MATSUMOTO SHUNSUKE: PRIVATE SPACES IN PUBLIC PLACES

Matsumoto Shunsuke, was born in Shibuya, Tokyo but spent his childhood years in Northern Honshu, and lived in Hanamaki and Morioka city before moving to Tokyo at the age of 17. At this time, Tokyo was a new city having emerged from the ravages of the 1923 earthquake. Matsumoto, with his interest in Western painting and in particular in modernism, was well placed to paint this new city. In one of his early pictures called Machi (town), Matsumoto painted a montage with a blue background against which there are details such as the girl in the red dress, a man polishing shoes, a man with a soft hat, a clock tower and a café. It is like a dream like world. Later he painted New York featuring some scenes from downtown as well as the White House. In other paintings from this period, there are dark, sombre, secluded places devoid of people which raises the question of why he painted Tokyo like this? There is a feeling of isolation and loneliness in many of his paintings. The scenes are often of isolated spots such as bridges, garbage disposal centres, public toilets  and, in one case, some sewage outlet pipes into the Kanda River. Matsumoto also liked to paint the St Nikolai Cathedral near Ochanomizu. One picture was painted from such an angle that it puzzled critics for many years. The sketch books showed, however, that he had merged two views into one.

 

 

 

Matsumoto caught the Yamanote line train to get to many parts of the city he painted on canvas drawing lots of sketches and taking lots of photographs. He painted many scenes near various stations such as Ochanomizu, Suidobashi, Tokyo and Shinjuku. Near Tokyo station he painted the Yaesu bridge and in the background a series of chimneys that capture a sense of the rhythm  of the city. He also painted a pedestrian bridge near Yokohama station. The post-war version of the same bridge shows the destruction of the surrounding area and a jeep. It has been suggested that Matsumoto's attraction to bridges is based on the idea that bridges connect areas that are otherwise separated. Made from steel and concrete, they allow people to move freely from one side to another. With the nation embarking on the road to war during the 1930s, Matsumoto painted a monolithic vision of himself as an artist that suggests that he would not be so  easily subsumed into the self-sacrifice required for the war effort. Together with his wife Teiko he started a new drawing and essay magazine called Zakkicho. He published an essay on the subject of humanism. His wife also featured in his 'Portrait of the Artist'. Matsumoto Shunsuke died in 1948 at the age of 36. The parts of Tokyo that he painted include:

• Takebashi bridge
• Rooftops near Yoyogi Station, east exit
• White buildings near the Suidobashi station
• Miyoshoji river, near where Matsumoto lived
• Tokyo station, Yaesubashi
• Hijiribashi, Ochanomizu station
• Nikolai Cathedral, Kanda
• Shinjuku station, south exit stairway and public toilet
• Yokohama station, Tsukimibashi (pedestrian bridge) and public toilet
• Showadori bridge, Shinbashi

As a modernist, Matsumoto follows in the footsteps of the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch whose famous painting 'The Scream' is also set on a bridge. Where the man in Munch's painting is the centre of attention, Matsumoto has turned to the surrounding city itself. The atmosphere he creates is one of isolation and loneliness. The line work he uses in Y shi no hashi (Bridge in Yokohama) allows him to suggest structures in the background whilst the fine lines add a sense nuanced detail in the foreground. These are contrasted with the heavy lines that he uses for the pedestrian bridge which give it a surreal, playful  presence like some gym equipment. An example of his fine line work can be seen in the 1948 work semi (cicada) which looks like something that Brassai, and his ilk with their predilection for graffiti might have been drawn towards.

 

 

THE SPACE ELEVATOR

Every now and then you hear something that has to be seen to be believed. And even then it is unbelievable... When Japanese scientists say that they will build a 96,000 kilometre elevator into space using nanotechnology making space rockets redundant you think okay, maybe this will work. Or, more likely, you will think how will it stay attached to the earth's surface? What if it is hit by a piece of space junk? How will it stay straight without getting tangled up in itself. As someone posted on a chart site, it would take a week to get there. Imagine being trapped in an elevator with 29 other people for a week? I guess it depends on what you mean by an elevator. Maybe it has cubicles and a bar and a restaurant... But if it is travelling at hundreds of kilometres to get the passengers to the station inside a week I guess comfort has to be sacrificed for speed. The Japanese have built and designed many amazing things in the post-war period from pocket transistors to the Sony Walkman, the video cassette recorder to instant noodles and the electric rice cooker, the blue ray disc and the compact disc, then there is the bullet train and the ninja robot. The list goes on.... The idea that we can catch an elevator into space, this one might outdo them all.

ANTI-NUCLEAR CRUSADER: NAOTO KAN IN AUSTRALIA

Former political leaders can end up doing a variety of jobs. Former U.S. vice-president Al Gore travels the world talking about climate change whilst former Japanese prime-minister Kan Naoto is pursuing an anti-nuclear campaign. Earlier this year, he brought this message with him to Australia talking about his experience as prime-minister during the Fukushima power plant meltdown. Australia being a major exporter of uranium is obviously a place where he would like his message to be heard. He talked about how during the Fukushima disaster his government had come close to evacuating people from a 250 kilometre radius of Fukushima. This would have included Tokyo and would have involved displacing 40% of the population or 50 million people. At the time of Kan's visit to Australia there were plans for Australian prime-minister Tony Abbott to visit India where he was to sign an agreement to sell Australian uranium for the first time. When Kan resigned as prime-minister due to criticism of his initial handling of the Fukushima incident and the slow pace of reconstruction he later won approval for his plans to phase out nuclear power. The legislation he drew up to realise this aim was overturned by the election of an LDP government led by Abe Shinzo in 2012. His pleas for Australia to reduce the world's dependency on nuclear power will fall on deaf ears as the Abbott government has no interest in the renewable energy sector.   



EMPTY VESSELS: MURAKAMI HARUKI'S 'COLOURLESS TSUKURU TAZAKI'

In Murakami's ;latest novel, a colourless man who considers himself to be an empty vessel, is rejected by his close-knit group of high school friends at the age of twenty. Out of the group of five friends he is the only one to leave Nagoya to pursue his studies in Tokyo. He wishes to become an engineer specialising in the construction of railway stations. Hence the significance of his name Tsukuru, which means 'to make'.

 

The notion of being an empty vessel is significant in Murakami's writing. In the first story in After the Quake, Komura agrees to take a small box to Hokkaido. When he arrives in Hokkaido he doesn’t feel like he has come a long way. What is interesting about the box is that it appears to contain nothing. After his wife leaves him Komura reads in her letter that although he is good and kind, “living with you is like living with a chunk of air”. At the end of the story, after failing to get an erection, Komura is told by the mysterious Shimao, “That box contains the something that was in you”. Having felt he has come a long way Shimao tells him “But really, you’re just at the beginning. In Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki, Tsukuru finds himself close to death for a period of six months but he recovers and notices that his face has changed. He finishes his studies, finds work and has several girlfriends but there is nothing permanent in his life. It is not until he meets Sara, who forces him to make contact with his old friends that he lost sixteen years ago, that he uncovers the truth about the past and is able to confront his unresolved feelings. On of the triggers that sets him on this course of action is his failure to get an erection. Having taken Sara home she had "reached out and gently took his hard penis in her hand... But a little later, as he was entering her, his penis went limp. It was the first time in his life that this had happened to him and, and it left him baffled and mystified." It is a mystification that deepens...

As events are uncovered, his dreams parallel and inform the events that unfold. He has lurid sexual fantasies about the two girls in the group. Whilst he is caressed by and has sex with both of them, he only ever ejaculates inside Shiro. It turns out that Shiro had a horror of sex. Her father was a doctor who performed abortions. When she was raped, she blames Tsukuru. Even though Kuro knows that this is a false accusation, she stands by Shiro because she feels whilst Shiro is weak and needs protection, Tsukuru is strong and can survive. As she explains to Tsukuru, sixteen years later, when he comes to find her in Finland, she figured that he was a survivor. Later, Shiro has a miscarriage and moves to Hamamatsu. It is here that she is strangled to death. Tsukuru was not told about this at the time. He feels that he was in some way responsible and so was possibly the reason for her death. Kuro feels the same way. It turns out that she was also in love with Tsukuru at the time which made her feel even worse.

In the period before he re-established contact with his old friends, Tsukuru met  a man at the local swimming pool named Haida. Haida tells him the story about his father who had a death charm. He always carried package with him which he placed on the piano before he played. When Haida disappeared from Tsukuru's life, he sees it as yet another example of  how people abandon him for little or no reason. He is afraid of losing Sara and so puts together the pieces of his past so that he can be together with her. When they have sex she feels that he is absent. Later on he comes to feel that  he has a lump inside him which needs to melt.

As an engineer, Tsukuru builds train stations, these are designed for safety as people are transported across the system. In Tokyo, the centre piece of this system is Shinjuku station. The fact that 3.5 million people use this station each day makes it the busiest station in the world. He loves stations and often sits in them to observe passengers in transit. He reflects on the famous photo that depicts a wave of Japanese commuters, head down and looking pensive, which an American photographer had taken. The idea was that even though they had experienced an economic miracle, they were unhappy. Tsukuru feels that this hypothesis missed the point. It gave no context for the look on their faces. The reality was that, given the volume of people in the system, there is a need to keep moving. If someone trips or loses a shoe the results could be catastrophic.

Finally, as events unfold, there is a musical motif provided throughout the novel. The characters listen to a piece of music Mal de Pays by Lizst which Shiro used to play on the piano. Tsukuru listens to one recording given to him by Haida whilst Kuro listens to another. These are quite different interpretations which leads to a reflection on the nature of music and the reading and interpretation of musical notes. This leads to a raised awareness of birds and bird song in the novel. Birds make an appearance regularly and it is through their songs that they make their presence felt. Tsukuru observes in Finland that, "The cries of the birds made for an unusual melody. The same melody pierced the woods, over and over." Kuro (now called Eri) says, "The parent birds are teaching their babies how to chirp... Until I came here I never knew that." Tsukuru decides that:

"Our lives are a complex musical score... Filled with all sorts of cryptic writing, sixteenth and thirty-second notes and other strange signs. Its next to impossible to correctly interpret these, and even if you could, and then could transpose them into correct sounds, there's no guarantee that people would correctly understand, or appreciate, the meaning therein. No guarantee it would make people happy. Why must the workings of people's minds be so convoluted?

The novel ends with a conversation at 4 a.m.. Sara has agreed to meet Tsukuru the following day. He has asked her if she is seeing someone else. She has asked for three days before she gives him her answer. Eri's advice to Tsukuru is, "... make sure you hang on to Sara. You really need her." Presumably the fact finding that he has been engaged in will enable him to  conquer his erectile dysfunction, but there are no guarantees that she will choose him. In Tsukuru's world of railway stations, "Everything proceeds smoothly, efficiently, without a hitch, down to the second." But the reality is that there are aberrations in life such as having six fingers. Luckily, whilst these might be the product of a dominant gene, these are "nothing more than one among many elements in tendency distribution."