Loneliness on Journey

Loneliness on Journey (旅愁) is a 120.5 × 82 cm oil on canvas painted by Migishi Kōtarō in 1934, exhibited the same year alongside Butterflies Crossing the Ocean as a pair, and like that painting belonging until the late twentieth century to the collection of the Gōra Hotel in Hakone, where it hung in the dining room. The composition shows a solitary figure in an open landscape under a luminous, atmospheric sky — a low horizon, a single small figure at the lower edge, and a band of slanting light above — that draws together the figural concerns of Migishi's earlier work and the unmoored, surrealist horizons of his 1934 seascapes. The title (旅愁, ryoshū) is a classical Japanese term for the melancholy of travel, particularly the melancholy of being far from home and from beloved companions, and the painting reads in retrospect as a premonition of the journey to Nagoya that Migishi would make in late June 1934 to install a café mural — the journey on which he died of a perforated peptic ulcer in his Nagoya inn on the night of 1 July, aged thirty-one. The Gōra Hotel's eventual closure dispersed its art collection, and the painting's current location is undocumented as of recent published surveys; it survives in high-quality reproductions from the Kodansha 1963 monograph and from Japanese exhibition catalogues of the 1980s and 1990s.