Fuyu no Ō, 21, Original Pencil Drawing

SHŪICHI KUSAMORI (B. 1961)
Fuyu no Ō, 21
signed by the artist (verso)
original pencil drawing on paper, unique work
sheet: 15 7/8 x 12 inches (40.2 x 30.5 cm)
drawn in 2018.
supplied unframed.

Shūichi Kusamori wrote and drew Fuyu no Ō — "The Winter King" — as a graphic novel, published by Graphic-Sha in Tokyo in 2018 and long out of print. This is one of the original pencil drawings he made for it, a unique work on paper corresponding to page 21 of the book. Kusamori belongs to a generation of artists who began with pencil and brush and came to digital tools late. He is skilled in both, but for inventing worlds he still relies on paper. As he puts it, drawing on paper is a process of discovery through action rather than the execution of a finished idea, and many of his concepts begin this way. These drawings may be less immediately striking than his painted backgrounds, yet in his own view they are the true core of his art — the place where the search for a personal visual language becomes visible, in thousands of pencil strokes that let one watch an artist disappear into a world of his own making.

The book itself traces back to a short story by the German writer Hugo Landsberger, who published under the name Hans Land. His brief 1905 travel sketch describes the seascape of Denmark, and its solitude frames the story of a tragic life; largely forgotten in the German-speaking world, the text is well known in Japan because Mori Ōgai translated it in 1912 and gave it the title under which it has been read there ever since: Fuyu no Ō. Kusamori takes up the central elements of the narrative but interlaces European motifs from different periods with mythical undertones, opening a world that reaches far beyond the literary setting of the original and moves without effort between reality and dream. In 2025 the Mori Ōgai Memorial Center of Humboldt University Berlin — housed in the building where Ōgai first lived during his stay in the city in 1887 and 1888 — devoted an exhibition to these drawings.