Hikaru Genji

In this painting, Otake Chikuha took a very unusual approach to a subject that has fascinated Japanese artists since the classical Heian period (794–1185)—namely, the Tale of Genji and its titular character, Hikaru Genji.

Otake began training as a painter when he was only five years old, studying the brush styles of famous Nanga-school painters. As a teenager he relocated from rural northeast Japan to cosmopolitan Tokyo, where he shifted his attention to the Japanese painting and woodblock print tradition called ukiyo-e and, in the early 1900s, was briefly among the most popular painters active in the city. After the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 he refocused again, turning his attention to the Italian modernist movement Futurism.