Azekura B (Log Storehouse B)

Held in the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Azekura B (校倉(乙), 1943) is the companion canvas to Suda Kunitarō's principal Azekura of the same year and shows the eighth-century Shōsōin imperial storehouse at the Tōdaiji in Nara from a different angle — viewed more frontally, with the stacked-log walls of the azekura-zukuri construction reading as a great horizontal lattice across the picture's middle band and the long bracketed eaves running parallel to the picture plane. The palette is slightly cooler than its sister picture: where the principal Azekura is keyed to warm umber and oxide red, this canvas leans on slate-grey and a colder olive-black, with the highlights restricted to the projecting beam-ends and the tiled ridge of the roof. Painted during the late-war years when the great Nara monuments had acquired a particular cultural urgency for Japanese intellectuals, the two Azekura canvases together form a paired meditation on the Shōsōin as bearer of eighth-century memory and stand among the principal documents of the dark, architecturally grounded yōga that Suda developed as a deliberate Kansai alternative to the brighter Tokyo manner.