Remember the Evergreen Review? Barney published Oe Kenzaburo so I learned an immense amount of culture from this man. Then, I was introduced to Barney Rosset, who owned Grove Press. I was a freshman and married to John Nathan. I was still a student at geidai (the Tokyo University of Fine Art). I met a lot of people from Mishima Yukio to Oe Kenzaburo to Kawabata Yasunori-incredible writers in the 60s. You know, I think about karma, what kind of karma that I have. I was married to him for seventeen years. ![]() I was married to John Nathan, a translator and Yukio Mishima’s biographer. That’s what I became, an over-sized tatami. I became an “over-sized tatami” and my mother was trying to fit me into a four-and-a-half mat tea room, chashitsu, sitting on me trying to fit me into the room. If you remained only in Japan, without having gone to America, do you think you would have become who you are today? It is only as liberated individuals, Oda’s life and work seem to suggest, that we can bring our love for live, art, and beauty to fruition, and only then can we become acquainted with the gods and goddesses within us. In the process she has emerged as a renaissance woman. Oda has succeeded in transcending the secular corruptions these institutions. ![]() Ironically, after initial disappointment and frustration in many of these fields, Ms. In Mayumi Oda’s life and work, several elements converge-Buddhism, feminism, art, ritual, social activism, mythology, motherhood-filtered through her bi-cultural life experience. Oda’s work opened at the Daimaru department store in Kyoto.) (Incidentally, on July 7, 2000, tanabata, a special exhibition of Ms. Oda’s colorful silk-screens, instantly recognizable for their sense of primitive majesty, have graced the covers of several books, including Gary Snyder’s Axe Handles and the late Rick Fields’ How the Swan’s Came to the Lake. In addition to a lengthy introduction to her work, Oda has provided a commentary on each of the book’s 31 prints. Virtually indistinguishable from wood pulp paper, bamboo paper nevertheless creates an added dimension to the printed experience, and compliments the simple voluptuousness of her subject matter. For this third printing, Goddesses appears on a special rice paper called takebaraki-the first such book to be so published. She eventually settled in Northern California where she lives to this day.Ī collection of her artwork has been collected in the book, Goddesses, recently made available in Japan from Gendaishuchosha Publishers in a bilingual edition. Oda’s sense of spirituality combines elements of Zen Buddhist practice, a universal reverence for life, and respect for the individual-all of which are visible in her artwork. Separated from Nathan in the next decade after several years of marriage and two sons, Oda decided to direct her attentions more assertively to the spiritual life-a life which has embraced social activism. ![]() Life in America during the tumultuous 60s exposed Oda to the likes of modern writers, musicians, activists, and artists, as well as the various social movements which characterize that unique decade including the full force of women’s liberation. Her marriage to American scholar, translator, biographer John Nathan seems to have offered temporary relief from her feelings of social and artistic frustration. Later, as a student at the National Academy of Art in the early 60s, Oda was to feel stifled by the traditional approach to art instruction, and sought to develop her own individual style. She also became acutely aware from an early age of the inferior status of women in Japan-a condition unchanged by the otherwise ambitious “new democracy” of the post-war years, a condition which remains stubbornly intact today. Monthly memorial services for her grandmother, wherein the Lotus Sutra was chanted, gave Oda a religious orientation which she has never forgotten. Born in Tokyo, 1941, to a Buddhist family, Oda writes that from an early age she felt attuned to the changing seasons and their rituals-the Tanabata Star Festival, the Obon Festival of the Dead, and New Years. Graphic artist Mayumi Oda’s cultural, spiritual, and artistic odyssey has taken her through many lives, eras, countries, and incarnations. Moreover, artists, by sharing their work, involve everyone in that search. More than simply providing a “view” of life, the artist documents her continual search for divine realization. Ne might say that the role of the artist is to manifest divinity.
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