The Tragedy of the Artist
When I lived in Nagasaki, I went on a road trip with my girlfriend — a rowdy, emotional fireball with a head in the future and a heart in the past — and our journey brought us to Kurokawa, a hideaway from the modern world in the heart of the mountains.
Kurokawa is a smattering of hotels and traditional ryokan linked by winding, narrow streets, and dotted with souvenir shops, bath houses, and thin slivers of housing. Surrounded by trees and forever echoing the nearby running rivers, Kurokawa is an escape to peace, quiet, and hot springs — where walking around in kimono-style bathrobes and indulging in private outdoor baths is the norm.
Dinners at ryokan are held in spacious dining rooms shared by all — elderly couples, families, young lovers, holidaying singles — and the feel is somewhat cult-like. Everyone shares the same bathrobes and eats the same extravagant meals. People have their hair down, their make-up off, and their stress dissipates with the rising steam of the hot springs outside. The air is communal.
Perhaps this is why a nearby middle-aged couple took a shining to us, the Japanese girl and her clueless boyfriend. I wonder, in hindsight, if it was the romanticism of the idea — of international love — that appealed to them, or whether it was simply pity for the poor girl burdened with the impossible task of educating the hopeless foreigner. Whatever the case, they poured us beer, and we talked, and sometimes I understood the conversation, and then I simply drank until it didn’t bother me that I didn’t.
The following morning we met that couple in the lobby, and they showed us around — Kurokawa was their regular holiday spot, a monthly getaway from the busy days and busy nights that plagued the husband’s salaryman life. Our wandering eventually took us away from the crowded quiet of meandering tourists, and to a solitary cabin amongst a collection of bamboo and timber.
Inside the cabin, a man with long, scraggily hair planed quietly at a long piece of wood. This man, I was told, was an artist — wood was his canvas, and nature his inspiration. The cabin was a gallery for his work, full of countless poems on planks of wood, surrounded by little characters made from scraps of timber and decorated with shavings.
The characters were all of a similar style, though sizes varied — they were oddly crafted, and sadly constructed.
It was a collection of wooden potato-men.
The artist raised his eyes from his work, and smiled at his friends. I thought it odd to see that smile droop slightly at the sight of us, the young couple in tow.
While my girlfriend and our hosts talked at a pace I couldn’t follow, their chatter played soundtrack to my wander through the gift-shop. I was fascinated by the vast collection of potato-men and plank-art-poetry.
But I was also saddened, because I knew it wouldn’t sell. There was a palpable lack of polish and craftsmanship in each piece of work, and the poetry was somehow childish, unrefined.
Even the wooden potato-men were just a simplistic, depressing family of smiling nobodies.
The artist spoke of his work, softly and slowly. He said that the time varied from piece to piece — getting the shape just right could take days, and other times hours, and sometimes mere minutes. I nodded, and looked around, and tried to take it all in — it was an eccentric collection that had likely been started decades ago.
It struck me as equal parts wonderful and tragic. Wonderful for the way he’d found a means to live and breathe his love of crafting timber, but tragic for the way he was destined to express his feelings through work that would go forever unappreciated, despite the hours poured into it.
The tragedy of the artist, I realized, is that they are cursed and compelled to work. To create. To express. Just how they do this, however, they often don’t have a say in.
The medium chooses them.
For me, it was stories — the feelings and thoughts that engulfed my heart were always written down, if rarely shared.
For that artist in his wooden cabin, it happened to be potato-men.
I felt us as kindred spirits, somehow — I sensed in him a resignation I knew existed somewhere in me, too.
The couple insisted on buying us souvenirs — a piece of poetry, and a potato-man key chain. We of course declined, as was proper, then smiled and relented, and expressed thanks. The artist smiled his half-smile, bid us farewell, and shuffled back to his workshop. The gentle sound of planing wood faded away as we heard the story of a dedicated artist — a heartfelt message, and a struggle to find self-discovery in art. The constant depression of quiet failure.
It was disconcerting, how much it all felt like listening to a potential future.
That day, as my girlfriend and I left Kurokawa in my broken-down hatchback, I took the potato-man key chain and hung it from the rearview mirror. Seeing it there, swinging gently side to side as the engine coughed to a start, I couldn’t shake the feeling I was looking at a hanged man, with sadness in his beady, potato-man eyes — a sadness I had watched shuffle back to a woodshed only hours earlier.
The ryokan and its hot spring had left me refreshed and invigorated, but as we drove winding mountain roads back to civilisation, I felt a weight on my soul — a heavy, lingering, and depressing sensation that stayed with me long after I placed that key-chain in the back corner of the glove box, where I couldn’t see it.
I wondered if the effect of that potato man, accidentally hanged and executed on my rearview mirror, was what the artist had intended from the very beginning.
Because regardless of what we create, we place in our creations what weighs on our souls and rests in our hearts.
Whether that be a gift, or a curse.
