Pathway to Japanese Literature

At the beginning of April, after reading Mr.Yamamoto Kanae’s book titled Sketching in Oil, I suddenly found myself wanting to try oil painting as well.
Ever since falling ill last winter, I had spent nearly every day from morning till night reading books in bed, but as the weather gradually warmed and plants in the garden beds began sprouting buds, I suddenly grew weary of remaining buried under covers indefinitely.
At the same time, the condition of my head had changed from how it was during the cold months, and I no longer had the stamina to read for extended periods.
When the mind’s eye—which had been turning ever inward until now—suddenly shifted outward, it felt as though nature itself now stood before me, roused from winter’s slumber and brimming with vitality, ready to welcome me with exuberance.
Just then, Mr.Yamamoto’s book appeared and took my hand to guide me forward.

I had dabbled in oil painting a bit during my middle school days. I asked my art teacher to have tools and paints sent from a place called Iida in Tokyo, then diligently copied the model I had borrowed from him. The method involved not using canvas or such; instead, I would apply glue myself onto yellow cardboard and then use bitumen to block in the light and dark areas of the underpainting. I painted quite a lot, but I never ended up doing any real-life sketching. And when I left home to study abroad, I stopped altogether, and until today I never once had the opportunity to take up a paintbrush again. As for the paint box, palette, easel, and other supplies I had once used—when we vacated our family home several years ago, my mother had disposed of them to a junk dealer without my knowledge, saying, "I probably won’t need these anymore."

Afterward, whenever I went to the capital and attended Western-style painting exhibitions, I would often recall my middle school days, along with that paint’s distinctive smell and a certain school song I used to hum nasally while painting back then—and thus, the desire to indulge in this pleasure again would be quite strongly stirred.
However, given that my circumstances simply wouldn’t allow me such time to spare or a settled state of mind, the prospect of actually doing so was slim.
Still, merely entertaining such hopes every time I saw an exhibition had the effect of letting some fresh air into my monotonous life.

In my middle school days, when it came to oil paintings, aside from those our teacher had painted, I had only seen lithographic color reproductions.
Once, the wife of a British missionary set up a tent in the park at the old castle ruins and spent several days sketching there.
When I timidly approached to peek at what she had created, a blond child of about twelve or thirteen came over and said something like, "Don't get too close! The dog will bite!"
In reality, there was indeed an enormous dog—larger than any I had ever seen—standing guard right beside her.

Then, over the course of more than twenty years, I had laid eyes on quite a number of oil paintings. In terms of quantity, it was probably enormous. As I continued viewing them, my eyes gradually changed in various ways. And my thoughts regarding oil painting as an art form underwent various shifts too. Yet throughout that time, the hope I had constantly cherished was that someday I might see "a painting I had done myself." No matter how many masterpieces existed throughout the world, it didn’t matter. However crude it might be, I wanted to see what my own oil painting—something I had never laid eyes on since birth—would look like.

This kind of hope had persisted for over a decade, rising only to fade, rising only to fade.
It revived with tremendous force simultaneously with this year’s plants sprouting.
And I realized that fulfilling this desire would also serve as appropriate work for my current convalescent state.

And so I promptly gathered paints, brushes, and necessary materials to attempt my first d’après nature on a small sketching board.
The vivid light and smell of the paints squeezed onto the new palette intensely evoked memories of the past.
The peculiar tactile sensation of kneading viscous paint at the tip of a long brush even more intensely revived impressions from over twenty years ago, making me feel as though I were seeing before my very eyes both the garden view from my room of that time and the faces of people I had nearly forgotten.

First, I tried painting whatever was at hand—potted plants, sweets, cups, and such.
Initially, whether my work was skillful or clumsy mattered not at all.
Such comparative terms held no meaning.
Even were there tens of thousands of painters in existence, there remained only one me.

The truth was that I couldn't paint as I wished.
Yet conversely, I found unexpected interest in seeing unforeseen forms emerge.
What I deemed utterly unpaintable would sometimes coalesce into passable shapes through mysterious alchemy, while subjects I considered simple often defied capture.
More fascinating still was discovering entire spectrums within monochromatic surfaces—walls revealing hidden hues, or grass blades I'd thought motionless twitching like living creatures.
I noticed this heightened sensitivity persisting even when not painting.
Once while reading supine, I marveled at my finger's shadow cast upon white pages—that dreadfully beautiful cobalt blue flanked by yellow complementary shades—and abandoned my book mid-sentence.
Another time observing nasturtium leaves in cloudy weather, I watched as fractured sunlight transformed them—countless circular forms pivoting with vigorous purpose, rearranging their spacing like solar-hungry organisms.
Each leaf seemed possessed of animal willpower, stirring in me an inexplicable dread.

While working on nearby still lifes and garden scenes, my subjects to paint gradually began to dwindle.
In truth, even with the same still life or landscape, changing the arrangement of elements, play of light, or viewing angle could provide endless material; but as an amateur beginner, I at least wanted to try painting various different subjects initially.
What I most wanted to paint was outdoor scenery, but given my current ailing health, I had no choice but to abandon that ambition.
And so I finally found myself compelled to begin painting self-portraits.
What on earth was wrong with me? I’d never had much interest in portraits to begin with—in fact harbored an inexplicable aversion toward others’ self-portraits—yet despite this, I somehow found myself wanting to paint my own face.

And so one day when I sat before the mirror and scrutinized my face, I found my complexion pallid with sagging cheeks, while an indescribably dark, unpleasant expression lingered around my eyes, brows, and mouth - causing me to lose all courage to attempt painting it in that moment.
Eventually during fine weather when my spirits lifted, I set up a small mirror on my desk and looked - this time, the face in the mirror appeared bright and clear, its eyes somehow brimming with vitality, giving the impression of a completely different person from before.
And so I promptly began sketching on the smallest board.
I roughly drew an underdrawing in pencil that bore little resemblance to me; however, as I applied paints regardless, something resembling a human face soon emerged.
Not only that, but I felt it did somewhat resemble me.
Given that the face measured merely two inches long with limited area to cover, something face-like had taken shape with less trouble than anticipated - a realization that brought me modest satisfaction.
When I immediately showed it to my family members, some claimed it resembled me while others denied any likeness - both assessments being undeniably valid.

What I noticed when painting this first self-portrait was that the face in the mirror constituted a different entity from my own face through left-right reversal.
This remains an utterly obvious physical fact, yet through sketching I felt I was truly experiencing this reality for the first time.
Even accepting reversed clothing fronts or inverted hair parts and mole positions, the true challenge lay in mentally flipping subtler asymmetries - eye shapes and nose curves - while maintaining their crucial relationships.
Ultimately I realized no single mirror could ever show one's true face.
Though two mirrors angled slightly might reveal it, implementing this felt tedious and beyond my technical means.
Persisting with direct mirror transcription, I grew perplexed again at the kimono's left-over-right lapel fold.
While my scientific and artistic principles demanded faithful reproduction, pictorial unnaturalness worried me - particularly my elderly mother's potential disapproval - leading me to deceitfully render it right-over-left, an adjustment that left lingering discomfort.

This self-portrait No.1, with its terribly wrinkled grimacing face glaring upward from beneath furrowed brows, looked exactly like someone hot-tempered and impatient—yet upon reflection, I cannot say I lack such qualities myself.

Then, after two or three days had passed, I tried painting the second self-portrait on a board the same size as the previous one.
This time, when I tried tilting my face slightly, contrary to before, there emerged a very gentle, smooth-featured youthful face.
My wife and children all laughed while saying it looked too young, but only my mother insisted this one resembled me well.
Between my mother's mental image of me and my children's impression of me, there might exist an age difference exceeding ten years.
That reminded me - when I recently saw photographs of teachers from my higher elementary school days whom I hadn't met since then, I failed to recognize them at first glance.
This was because their photographic faces appeared too youthful, almost childlike.
As I scrutinized them closely, thirty-year-old memories were vividly summoned.
Considering this, might it not be that others' faces preserved in our minds age gradually alongside us while maintaining fixed intervals between their remembered ages and our own?

When I set out to paint my own face each time as the same self, various faces would emerge depending on the occasion. While this was undoubtedly due to my clumsy sketching, I nevertheless found it curiously intriguing.
Both No.1 and No.2 should have carried some resemblance to me, yet when placed side by side for comparison, they appeared unmistakably as different individuals.
Examining them thus, it seemed their likeness to me resided not in the essential points that ought to determine facial similarity, but merely in secondary or peripheral details.

Regarding this matter, I recall a curious phenomenon.
One time on a train, I found myself sitting across from a couple with a child and gazed absently at their faces—though naturally their features were entirely dissimilar, sharing no resemblance in the ordinary sense.
When I then examined the child's face closely, I noticed it bore a striking likeness to both parents.
Though I couldn't readily discern which traits came from the father and which from the mother, I was profoundly astonished to see how these two utterly different parental countenances had fused seamlessly within the child's face, forming one perfectly integrated and natural visage.
What proved even more remarkable was that after intently studying the child's features and then re-examining the parents', their initially dissimilar faces began appearing alternately similar to each other.
How might psychologists account for such a phenomenon?
This would undoubtedly present an intriguing problem, I thought.
Moreover, I found myself contemplating anew the profound implications of familial bonds.
There was another story from Mr.K—his friend's second son bore an uncanny resemblance not to his father or biological mother, but rather to his father's deceased first wife; when Mr.K first saw the boy, he reportedly experienced an indescribable shock.
If this resemblance acknowledged by Mr.K were entirely objective, modern science would likely find itself at a loss for explanation.

What could be the elements that determine whether two faces resemble each other or not? Could there be no scientific method to analyze and extract these elements? While painting self-portraits, I tried thinking about various things. I tried painting dozens of images of the same size and orientation. Then I took photos of them one by one and overlaid each to create composite photographs. If the "differences" in each painting from the actual subject were distributed according to physics' law of errors, wouldn't the composite result amount to taking an average that matches an actual photograph? If it differed from reality, this discrepancy might indicate the artist's inherent personal equation or perhaps expose their idealized conception of their own face. In any case, I classified dozens of portraits into two or three groups based on similarity. Then by overlaying each photograph with a real one, I categorized points of agreement and disagreement into several items and created a statistical table. By employing this method, it would likely constitute a stage in systematically researching the mysterious phenomenon of facial similarity.

After setting aside Self-portrait No.2 for a while and working on still lifes and such, one day the painter Mr.T returned from a trip and went out of his way to come see my paintings.
Showing him all the paintings I had while receiving various critiques and learning many fascinating things, I felt profoundly enlightened.
Regarding the two self-portraits, he pointed out that the colors were too pale, adding that I needed to observe more meticulously and study the hues and tones with patient application.
Now that he mentioned it, the faces I painted lacked the typical richness of oil paintings, appearing pale like light-colored Japanese watercolors.
Admittedly, my complexion did appear somewhat pallid due to the poor-quality mirror, yet when I compared its reflection with my painting afterward, the image indeed looked faint and translucent—its skin resembling silkworms ready for cocooning.
And it had come to seem like a careless and superficial thing indeed.
Then among various topics, Mr.T spoke about the importance of tone.
After narrowing one’s eyes to scrutinize carefully, one should mix fresh paint for each brushstroke before applying it—or so he instructed.
He described how some painters would dab paint onto a six-foot-long brush’s tip, apply it with a motion akin to spearing a bird, then step back to gaze and ponder.
As I listened to these accounts, I found myself growing inexplicably cheerful.
I came to find it amusing how painters engaged in such work resembled scholars performing delicate physical experiments—those peering through lenses while adjusting sensitive screws—as absolute brothers in spirit; then suddenly finding it hilarious for no reason, I burst out laughing, whereupon Mr.T too ended up laughing along.

A few days later, I went to Mr.T’s house and was shown two self-portraits he had painted long ago.
They were studies painted on small boards, but indeed bore thick layers of paint slathered on in a seemingly haphazard manner.
However, when I compared them with my flat paintings, these appeared incomparably more vibrant - beneath the jet-black paint, I felt as though hot blood might be coursing through their very foundations.

Upon reflection, such things were not something I’d just now learned for the first time.
Had this self-portrait of mine been someone else’s work, it might have been so utterly unremarkable that I would have dismissed it outright from the very beginning.
It was merely that, precisely because it was my own work, I had failed to recognize such an obvious truth—a fact I finally came to clearly recognize only while gazing at Mr.T’s portraits.
Indeed, like many people, I likely often dismiss what I cannot comprehend as "trivial" or deem those different from me as "lacking common sense." Yet whether fortunately or unfortunately, when viewing my painting as a simple work and comparing it to a Black person's work, I evidently lacked enough confidence to consider mine superior, and thus became utterly impressed by Mr.T's painting and theories.
And so, with a renewed mindset, I decided to begin work on Self-portrait No.3.

Following Mr.T’s advice, I decided to use canvas this time.
I purchased a No.6-sized canvas stretched on a frame and brought it home.
Simultaneously, I acquired an easel and mounted the canvas upon it.
Somehow, as everything grew properly formalized, I felt an eerie reluctance and couldn't bring myself to begin immediately.
I settled before the mirror stand beside the chest in the living room corner, letting leftward light illuminate half my face, then resolved to paint every visible thing reflected in the mirror exactly as seen—the easel, the chest behind me, even the books and newspapers atop it—and so commenced my work.

This time I began the underdrawing intending to make the face as large as possible, but somehow while working on the sketch, it ended up smaller than I had envisioned.
Though I meant to enlarge it, my hand and pencil seemed to press down relentlessly, making the face shrink.
What I had aimed to render near actual size had somehow become less than half that.
What I perceived as the real subject was actually a virtual image in the mirror positioned twice as far away, making the visual angle considerably smaller.
Moreover, since the canvas sat close at hand, even matching the mirror image's visual angle would result in dimensions less than half life-size, I reasoned.
Yet even setting aside mirror reversal, it began dawning on me how profoundly difficult it must be for people viewing mirrors to form accurate conceptions of their facial proportions.
In other words, we came to feel one could live an entire life without ever truly knowing one's own face.
About myself, I realized I didn't even know my own countenance.
I remembered someone once saying, "No one can touch their own back throughout their life."

It would be too much trouble to completely erase and redraw the underdrawing, and I thought having one of this size wouldn't be so bad either, so I decided to proceed with it as it was. When I showed the underdrawing to my wife and eldest daughter and had them search for discrepancies, they soon discovered various errors. Mistakes that others could have easily spotted were ones that I, the one painting, found quite difficult to notice.

The underdrawing ultimately remained not very similar, and I began applying paint.
I thought it would improve as I worked on it, but gradually came to realize later that it wasn't progressing as expected.

Of course, I started painting from the face.
When I first roughly applied the flesh tones and shadows, a face emerged that did not resemble me but had a very pleasant quality; thinking this was going well, I began to feel somewhat motivated.
Then, as I gradually started using finer brushwork while paying attention to both achieving likeness and color tones, I began to sense impending difficulties.
The first major problem was that while faithfully reproducing each individual part, before I knew it, the positional relationships and balance between parts would become distorted.
Having painstakingly painted the shape of the right eye until it seemed mostly improved, when I stepped back to look, that eye alone had strayed sideways from the face or twisted upward independently.
It seemed I had developed a habit where the facial tilt changed between painting the right and left sides.
Because of this, the left and right eyes acted independently and refused to harmonize within a single face; realizing there was no alternative but to establish one side and subordinate the other, I decided to take the relatively more accurate-looking right eye (from the viewer's perspective) as my standard, and when painting the left eye proceeded with intense focus while constantly considering its relationship to the right.

I brought compasses and rulers to take proportional measurements, but this task proved far less straightforward than with still lifes precisely because a mirror was involved.
After all, since I was comparing two out of these four elements—the real face and the mirror face, the actual ruler and the mirror ruler—my mind often became muddled, causing me to mistake which elements to compare.
Another problematic aspect of the mirror was that when I squinted and peered through a hole made in my clenched palm—intending to use the same method as with still lifes—the face in the mirror mimicked this action, ultimately rendering this method ineffective when painting around the eyes.

Proceeding gradually with the right eye as my standard, I soon realized a major overhaul from the nose to the entire facial contour would be necessary - this would be quite a task, I thought.
The entire face appeared needing considerable tilting.
Recognizing this wouldn't do, I concluded I must demolish the crucial right eye yet again and restart completely - causing all pent-up tension to drain instantly, making me want to hurl down my brush.
Temporarily halting work, I propped the canvas in a room corner and observed it from afar: the face now twisted grotesquely, even those initially pleasant eyes glaring with ferocious-malicious light - I simply couldn't leave it until tomorrow.
Thus though my shoulders had stiffened painfully, I rallied myself and began corrections.

Then, almost every morning after waking and finishing cleaning my room, I would immediately set to work on this Self-portrait No.3.
I resolved to work only in the mornings, thinking that overexertion would strain my body, but as I ate lunch while surveying what I thought was a completed morning’s work, errors would catch my eye and unsettle me. Before I knew it, determined to add just one more stroke, the afternoon hours would mercilessly slip away.

Even so, it seemed to be gradually taking on a likeness.
At times, while painting and viewing it up close, it would improve remarkably, and I’d feel so pleased, thinking there was almost no place left to touch up.
However, when I removed it from the easel and propped it against the horizontal beam to view it from below, I was startled to find that the face had become unrecognizably strange.
At times, when viewing one of the small nostrils drooping down excessively up close, I would fail to notice it at all.

The strange thing was that through this daily scrutiny, the face in the painting gradually seeped into my mind until it somehow became a living human being.
It appeared like myself yet also like another person.
At times, I felt that the face in the painting was my true self, while the one in the mirror seemed false.
Especially when mentally contemplating away from both the mirror and the canvas, the mirror's face would always appear faint and shadowy, while the painted face emerged in my mind as an intensely vivid reality.
I thought this wouldn’t do.
I resolved I must reduce the time spent gazing at the painting and lengthen the time looking in the mirror.

Between the person in the painting and myself as I worked, I began sensing that a sort of empathetic bond had unknowingly formed.
When the image's mouth started contorting, I found myself compelled to distort my own mouth in response.
If I narrowed my eyes, the image appeared to have unconsciously begun doing the same.
On days when the painted face looked agreeable, I felt unaccountably cheerful; on other days, my own mood grew foul.

On days when everything was going extremely well, even the colors and tones I casually mixed would fall into place with an almost amusing precision.
As the paint seemed to fully comprehend and cooperate splendidly on its own, I felt as though I were merely carrying it there and applying it.
In such moments, when I swiped the brush quite roughly and vigorously, the eyes would come alive in an amusing way and the cheeks would plump up.
I felt as though I were watching in astonishment as the paints and brush painted of their own accord.
At such times, I would become pleasantly excited.
Even when looking at the garden or the faces of my family members, everything appeared pleasant, and then, strangely enough, my stomach would grow quite hungry.

In contrast, on days when things went poorly, it seemed as though the paints and brushes conspired to rebel against me.
When I thought the color was too dark and adjusted it, it would inevitably become too light.
As I made corrections, the contour would crumble, and with each brushstroke, the face was gradually demolished into a pitiful state.
My state of mind at such times was quite unpleasant.
It wasn’t that I didn’t think I should abandon it quickly, but precisely at such times reluctance would emerge, making it unbearable to stop.
When forced to discontinue work due to a visitor's arrival, feelings of frustration would mingle with the thought that they had come at just the right time.
When the guests left, I couldn't help but immediately look at the failed painting.

Because I was so engrossed in it, my wife said playfully, “This painting has a soul—it might slip out at night,” and laughed.
One night, as I lay in bed gazing at the self-portrait hung on the kamoi lintel, I felt as though the face in the painting had unexpectedly blinked.
Thinking this was interesting, I stared at it, but nothing happened.
However, the moment I tried to look away, it seemed to blink again swiftly.
This might be a common hallucination.
In Pushkin’s short stories there is a tale about the Queen of Spades from playing cards blinking, but in any case, it appears that when our nerves are strained into a particular state, such illusions arise.
Yet an even stranger illusion occurred when I lay in bed at night, half-closing my eyes to peer into the darkness—there, the painted face would appear.
When I first noticed it, it appeared as clearly as a hallucination; afterward, it would only emerge and vanish dimly, yet still recognizably as the face from the painting.
In physiological optics, there is a well-researched phenomenon called afterimages; these typically persist for only a very brief period after one gazes at an object and usually alternate between positive and negative images.
That afterimages would persist for such a long time afterward and only appear as positive images was something I had neither read about nor heard of before.
This was likely not physiological but rather a type of hallucination arising from pathological neural abnormalities—yet even so, it remained profoundly strange.
They say that those who have committed murder vividly see their victims' faces when they contract a fever many years later, but I thought that what they see is likely similar in degree to the hallucinations I had experienced.

There was another strange illusion-like phenomenon.
One day, as I was making slight adjustments to the eyes and mouth as usual, the face I painted suddenly began resembling my deceased father's.
It felt exactly as though Father's face had peered out unexpectedly from within the painting, startling me profoundly.
Yet upon reflection, this didn't seem particularly strange after all.
I've often been told I closely resemble Father - though I myself don't see it - there must undoubtedly be points of strong likeness.
If I were to adjust some part of my face even slightly, there must be a tendency for it to approach Father's visage.
Thus through daily corrections and alterations, I must have accidentally struck upon that 'certain something' - touching this crucial key would make Father's face manifest instantaneously.

Then it occurred to me that as I daily brought forth various faces with my brush, the faces of ancestors I had never seen might occasionally be peering out from within them.
In fact, there were even times when I felt these were faces that seemed strangely familiar.

While concrete individual memories and experiences may not be directly inherited, was it not because some refined essence distilled from them was passed down that such feelings arose? It seemed Mr. Natsume Soseki's *Heredity of Taste* precisely touched upon this point. In Lafcadio Hearn's writings too, such ideas had been discussed. If we trace our ancestors back a thousand years, they say my present self inherits the blood of twenty million people from that ancient time. If that were so, then the various faces I created daily might correspond to someone among those twenty million people. Thinking such thoughts, I found it amusing, yet simultaneously felt compelled to thoroughly reconsider the very formation of "myself" from this perspective. It was as though my independent self had crumbled into dust, leaving only countless ancestral spirits swarming within the cells and blood corpuscles of my body.

I somehow managed to complete this Self-Portrait No.3.
In the true sense, no matter how long I worked on it, it would never truly "be completed"—
Having come to realize the futility of continuing, I decided to consider this a natural stopping point and set it aside for some time.
There was a cabinet draped with green cloth in the background, and the haphazardly placed books and newspapers on top made the entire painting look garishly cluttered; therefore, I later completely painted over it and adjusted it to appear as though a dark green curtain had been hung instead.
At this, the face suddenly stood out and emerged vividly.
Not only that, but through this modification, the painting—which until then had felt like something one might find as a magazine frontispiece—acquired a somewhat settled, classical-like elegance.
Moreover, through the effect of color contrast, the reddish tone of the face became more pronounced.
However, at the same time, the kimono also began appearing reddish in tone—something I came to dislike—but I no longer had the stamina to correct it and left it as it was.

I immediately decided to start working on Self-Portrait No.4 on a canvas of the same size.
This time, I thought I would make the face much larger and analyze the tones more finely than before.
However, though I had drawn the underdrawing quite large at first, it was truly strange how the face gradually shrank without my realizing it as I repeatedly corrected the eyes and nose.
When I took measurements around the time it was mostly completed, I realized it had ended up being only about three-quarters the size of the actual face.
I lacked the courage to erase it completely and start over, so this time too, I continued working as it was.

On the first day, I boldly distinguished between shadows and sunlit areas to establish a rough layout.
The face that emerged then strangely resembled that of the previous No.3.
It seemed some deeply ingrained fallacy in my mind was asserting its existence with formidable force.

In the end, I fiddled with this painting for over twenty days but ultimately had to abandon it as nothing substantial emerged.
Precisely because the facial area had grown larger, the difficulties became greater than before.
I increasingly found myself fixating on details while losing sight of overall balance.
Cézanne said, "Do you understand, Mr. Vollard? The contour lines escape from those who look." Though I never fully grasped his meaning, I often felt exactly that phenomenon.
The moment I thought I'd captured the right cheek, the left cheek slid away.
Long ago I once saw a painter working on a portrait.
Observing his movements revealed many things incomprehensible to an amateur like me—when I thought he was carefully painting the chin's tip, his brush would suddenly dart to an eyelid like lightning.
He kept darting his brush about with watchful vigilance.
There was something of a sheepdog circling its flock, herding back straying sheep.
Now I realize he'd been guarding against escaping contours and colors.
I thought this method would prove terribly demanding.

It terrified me how even a mere millimeter shift in contour lines could completely transform a face's appearance.
Whether a dab of paint applied too thickly or too thinly at any spot, the face would look distorted.
Such effects remained invisible when viewed up close yet became strikingly apparent from a slight distance.
This finally made me understand why one might use a six-foot brush.

When I finally managed to create something resembling a face, it bore an uncanny resemblance to a certain scholar I knew.
Unaware of this, my wife saw the painting and remarked, “It looks like the face of a carpenter or plasterer.”

Then, as I made various daily corrections and alterations, it was strange how this same carpenter’s face would unexpectedly return before I knew it.
I often felt as though I were unexpectedly encountering someone I had no desire to meet and was actively avoiding.
One day, I boldly scraped off the left cheek in one go, and from then on, I was never again haunted by this mysterious ghost.

No matter how long I continued, I came to feel there seemed no prospect of it ever being completed.
One day while recounting my recent experiences to Mr.K, he made this observation:
"Not only is it fundamentally impossible to capture a single fleeting moment of human faces that change every instant, but even if you could seize and express such a moment, would that truly deserve to be called a likeness?"
Contemplating this, I realized that while something like a quick snapshot might be perfected through prolonged technical training, a portrait meant to express a living human being could never truly reach completion.
Perhaps pursuing this line, nihonga-style portraits or manga caricatures might hold more promise.
Even short of such extremes, those peculiar faces from Post-Impressionism onward - compared to rigid portraits where every eyelash is meticulously rendered like enamel on metal - might at least grasp fragments of essential truth.
If one were to expand upon this idea, might it not naturally descend into the doctrines and theories of movements like Cubism and Futurism?

If one could capture a natural subject that never truly completes and yet manage to finish a painting, there must be some kind of trick involved. Not only faces, but indeed any still life or subject—if one draws the contours too distinctly, the painting becomes overly rigid and paradoxically loses its lifelike quality. For instance, when I attempted to draw each nasturtium leaf with precise definition one by one, the result inevitably felt like applying paint to tinplate crafts. I wondered if this stemmed from my own clumsy technique, but surprisingly, even works by renowned artists often fell into this trap. In contrast to this, when one intentionally breaks the contours while painting, vitality emerges and suggests movement and depth. I thought that this was indeed a psychological phenomenon that could be relatively easily explained scientifically. At the same time, I began to feel that there might be somewhat solid grounds for the argument that elements such as errors in drawing in the ordinary sense, or clumsiness and awkwardness, are necessary components in painting. The secret to the trick seemed to be hidden there.

Cézanne seems to have been someone who sought this secret to the trick. However, according to Bernard, he was unable to complete his works in his lifetime because his theory and objectives contradicted each other. Even so, I could never quite grasp how Cézanne had felt confronting the same 'still life' a hundred times over—yet as I continued painting my endlessly unfinished self-portrait, I suddenly found myself thinking this: Undoubtedly, Cézanne must have clearly seen each and every "face" of the apples. There are people among my acquaintances who can distinguish between sparrows' faces, but for this painter with eyes even sharper than theirs, the living faces of individual fruits must have kept eluding his grasp, causing him no small trouble. Could it be that this resulted in those angular apples?

As I pondered these various matters while earnestly staring at and painting faces every day, not only did my own face begin to appear not as a three-dimensional form but like a painting rendered on canvas, but so too did the faces of anyone I faced.
I found myself troubled by becoming overly conscious of the shadows and light on people's faces during conversations.
One night while intently observing a female guest's beautifully complexioned face under electric light, I couldn't shake the impression that the bright areas on her cheeks and forehead resembled thick daubs of undried oil paint. As I became engrossed in watching how these gleaming patches transformed with her facial movements, I nearly lost track of her conversation on more than one occasion.
Afterward, one day while strolling through Aoyama Cemetery with Mr.K and attentively observing the colors of the shining young leaves on the tree crowns, I recalled this matter and mentioned it to him. Mr.K then shared the following story with me.
"In one of the Goncourt brothers' novels," he said, "there's an actress who retires from the stage to marry a nobleman, only to yearn for her former life."
"In the final chapter," he continued, "immediately after witnessing her husband endure terrible agony from illness, she practices her acting gestures before a mirror right in front of him."
"When her husband saw this," Mr.K concluded, "he declared 'You're an artist who can't love,' shoved her away, and that was the end."
Mr.K added that while he'd initially found this scene implausible when reading it, hearing my experience made him reconsider its possibility.
When considering such extreme cases alone, one might concede some validity to those who attack pure art for corrupting ethics.
Yet the art itself produced by such immoral artists need not necessarily be wholly detrimental.
In truth, these artists and similar scientists—precisely through their extreme egoism—may ultimately sacrifice themselves for society's benefit.
In such circumstances, those who profit most are likely scholars and priests resembling Pharisees, lashing whips across these victims' corpses.
As I contemplated these matters, I collided with the problem of how to judge those obsessed with wealth accumulation at social obligation's expense—a question that proved increasingly thorny.

While tinkering with the same face every day, there were times when I would serendipitously hit upon the right approach. While there was undoubtedly something off about it, whenever—by some chance—the very areas I’d been struggling with, unable to pinpoint how they differed, began correcting themselves, I felt an odd sensation. It felt akin to when tuning a musical instrument’s strings until they perfectly align, or when a stubborn screw on an ill-fitting device finally clicks into place—a sensation where, without any particular reason, the tension in my shoulders would suddenly dissipate.

Once a section had been successfully executed in that manner, the thought of tampering with it again became terrifying. Yet when I nevertheless applied the brush, I felt rather heroic in spirit. But whenever I did this, my hands would inevitably tense up and shrink back timorously, often leading to failure. If I didn't even concern myself with progress, leaving it untouched and remaining content as it was might safely coincide with what's called the prudent way of life.

And so I ultimately abandoned Self-Portrait No.4 without completing it.
Self-Portrait No.3 had a mean-spirited face like No.1, but this No.4 turned out gentle-mannered like No.2.
I felt as though the contrasting traits of a dual personality were taking turns to manifest.

This time, thinking I'd try a profile, I set up two mirrors and captured the contour directly from the side, only to discover a truly unexpected visage.
The nose jutted out far higher than I'd imagined in an almost repulsive manner, with a receding forehead, sunken jaw, and moreover a protruding occiput—it was an inexplicably strange face that somehow reminded me of Robespierre.
In any case, reconciling my frontal view with this profile seemed rather challenging.
Though I'd had similar experiences with unfamiliar faces in photo studio albums before, I never imagined confronting such dissonance with the face that had rested atop my shoulders for over forty years since birth.

Reflecting on this now, I thought there was considerable probability that a detective searching for criminals using frontal photographs might nonchalantly overlook the actual person standing before them in profile.
In some cases, relying on abstract facial descriptions might actually prove safer.
Or perhaps caricatures drawn by cartoonists could ultimately be most effective.
After all, skillful caricatures express the entirety of their subject more vividly than reality itself.

In connection with this matter lay a question I had long pondered - how human faces often resemble animals' visages while conversely animal faces frequently evoke memories of specific people.
In reality there exist people bearing likenesses to camels or pelicans.
There are even those resembling pufferfish,sand borers,mantises,and what one might call sea serpent spawn.
An old issue of Strand Magazine had once featured color photographs of various animals cleverly juxtaposed with human counterparts.
A certain foreigner once remarked how Japanese sumo wrestlers' faces invariably reminded him of beasts - though ironically,the man's own countenance strikingly resembled some creature itself.
The face of Tolstoy painted by Levin remains undeniably leonine in aspect.

Considering this, it seemed that the images formed in our minds when observing human faces were by no means Euclidean geometric constructs.
It was merely that various facial impressions were created through numerous permutations of relatively few elements.
Within these permutations existed a combination of key elements determining "resemblance," where as long as these were present, the arrangement of remaining features likely mattered little.
I thought analyzing this combination of key elements would prove both fascinating and challenging.
To memorize star positions scattered across the celestial sphere, one connects them with arbitrary straight lines to form constellations.
Once memorized, those specific stars would always appear clustered together; even when encountering similarly arranged points that were actually quite distorted, one could immediately recognize them as such.
Was our memory of faces not much the same?
While constellation connections were rather arbitrary, if facial recognition required methods both necessary and universal to all humans, this too became a curious problem.

When considering various academic disciplines bearing the name of 'science,' particularly those related to spiritual matters—though they claim to investigate the true nature of things, upon closer examination one realized they still failed to grasp objects' original essence, often amounting to little more than creating facial sketches or caricatures—it gave me a strange feeling to think such incomplete 'images' had proven immensely useful to humanity in building today's civilization.
Even if we accept that when two individuals drew differing facial sketches, each insisting their own was 'correct,' it was one thing to make such claims—but what would it mean if this ultimately ended in bitter quarrels?
In physics we lived in an age where the principle of relativity was acknowledged, yet...

Putting aside the profile for now, I resolved to attempt a frontal portrait on the sketchboard in one continuous burst. Having struggled for twenty days, I thought I wanted to shift my mindset a bit. This time, adopting a mindset where whether it resembled me or not didn’t matter in the slightest, I started working boldly and managed to complete just the face in merely two days. Yet contrary to expectations, this version ended up having the most lifelike face and appeared the most artistic. Moreover, there were those who said this was the most similar among all those created so far. Somehow, it felt almost too anticlimactic—making my prolonged obsession with the previous paintings seem utterly foolish—yet in truth, perhaps the accumulated experience from those earlier works had finally manifested in this sketch.

When I lined up the portraits from No. 1 through to the final No. 5, they presented quite a variety of faces. And all of them were accidental creations. I thought it was no easy task to grasp necessity from this array of contingencies. The only thing common to all might be abstract points like having two eyes. Though in truth, the face's daily manifestations were likely matters of chance.

If one were to trace back through the ever-changing history of a face day by day, it would form a 'continuity' extending to infancy; yet attempting to scientifically prove to someone who hadn't continuously observed this that the childhood face and present face belonged to the same individual would likely prove exceedingly difficult. Even if you had to "prove" to a parent who'd lived with you for decades that you hadn't been suddenly replaced at night, it would be quite a predicament. First of all, it seemed unlikely anyone—even themselves—fully grasped the continuity between their childhood and present selves. One could rest assured since the need for such "proof" rarely arose. But for example, was there anyone who could strictly confirm their own child—separated at birth and reunited three years later—in the truest sense? Fortunately, in this world, logical proof remained relatively unrequired; testimony of authority served as substitute, and thanks to this, things likely proceeded without congestion.

While painting my self-portrait and struggling to render it as intended, in my desperation I found myself pondering all sorts of things. When I tried writing this as if reviewing my thoughts once more, I realized many of the things I had pondered were trivial; yet among them were also matters I wished to explore more deeply.

(September 1920 [Taisho 9], Chuō Kōron)