Art: Works of a Woman's Hand

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Her father also made a strong impression on the fifth of his seven children: "He came from a very old family, and he was quite strict in some ways and quite liberal in others." He owned one of the first three bicycles ever imported to Japan and tinkered with it constantly. He also decided that his little daughter would undergo rigorous training in a procrustean antiquity.

"I was forced to study from age six on to learn calligraphy," Shinoda says. The young girl dutifully memorized and copied the accepted models. In one sense, her father had pushed her in a promising direction, one of the few professional fields in Japan open to females. Included among the ancient terms that had evolved around calligraphy was onnade, or women's writing.

Heresy lay ahead. By the time she was 15, she had already been through nine years of intensive discipline: "I got tired of it and decided to try my own style. My father always scolded me for being naughty and departing from the traditional way, but I had to do it."

She produces a brush and a piece of paper to demonstrate the nature of her rebellion. "This is kawa, the accepted calligraphic character for river," she says, deftly sketching three short vertical strokes. "But I wanted to use more than three lines to show the force of the river." Her brush flows across the white page, leaving a recognizable river behind, also flowing. "The simple kawa in the traditional language was not enough for me. I wanted to find a new symbol to express the word river."

Her conviction grew that ink could convey the ineffable, "the feeling," as she says, "of wind blowing softly." Another demonstration. She goes to the sliding wooden door of an anteroom and disappears in back of it; the only trace of her is a triangular swatch of the right sleeve of her kimono, which she has arranged for that purpose. A realization dawns. The task of this artist is to paint that three-sided pattern so that the invisible woman attached to it will be manifest to all viewers.

Gen, painted especially for TIME, shows Shinoda's theory in practice. She calls the work "my conception of Japan in visual terms." A dark swath at the left, punctuated by red, stands for history. In the center sits the Chinese character gen, which means the present or actuality. A blank pattern at the right suggests an unknown future.

Once out of school, Shinoda struck off on a path significantly at odds with her culture. She recognized marriage for what it would mean to her career ("a restriction") and decided against it. There was a living to be earned by doing traditional calligraphy; she used her free time to paint her variations. In 1940 a Tokyo gallery exhibited her work. (Fourteen years would pass before she got a second show.) War came, and bad times for nearly everyone, including the aspiring artist, who retreated to a rural area near Mount Fuji and traded her kimonos for eggs.

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