Hardness of Travelers' Ways, right screen

Hardness of Travelers' Ways (行路難, Kōrokunan), the right screen of the pair dated 1922, carries the figure subject derived from Li Bai's celebrated Tang-dynasty poem on the theme of life's hardships: a traveler with attendants pausing on a difficult mountain road, the figures drawn with the close anatomical observation that Konoshima Ōkoku had carried throughout his career from his Imao Keinen apprenticeship and his Maruyama-Shijō training. The Tang poem from which the title derives was a standard subject in the Japanese literati painting tradition, and Ōkoku's reading of it draws on his Chinese-classics education at the Heian Kangaku-kan. The right screen develops the narrative center of the composition, with the figures organized in the asymmetric balance characteristic of his folding-screen work and the landscape elements receding into ink wash distance. Together with the left screen the pair forms one of the late-career compositions on Tang poetic themes that, alongside his animal paintings, define Ōkoku's contribution to Taishō and early Shōwa nihonga.