Takamura Chieko — The Woman Who Could Not Show Her Work

The One Who Never Brought a Painting

"There is no sky in Tokyo."

Chieko often said so, and sighed, her husband Takamura Kotaro wrote.

Kotaro even turned it into a short poem. In the poem, Kotaro looks up at the sky in surprise. Between the young cherry leaves is the lovely sky he has always known.

But Chieko, looking far away, says: above Mount Adatara, a blue sky shines every day. That is the real sky.

Kotaro was born and raised in Tokyo. He could not feel her complaint in his own body. He thought she would get used to the city in time.

She never did. Her longing for the real sky did not change until she died, Kotaro looked back.

She was a woman who meant to become a painter. And yet she hardly ever showed her paintings, even to the man who would become her husband.

She spoke little, too.

Naganuma Chieko was the eldest daughter of a sake brewer, in a village near Nihonmatsu in Fukushima, northern Japan. In 1903, at sixteen, she entered Japan Women's College in Tokyo.

A friend who shared her room in the dormitory later wrote down her memories of Chieko. The dorm had only one bicycle. The students set times and took turns practicing. Who would learn to ride first? It was Chieko, they say. Snacks between meals were forbidden, but Chieko ate them openly, without even hiding, it is said. And on the day that friend left the school, Chieko saw her off in tears, apparently.

She met painting at this school, too.

Her department was home economics. But she went eagerly to the Western-style painting classes, which she chose for herself. Whenever the students put on a play, she always took the job of painting the backdrops. Some people remembered her painting late into the night, in the basement of the assembly hall.

Her parents back home were against their daughter becoming a painter. What changed that, it is said, was a portrait of her grandfather that she painted around that time. The people of her hometown were amazed at how well it was done, and her parents at last gave in. Kotaro, who saw that oil painting later, wrote that it was plain, but had a quiet harmony and was beautiful in color.

After she graduated, Chieko did not go home. She stayed in Tokyo and kept studying oil painting.

In November 1910, Chieko was staying on Mount Akagi in Gunma. She sent a postcard to the president of the women's college.

The trees had dropped their leaves, and their bones were showing. The cows had gone down to the village, the mountain was asleep, and only the wind raged by itself. Even on a winter mountain like this, she wrote, I am still doing a little "study." (She used the English word, spelled out in Japanese letters.)

Study, in English. It can be read as if she wrote it a little proudly, to her old president.

In 1911, Hiratsuka Raicho asked Chieko to draw the cover of the first issue of a new magazine made by women, called Seito ("Bluestocking"). Her cover was seen by many people, but she herself did not often show up at the gatherings of the group, it seems.

At the end of that year, Chieko was taken by Yanagi Yae, an older student from the college, to visit a sculptor's studio.

Takamura Kotaro. Just back from France, and twenty-eight years old.

Kotaro was living a rough life then. He had tried to move to Hokkaido and failed almost at once. They were days when even he did not know what would become of him, he himself later recalled.

Chieko began to come to the studio now and then.

Very elegant, and silent. When she spoke, the ends of her sentences faded away. She looked at Kotaro's work, drank tea, listened to talk about French painting, and went home. That was how it always went.

All that caught Kotaro's eye was how well she wore her kimono, and her slender figure.

She never, ever brought a painting of her own. Kotaro had no idea what kind of paintings she made.

The paintings she made in the few years after she graduated, she later threw away, every one.

All that ever reached Kotaro's eyes were a few rough sketches.

A Friend on the Mountain

On Sunday, January 21, 1912, the Seito group held its New Year party at a restaurant in Omori, Tokyo. Chieko was there too.

The party lasted until about two in the morning. The next month's Seito wrote an article about that lively day.

According to the article, Miss Naganuma stayed in her seat with three others and would not get up. When someone spoke a thought like her own, she answered, breathing a little faster, it is said:

"Yes, yes, that's right, that's right, that's it."

The article calls her "Mr. Naganuma of the Hazy Style." "Hazy style" was a name for a way of painting with blurred outlines. It was probably a teasing way of calling her a vague, foggy person. The article says she talked with her head hanging, as if in a dream.

And that she looked like someone who had never seen a blue sky in her life.

When the entertainment began, it was Miss Naganuma who raised difficult demands such as "If there is no shamisen..." (a Japanese stringed instrument).

At noon that day, when everyone had their photograph taken, one of the others caught hold of Chieko, they say, and asked her with a straight face:

"How can one manage to look like a beauty?"

What stayed in the memory of the article's writer was Miss Naganuma, with a friend's coat hung over her shoulders like a bride's long robe, looking like a jellyfish.

Miss Naganuma was hard to talk to. That seems to have been the honest opinion of her women friends then, Kotaro wrote later. Some people remembered often seeing her walk in tall lacquered clogs, dragging the hem of her kimono long behind her.

That year she put oil paintings in an exhibition, and held a two-person show with a friend, where she showed paintings on round paper fans. So she did sometimes show her paintings in public.

Even so, Kotaro had still not seen a single one.

That year Kotaro's new studio was finished. His father had built it, and Kotaro moved in alone. Chieko came to visit, bringing a big pot of gloxinia as a gift.

It was just after the Meiji Emperor died. Kotaro went to Inubosaki in Chiba to sketch.

There he met Chieko again. She had come to another inn with her younger sister and a close friend. Before long she moved to Kotaro's inn, and the two of them walked together, ate together, and sketched together.

A maid from the inn, it is said, always followed them on their walks. It seems she thought they looked strange, and feared the two might do something drastic together.

Kotaro did not know. Chieko told him afterward that if he had said anything unreasonable to her then, she had meant to die on the spot, it is said.

What Kotaro, knowing nothing, saw was Chieko delighted to find a beach plant called hama-bofu. She was just like a child, he recalled.

Soon, passionate letters from Chieko began to arrive.

Kotaro hesitated. Again and again he doubted himself: might this feeling be only for a moment? He warned Chieko, too. His life ahead would be hard, and he could not bear to drag her into it.

Among artists and among women, nasty rumors flew about the two of them. Both of them had a hard time with their families. Even so, as Kotaro tells it, the more bad voices filled the air around them, the more strongly the two were bound together.

In September 1913, Chieko visited Kotaro, who was painting at Kamikochi in the mountains of Shinshu.

Kotaro crossed a steep pass to meet her. Chieko carried her painting tools and left the rest of her luggage to the guide, and climbed the mountain path lightly. The mountain people were amazed at how strong her legs were.

From then on, every day, Kotaro slung both their sets of painting tools over his shoulder, and they walked around sketching.

It was at this time that Kotaro saw Chieko's paintings for the first time.

Her way of seeing nature was quite personal, with a special character of its own. If she grew into a great painter, it would be interesting, he thought, he wrote.

One of the self-portraits Kotaro painted on this mountain, Chieko is said to have looked at again, much later, when she lay ill.

At the same inn were the English couple Mr. and Mrs. Weston, who had come to climb the mountains. Weston asked Kotaro: is she your sister, or your wife?

"A friend."

When Kotaro answered so, Weston gave a wry smile, Kotaro wrote.

A Tokyo newspaper made a fuss of the two of them under the headline "Love on the Mountain." Even so, in 1914, the next year, Kotaro's parents allowed their marriage. Kotaro decided that his family's land and house would all belong to his younger brother's couple, and he began living with Chieko in the studio. The two started a household completely bare, he wrote.

When the new year came, Chieko wrote a thank-you letter to Yanagi Yae, who had introduced them. She thanked her for the wedding gift and for making the trip to visit. In it there is this line:

"That butter was fresh. It really has the smell of butter."

It is signed "Chie." She had written the smell of the butter she was given, just as it was.

This was around the time they married. Kotaro could not imagine Chieko as an old woman, however hard he tried. So he said, half joking:

"Will even you become an old woman?"

Chieko answered without thinking, Kotaro remembered:

"I'll die before I get old."

The two kept separate rooms for their work. Chieko's room was upstairs.

The paintings she made there, she would soon stop showing anywhere.