Beauty resides in fleeting moments.
Inspired by a television feature on Itō Jakuchū, this essay reflects on a shared way of seeing birds, flowers, and nature, interwoven with personal memory, hardship, and an unexpected connection to Jakuchū’s birthplace in Kyoto.

May 14, 2016

I am convinced that there is no beauty greater than birds, flowers, wind, and moon.
At the same time, I am also convinced that beauty exists in a moment.

In photography, a moment means an instant.
For cherry blossoms, it is the moment of full bloom; for autumn leaves, it is their peak.
All of these are moments.

When it comes to the black swallowtail butterfly, which I was once deeply fascinated by, its life lasts only a few months.
Birds, too, have lives that are but a moment compared to humans.
That is probably why I am drawn to birds.

The other day, NHK aired a special program on Itō Jakuchū, so I recorded it.
Needless to say, it was magnificent, but as I watched it, I found myself thinking:

Jakuchū and I see birds, flowers, wind, and moon with the same gaze.

At the same time, I recalled something I had learned recently that had surprised me.

As I have written before, Tolstoy begins what is regarded as the greatest novel in the world, Anna Karenina, by stating that there are as many kinds of unhappiness as there are people.
From childhood, I lived within a painful unhappiness that was mine alone.

As I have already mentioned, by the time I was in the fifth grade of elementary school, I had been given the intellect of a second- or third-year high school student.

I am a person who abandoned a promised life as an elite destined to govern the nation, in order to escape from my own unhappiness.

But abandoning it, too, felt like a natural course of events.

As I have also written, when I arrived in Kyoto, I thought to myself that I did not need university.

Thus, in my early twenties, while taking on various jobs to earn my living, I once worked as a live-in employee at a restaurant located at the eastern corner of the block where Itō Jakuchū’s family home once stood, in Kyoto’s Nishiki Market—just a few shops away.
It was only for a very short period.

The other day, when I stopped by Nishiki Market for the first time in a very long while, I saw countless banners hanging from the ceiling, printed with reproductions of Jakuchū’s paintings and bearing the title “Jakuchū’s 300th Anniversary,” stretching endlessly along the arcade.

I was genuinely astonished to learn that his birthplace had been located at the western end of Nishiki Market, near Kyoto Daimaru.

For I had lived and worked as a live-in part-time employee at a shop just a few doors down from there.