Oil, Canvas
630 × 1120 mm
25.2 × 44.8 in
Unique
This painting depicts dokudami (Houttuynia cordata) glowing in the darkness.
In the mansion where I practically lived and played as a child, a woman lived alone with her black cat. During the rainy season, she would often call out to me, “I’m going to cut back the dokudami—come help me.”
The two of us would spend two or three full days working, cutting through the thick dokudami until the sun went down. In the end, we dried the leaves and drank dokudami tea. Our hands would stink, and the tea tasted strange.
One night, while walking through the city, I glanced to the side of the road and noticed dokudami growing there. The memory of that garden rose up vividly—as if only the dokudami were shining with color.
The subtitle text was sampled from the 2014 TV animation series Rick and Morty, Season 1, Episode 9 (“Something Ricked This Way Comes”).
