Hotaka-Dake

Hotaka

Beneath the hushed mountains of Honshu Island, the mountains known as the Japanese Alps, I began, on whim, an arduous regimen of fasting and meditation. For six weeks I felt the weight of birds, the stillness of long, cold nights, the gentle blur of slowly melting ice and the vastness of a sky, radiant with unimaginably lush shades of blue and green.

It was in 1992, barely out of my teens, and I was gripped in an unyielding vise of hopelessness and despair. It was my indifference to everything that signaled to family just how deep my sorrow had become. It was my sister’s boyfriend, Toro Agaki, who suggested the dissolving landscape of the Hida and Kiso mountains as a possible balm for my misery.

So uncharacteristic was my self-prescribed self-denial that those closest to me were certain that I had gone mad. What ensued was actually the series of drawings known as the “Hotaka-Dake Suite,” exhibited the following year in my very first exhibition.