Plenty of Nothing

Outer Office

Winter in Flanders (1928)

Winter in Flanders (1928) by Valerius De Saedeleer.

Bijin as Meng Zong

From Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety by Harunobu. Mitate.

Large Flakes of Snow

Large Flakes of Snow, by Uemura Shōen. Part of an exhibit at the Yamatane Museum of Art last spring.

Japanese Switzerland

Japanese Switzerland by John Lavery, painted after his visit to Wengen, Switzerland, Christmas 1912. The vertical format of the painting, and the bijin-like posture of the woman, both suggest ukiyo-e. Source.

Ovid in Tomis and Sulmo

Ovid Square in the city of Constanta, Romania, features a statue of Ovid, the author of Metamorphoses, who was exiled to the Black Sea coast by the Emperor Augustus in AD 8. Constanta was named Tomis in those days. Source.

A copy of the same statue stands in Sulmona, Abruzzo, Ovid's home town. Source.

We tend to think of Ovid's place of exile as an Arctic waste, but this picture is from Italy. Source.

Okuyama Gihachiro

Suburbs of Yamagata by Okuyama Gihachiro.

Maekawa Sempan

Winter at Semi-Onsen, Yamagata (1949) by Maekawa Sempan. This print would make a good cover illustration for Kawabata's Snow Country.

Genji Snowball II

The snowball episode from The Tale of Genji, chapter 20, "Asagao", by Masao Ebina.

    There was a heavy fall of snow. In the evening there were new flurries. The contrast between the snow on the bamboo and the snow on the pines was very beautiful. Genji's good looks seemed to shine more brightly in the evening light.

    "People make a great deal of the flowers of spring and the leaves of autumn, but for me a night like this, with a clear moon shining on snow, is the best -- and there is not a trace of color in it. I cannot describe the effect it has on me, weird and unearthly somehow. I do not understand people who find a winter evening forbidding." He had the blinds raised.

    The moon turned the deepest recesses of the garden a gleaming white. The flower beds were wasted, the brook seemed to send up a strangled cry, and the lake was frozen and somehow terrible. Into this austere scene he sent little maidservants, telling them that they must make snowmen. Their dress was bright and their hair shone in the moonlight. The older ones were especially pretty, their jackets and trousers and ribbons trailing off in many colors, and the fresh sheen of their black hair against the snow. The smaller ones quite lost themselves in the sport. They let their fans fall most immodestly from their faces. It was all very charming. Rather outdoing themselves, several of them found they had a snowball which they could not budge. Some of their fellows jeered at them from the east veranda.

Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji (trans. Edward Seidensticker), page 357.

Snow-Cooled