What is the nationality of the artist who inspired Kenzaburō Ōe's novel, the Game of Contemporaneity?
The Game of Contemporaneity The Game of Contemporaneity or dojidai gemu (同時代ゲーム) is a 1979 novel by the Japanese writer Kenzaburō Ōe. "The Game of Contemporaneity" was originally inspired on Diego Rivera’s mural 'Dream on a Sunday Afternoon in the Central Alameda'. Oe's approach to history and story-telling, like in the mural, exposes the themes of simultaneity, ambiguity and thus complexity. The story centres itself around the alternative world of the dissident samurai, as opposed to that of the Emperor. The samurai turn into demons after being chased into the forest. The story of the village serves as a microcosmic representation of the history of the nation as a whole. It has its own creation myth and fertility goddess, as well as having a composite healer/trickster called: The One Who Destroys. Although the novel exposes the themes of marginalisation and outsiderhood, it also provides hope for a new beginning. This emphasizes the central theme of the novel: simultaneous ambiguity, in the amalgamation of past and present, fact and dream, as well as history and myth. Oe uses satire, parody and black humour to describe the many deeds and events of the samurai. This culminates in the Fifty-Day War, in which the samurai and the imperial army battle one another, with The One Who Destroys leading the battle against The No-Name Captain of the imperial guard. It ends in the samurai surrendering to avoid the destruction of the forest (mori). The word 'mori' in itself is ambivalent in that in Japanese it conjures an image of regeneration or rebirth and in Latin that of death.
Jiro Yoshihara Jiro Yoshihara (吉原 治良 , Yoshihara Jirō , January 1, 1905 – February 19, 1972) was a Japanese painter. In 1954, along with Shōzō Shimamoto, he co-founded the avant-garde Gutai group in Osaka. He was a businessman and scion of a family that owned a cooking-oil company, along with a group of young, Hanshin-region artists. Yoshihara had taught Western-style painting before becoming Gutai’s leader. Yoshihara wrote the "Gutai Manifesto" in 1956 and was the leader of the so named group of internationally acclaimed avant-garde artists representative of Japan's post-war art world. He worked in surrealist and abstract expressionist painting styles before turning, in his final years, to the repeated depiction of circles reminiscent of "satori," the enlightenment of Zen. This white circle was made by leaving the canvas unpainted while painting the background black. When asked about his circles, Yoshihara said that he could not manage to paint even one circle with satisfaction, an indication of the depths of his pursuit of this form. Indeed, no two of his circles are shaped exactly alike. He was the leader of the Gutai Group until his death in 1972.