Mizuno Toshikata – Spring Sea

“Perhaps – I want the old days back again and they’ll never come back, and I am haunted by the memory of them…”

(Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind)

Mizuno Toshikata, Spring Sea, 1905

There is a sense of stillness, quietness and wistfulness in Mizuno Toshikata’s ukiyo-e print “Spring Sea” from 1905. The print shows a lonely beach and a woman collecting seashells. It is always these kinds of simple scenes that possess so much depth and feeling. The woman has a pensive look on her face; she is looking down at the beach and holding a piece of a shell in her hand but in spirit she seems to be elsewhere. Her long black hair is falling down her back and resembling sea algae. There are no other people on the beach, though there are small boats in the distance. Distant enough they are not to disturb the woman. The sea and the mountains are painted in a vague manner, and they appear to be sinking into the mist, perhaps to symbolise the world around her fading away as she is retreating into her inner-world.

The way I see the scene is that each little shell represents a memory and while the woman is collecting seashells she is actually reliving all these memories. One seashell for a lost love, one seashell for the kiss, one seashell for the lovely summer evening with fireflies which I will never relieve again, one seashell for…. wait… For each seashell a tear. A single tear strolling down the cheek quietly, unassumingly, not wanting to catch anyone’s attention, not wanting even for the seawaves to stop their play. Years go by, but the memories remain… Of course I am reading too much into the painting, but that is what I do best. Tender colours which we see here were typical for Toshikata’s prints and it is something rare in the ukiyo-e art. Usually we see more garish colours.

Mizuno Toshikata (1866-1908) was a Meiji era painter famous for a diverse range of topics, from the bijin-ga (paintings of beautiful women), to newspaper illustrations to the war illustrations for the Sino-Japanese war. As you can see by the dates, he died just there years after the ‘Spring Sea’ was made and this further puts a wistful note on the artwork for me.