Spirited Away (Give Her Back II)
神隠図 又は かやせ、もどせ II

Oil and acrylics on panel
43.5x150cm, 2009
Private Collection

An art work for a contemporary music group Cockroach Eater's 1st album, "Perfect World".

Lately I see kids playing with game machine in everywhere. I can sympathize with them when I find them in mall and train, but how about kids playing game in park sitting next to next? I wondered if they feel more comfortable to be in completely artificial virtual world than to be in real world. But I learned it was wrong when I saw a short news in TV. There were kids spreading fallen leaves and sliding down hills so happily in a nature school in a mountain forest. There were no difference among them and me when I was little.

Anyway, the kids playing game in park do exist. I came to wonder if they don't have any chance to know the nature.

Formerly, when children had been missing for three days, Japanese people believed they were spirited away. To ask "them" who took their children into forest, they marched along mountain holding torch, beating pans and jars and called out "Return him/her, back him/her"(Life with Mountains, Kunio Yanagita).

Reminding that, I thought if "they" used to appeal their own existence to make people fear them by kidnapping children.(I think "They" might be really spirits from mountain forest, but also would be existence people made up through life beside mountain forest.)

In Noh (Japanese mask play), there are many stories which spirits of various kinds of trees appears. Just like that, I came to feel Japanese wolf, which is already exterminated, as an enbodyment of nature through painting last work.

If children were "spirited away" by those natural existence, wouldn't they love to be among nature for at least three days? By that, I believe "they" will get merit in the near future.