The inspiration of Van Gogh's paintings

The Van Gogh painting revelation is a decisive turning point in Yozo's early life, an event that shatters his superficial approach to art and opens a path for him to express the monstrous inner reality he has so desperately concealed behind his clowning. It occurs during his high school years, when his classmate Takeichi, the puny, scrofulous boy who had already seen through Yozo's deliberate failure on the horizontal bar, comes to his room one day waving a brightly colored picture. Takeichi proudly declares, "It's a picture of a ghost." Yozo is startled, instantly recognizing it as the familiar self-portrait of van Gogh. He had seen many colored photographs of van Gogh's paintings before, intrigued by the brushwork and vividness, but had never imagined them to be of ghosts. This moment, Yozo later reflects, determined his path of escape.

The Revelation of the "Ghost" in Art

Takeichi's naive pronouncement unlocks a new understanding. Yozo had previously tried to model his techniques on the Impressionist School, but his pictures remained flat as paper cutouts, offering no promise of development. Now he realizes the profound error in his mental attitude: the superficiality and stupidity of trying to depict pretty things in a pretty manner. The masters, he grasps, created beauty out of trivialities through their subjective perceptions, soaking themselves in the pleasure of depicting even nauseatingly ugly things, without relying on the misconceptions of others. To confirm this new insight, Yozo shows Takeichi a volume of Modigliani reproductions, and Takeichi, widening his eyes in admiration, calls one nude "a horse out of hell." Yozo asks, "They really are ghosts then, aren't they?" and Takeichi replies, "I wish I could paint pictures of ghosts like that." This exchange solidifies Yozo's conviction that these painters, who had been repeatedly wounded and intimidated by the apparitions called human beings, had dared to depict the monsters they saw in broad daylight. Yozo feels so excited he could weep, thinking, "These, I thought, would be my friends in the future."

The Birth of the "Ghost Pictures"

Inspired, Yozo whispers to Takeichi, "I'm going to paint too. I'm going to paint pictures of ghosts and devils and horses out of hell." He begins to create self-portraits, taking care that they not be seen by his female visitors. The pictures he draws are so heart-rending as to stupefy even himself. Here, he feels, is the true self he had so desperately hidden—the harrowing reality beneath the cheerful smile and the laughter he used to make others laugh. He secretly affirms this self, sure that there is no escape from it, but he hides the pictures in the back of his cupboard, afraid that if others saw them, they might either detect the nightmarish reality under the clowning or, worse, imagine it was just another new twist to his clowning, occasion for additional snickers. To Takeichi, and to him alone, he displays his easily wounded sensibilities, and Takeichi, enthusiastic, predicts, "You'll be a great painter some day." In school drawing classes, Yozo keeps his "ghost-style" techniques secret, continuing to paint in the conventional idiom of pretty things.

The Undrunk Glass of Absinthe and a Lost Path

This revelation becomes a haunting, unfulfilled promise in Yozo's later life. When, as a kept man living with Shizuko, he speaks of his artistic talent, the self-portraits naturally come to mind. He calls them his "lost masterpieces," the only really worthwhile pictures he ever painted, which disappeared during one of his frequent changes of address. The sense of loss is so heavy it plagues him like an "undrunk glass of absinthe" flickering before his eyes. He is agonized by the frustrating thought that if only he could show those paintings, people would believe in his artistic talents. But he never can. Instead, he becomes an unknown, second-rate cartoonist, drawing for the cheapest magazines and, later, pornographic pictures. The prophecy of becoming a great artist fails to materialize, while the other, inglorious prophecy—that women would fall for him—comes true. The Van Gogh revelation thus marks the moment Yozo glimpses a true artistic vocation, a path to express his authentic, terrified self, but it remains a road not taken, a ghost of a possibility that haunts his descent into alcoholism, drug addiction, and the final declaration that he is "disqualified as a human being."