Murase Taiitsu’s painting is paired with his own poem that reads:
The world's fortunes rise and fall, and my heart churns without repose.
I am almost like a fish in a boiling cauldron.
Flowers are red, the willows green; spring is as ever.
I wander through the forest to visit a humble tavern.
The person in the scene gazes up at a tree’s branches, a tavern’s banner waving in the distance. After studying with a Confucian scholar in Kyoto, Taiitsu started his own school. His peers considered him eccentric and many accounts of his unusual behavior survive.
