This weekend has been a big museum weekend. Yesterday (Friday, Day Forty-Two) we went on a fieldtrip to the Tokyo National Museum to see the special exhibit on Ise Jingu and the Treasures of Shinto. The exhibit was really interesting. There was an old wooden statue of Buddha with really large stretched earlobes, and when my teacher saw me admiring it, she came up to me and said, "Look Honma-san, his ears are so big!" I laughed and replied, "Yeah, someday I'm gonna have ears that big too!" Who knows, perhaps I will one day reach enlightenment as well...but I'm not really holding my breath on that one.
The thing about the Tokyo National Museum is that they have in their collection an amazing series of hell paintings (地獄草紙) but each time I go there they are never on display. This is the third time I have visited the museum and the third time that they are not up. What makes it more frustrating is that they are scheduled to be on view starting in late August to early October, exactly when I will have already left the country. Oh what luck. Perhaps I am only destined to experience hell in person rather that in aesthetic form. *sigh*
But ironically, today (Saturday) I went to visit the museum dedicated to one of my favorite artists, the Kawanabe Kyosai Memorial Museum and they had a special exhibit of Kyosai's own hell paintings, which made me very very excited! If you aren't familiar with Kyosai's work, he is a master of the macabre, and his painting of ghosts, demons, and other hellish creatures are superb. The museum is rather small, but it holds so much great stuff and the paintings and sketches they had on display were excellent. Much more interesting than the last time I went two years ago, when they had on display Kyosai's work on beautiful women. Nothing against beautiful women, but c'mon, can they really compare to rotting corpses and sadistic demons laughing at tortured human figures writhing in the pits of hell? I think not.
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