Hardness of Travelers' Ways, left screen

Hardness of Travelers' Ways (行路難, Kōrokunan), the left screen of a pair of folding screens dated 1922, takes its title from the famous Tang-dynasty poem of the same name by Li Bai (Li Po), one of the central works of Chinese classical poetry on the theme of life's hardships and the moral perseverance required to endure them. The Tang poem was a standard reference in the Japanese literati-painting tradition, and Konoshima Ōkoku — who had received a thorough Chinese-classics education at the Heian Kangaku-kan in Kyoto — would have been intimately familiar with both the text and its long pictorial tradition. The left screen handles the landscape side of the composition: a mountain road winding through harsh terrain, treated in ink wash with restrained color and with the kind of long diagonal organization characteristic of the Maruyama-Shijō school. The pair belongs to Ōkoku's late Bunten and Teiten years, a period in which he repeatedly returned to poetic subjects from Tang and Song literature, treating them with the atmospheric restraint of his mature painting style.