the night sky
Will call your name correctly
And gently tilt its head.
Do not grieve, my beautiful one,
For the paint blurs by the count of tears,
And all the murals of the world
Are opening now, just for you.
── John 14:27
“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.”
── Osamu Dazai, Monoomou Ashi
“An artist must always be on the side of the weak.”
“Hey, why are you going on a journey?”
“Because I’m suffering.”
“Your ‘suffering’ is so predictable, I can’t believe it at all.”
── Osamu Dazai, Tsugaru
Postscript: The Tale of a Certain Foolish Man Who Cut Off His Ear
As a postscript, allow me to tell you a short, very personal, strange, and comical story about myself.
In truth, among my acquaintances, there is a painter named Mimi Takamizawa who is truly foolish and terribly peculiar.
Despite being a painter of this modern age, he does not use canvas or brushes at all.
Every day, he sits before a computer screen, diligently creating art digitally.
Then, using a special technique called giclée printing, he prints the finished works onto coarse, high-quality printmaking paper and delivers them to everyone.
Isn’t he a slightly strange, modern sort of craftsman?
The themes he paints are always the same.
Your eyes, my eyes, Christianity, eternity, the human psyche, the truth of the world, and the deep loneliness, isolation, and hardships of people buried under the waves of history, along with their resurrection and liberation from those depths.
He clumsily continues to pursue only such heavy, yet somehow sacred things.
But, my dear, please, go ahead and laugh at him.
His talent as a painter is completely third-rate.
He understands this perfectly well himself, and he is the sort of man who always looks down shamefacedly, murmuring, “I am foolish, a laughingstock.”
However, he knew.
He knew that the masterpieces of the great, historic giants of the past were by no means painted solely through innate, genius talent.
He believes without a doubt that those were all brought into existence through decades of blood-spitting labor and tear-stained trial and error.
Therefore, lacking talent, he believes he must put in at least a dozen times—no, dozens of times—the effort of others, and so he continues to face his screen for over 12 hours every single day, just like laying bricks, solely for the sake of devotion to you.
He decided to become a painter because he learned of the tragic life of none other than Vincent van Gogh.
His strange name, “Mimi” (which means ‘ear’ in Japanese), was chosen by himself, inspired by that famous ear-cutting incident where Van Gogh sliced off his own ear with a razor.
What an extreme, comical, and pitiful man.
Yet, he continues to paint “eyes” in his works like crazy.
Why do you think he does that?
Through the “eyes” he paints, he wants to constantly feel the gaze of none other than “you” on the other side of the screen.
He wants to know the heart of you, who are right in front of him. He desperately wants to connect with you.
If it is for that sake, he says he does not mind at all even if everyone in the world laughs at him as a “weirdo” or a “madman.”
The work of an artist is a desperate, life-risking act of buffoonery, cutting into one’s own pocket.
He wants to please you; he wants to be the reason for the tears you shed.
Solely for that, he dedicates the entirety of his life to serve you.
“If I am abandoned by you, I can no longer go on living.”
He always cries out this way in his heart while continuing his desperate service.
Just by you being here in front of him, he welcomes you with roaring applause in his heart.
He respects Mr. Tokuji Munetsugu, the founder of CoCo Ichibanya, from the bottom of his heart. Without ever looking away, without hobbies or friends, he dedicates his life entirely to his work.
Mr. Munetsugu said:
“During my active years, I had no hobbies, made no friends, and never went to bars. I did nothing that would get in the way of my work. There were years I worked 5,640 hours. I felt that if I didn’t lead by example, my employees wouldn’t work for me. I didn’t look away; I dedicated my life to management. It was a very lonely life. That’s why I wanted others to show even a little interest in me. I wanted them to be interested in me. That became my starting point. So, when I started the business, rather than making money, I wanted to make people happy. I wanted people to say they were glad I existed, even just a little.”
Like this great predecessor who walked a turbulent life—eating weeds in his impoverished youth to stave off hunger—Mimi Takamizawa also says, “Working more than 12 hours a day is the bare minimum condition,” and continues to paint every day with an unyielding spirit, solely for the sake of his devotion to you.
Things of value, more often than not, do not yield immediate results.
Just as Sakichi Toyoda, the founder of Toyota, was treated as a madman and an “invention maniac” by those around him, yet day after day, built and destroyed, built and destroyed, until he finally completed the automated loom that changed the world.
He refuses to give up, believing that what kind of life one achieves is determined solely by a person’s diligence, patience, and power of continuation.
After the death of Van Gogh, there was a highly intelligent and wonderful woman named Jo, the wife of Theo, who dedicated her life to reading his vast collection of letters and conveying the brilliance of his thought and art to the world.
After Theo died, she refused to let the achievements of the Van Gogh brothers be buried. Enduring the ridicule of those around her, she continued to organize the letters and hold exhibitions.
In her words:
“In addition to the child, Theo left me another mission—to have Vincent’s work seen by many people and to have its true value recognized.”
If not for her life-risking dedication, the Van Gogh we know today would not exist in this world. It is precisely the same as the Apostle Paul, who traveled at the risk of his life after the death of Jesus Christ, writing vast epistles to continue conveying Christ’s life and thought to the people.
No matter how wonderful a “product” may be, if there is no communicator to correctly convey its value and deliver it to the hearts of people, it becomes the same as “not existing” in this world.
Mr. Akio Morita of Sony also said this:
“A product that has never been produced before, that no one has ever seen, but which has been painstakingly researched in some corner and manufactured after tremendous hardship—if one wishes to turn that product into a commodity, one must arouse the desire among people to possess it. No matter how excellent a ‘product’ it may be, it cannot become a ‘commodity’ otherwise.”
This is precisely why Mimi Takamizawa, in his clumsy way, is desperately trying to convey his existence and his thoughts to you like this.
He does not mind being laughed at; he does not mind being thought a eccentric.
He simply wants to dedicate the whole of his life to you, who are right in front of him.
That is the sole reason for this foolish painter’s existence.
“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.”
── Henry Ford
“The most wicked thing mankind ever created is the lie. But the most beautiful thing mankind ever created is also a fiction, called love.”
── Agatha Christie
“The place whereon thou standest is holy ground. Put off thy shoes, quiet thy heart, and listen to the great voice.”
── Moses (From the Old Testament, Book of Exodus)
“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances.”
── William Shakespeare, As You Like It
“If there is someone suffering before you, what you must bestow is not money. Simply weep together with them.”
── Judaism, The Talmud
“I merely wished to show, just as it is, the weakness of a single, pitiful man that is myself.”
── Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human
“Please forgive this frustration of mine—knowing that if I do not speak in exaggerations, my truth will not reach you.”
── Osamu Dazai, The Setting Sun
“Why is it that the memory of happiness always possesses the touch of cold glass?”
── Osamu Dazai, The Late Years
“Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in.”
── Winston Churchill
“Have the courage to be the first, to do something different from everyone else. People think I achieved success overnight, but that one night was thirty years. Looking back, it was a long, long night.”
── Ray Kroc
“All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them. Remember, it all started with a mouse.”
── Walt Disney
“Beauty dwells only within living things. And its deepest beauty is always found within the shadow of that which is vanishing away.”
── Leonardo da Vinci
A Final, Special Gift for You
My dear, you have truly, truly well accompanied my long story this far.
I offer you my deepest gratitude from the bottom of my heart.
Faced with your beautiful patience, my chest is burning fiercely with the feeling that I must respond with the most precious thing I possess.
This is my final, desperate service to you, shaving away my very existence.
In truth, for the works of that eccentric painter I mentioned earlier, Mimi Takamizawa, there is a special opportunity right now where you can obtain a set of 10 large, exceptionally beautiful A4-sized postcards 【for free】.
This is not something being handed out to just anyone.
Right now, for “you” alone, who are listening to my secret talk here, I want to deliver them safely and with great care, right to your home.
Please, do not reject this hand.
If you think “I’ll do it later” and close this screen just like this, you may never again have the chance to touch the creations that are the crystallization of my soul, and of his.
I want to save your somewhat unfulfilled, lonely heart by any means necessary. Right by your side, whispering gently into your ear, I want to invite you into this beautiful world.
Directly below this text lies the secret place that connects to this special offer for you.
Please, reach out and click it softly, gently.
Won’t you tell me your name right now?
With bated breath and a pounding heart, I am waiting, waiting always, for the moment I can connect with you.