Lyrique No. 5: Sudden Recollection of the Day of Agony

"Lyrique No. 5: Sudden Recollection of the Day of Agony" of 1950 addresses one of the most specific psychological states in all of Onchi's titled works — the involuntary memory of a moment of intense suffering, the way trauma can return unbidden and with full force. The specific emotional target is rendered through formal means whose character must convey something of the suddenness and the suffering: an abrupt compositional shift, perhaps, or colors that jar against each other in the way that intrusive memory disrupts the present. This is Onchi's most explicitly psychological abstract subject.