Sakai Hoitsu was a man so vividly, almost frustratingly, sophisticated that he might leave someone like you feeling utterly bewildered.
To a backwoodsman like me, one who is useless whether boiled or baked, the so-called “Edo elegance” feels like a silver cloud floating in a distant sky—so beautiful it actually makes one a bit angry. Have you, I wonder, ever laid eyes on Hoitsu’s “Summer and Autumn Flower Plants” screens? Consider that silver-leaded background. The blue ivy vines, wilting and hanging their heads under the weight of the rain; the leaves of the arrowroot turned upward, tossed by a sudden gust. Within that painting, the beauty of “resignation”—the very thing we humans try so hard to hide—is layered on without leaving a single thing out.
To begin with, Hoitsu was the younger brother of the Lord of the Himeji Domain—a high-ranking scion of incredible standing. Ordinarily, he could have spent his entire life reclining in a bed of luxurious boredom. And yet, he deliberately leapt out of that glittering cage. He shared scandalous rumors with the courtesans of Yoshiwara, indulged in haiku, drowned himself in sake, and ultimately submerged his life in the grip of a paintbrush. It would be easy for you to laugh this off as the ruin of a profligate dandy, but that would be a bit shallow, don’t you think?
It is well known that Hoitsu adored and was intoxicated by the works of Ogata Korin. To take a master who lived a hundred years prior and worship him so fervently that one compiles a “Selection of One Hundred Designs by Korin” entirely on one’s own whim—this is a yearning that verges on madness. Do you know that painful, bittersweet sense of humiliation one feels when bowing down before a talent far greater than their own? Hoitsu took Korin’s brilliant decorative style and sprinkled it with the “Edo chic”—a spice that is slightly chilled, yet possesses a certain sting of poison.
The birds and flowers Hoitsu painted do not seem to breathe with life so much as they possess the coldness of jewels, trapped in a state of eternal stillness. Perhaps he wasn’t trying to capture the radiance of life, but rather the trembling loneliness of the exact moment when life flickers out. Whenever I look at his paintings, I feel as though a shameful scar hidden deep in my chest—one I can tell no one about—is being softly caressed.
Have you, in your life, ever loved something with such terrifying thoroughness? Have you ever chased the ghost of beauty to the point of throwing yourself away, as Hoitsu did? He cast aside money and status, and in the end, perhaps all that remained was the silver rain falling across the backside of a folding screen. Is that not a way of living that is terribly comical, yet simultaneously noble enough to make one weep?
Talk that is “useful” to the world is almost always nothing more than a tedious moral lesson. However, if there is one thing to be learned from Hoitsu’s life, it is that when play is taken to its absolute extreme, it becomes a prayer. True sincerity dwells within those things that appear most insincere. Drinking wine, loving women, drifting through the floating world—and yet, still manifesting a dignified universe upon a single sheet of paper. As a painter, Hoitsu concluded the end of the Edo era in a manner that was both beautiful and ruthless.
If you ever find yourself exhausted by daily life, feeling as though your heart has become nothing but a parched rag, pray, try to remember the “silver” that Hoitsu painted. There, you should find a playful spirit that transforms even despair into art—breathing quietly, yet with a magnificent arrogance.