Linda Butler: Rural Japan

This splendid 1992 volume of photographs, sadly no longer in print, is the work of the American photographer Linda Butler, who has an uncanny eye for and command of visual texture, whether it is on the grand scale of a river landscape or just the meticulous detailing on the surface of a cast-iron kettle. In her introduction she relates a vivid -- if somewhat alarming -- anecdote of how she began the project and how the cover image, in particular, came to be taken.

At noon the Fujita's grandmother asked me to take a break from my photography to join her family for lunch. She was planning to serve a rural delicacy that is now rarely eaten by the Japanese. In the kitchen, she placed a two-inch cube of tofu (bean curd) and several small, live eels at the center of lacquer bowls. Just before the soup was served, she added five small eels and poured soup stock in the bowls. In order to escape the heat, the eels dove into the cool tofu and smothered.

In the formal dining room we knelt around a lacquer table. The fifty year-old Mr. Fujita sat at the head of the table. Outside the sliding screens was a carefully composed rock garden, but it was the fifteen-inch long white radishes drying in the cool fall air under the eaves that captured my attention. Just as the soup arrived, there was a break in the clouds and the sun came out. The radishes were transformed--looking almost translucent. I knew I had to act quickly to capture this image so I excused myself in the polite language customarily used by Japanese in formal situations. It took me ten minutes to set-up the camera and expose a negative. When I returned to lunch, my soup was lukewarm and the eels seemed particularly dead, but the image of the radishes would become the beginning of my photographic work in rural Japan.

Below are a representative sample of images chosen from the photographer's website.


Pagoda, Yamagata-ken

Seacoast Village, Yamagata-ken

Earthen Floor, Iwate-ken

Grape Vineyard, Yamagata-ken
The next image is here simply because I can never let anything having to do with cuttlefish or squid go by.


Drying Squid
But I think this last one is still my favorite:


Tea Ceremony Kettles, Iwate-ken
Butler explains the above image:

Cast iron kettles are used to hold hot water in the tea ceremony. Made in the Suzuki studio in Morioka, the pots were cast in a clay and plaster mold that is used once and then discarded. The tiny indentations in the mold (bottom left), made dot by dot with a pointed hand-tool, become textural protrusions in the metal container.

Second-hand copies of Rural Japan are not impossible to find if you poke around for them, and individual prints may be available as well through the galleries who represent Butler's work. She has three other books that remain in print, all of them well worth getting a hold of; they are Inner Light: The Shaker Legacy, Italy: In the Shadow of Time, and Yangtze Remembered: The River Beneath the Lake.

House

The weekend after the burial the relatives came with a van and carted off what they wanted, the things that still had some use in them. They took the china and the silverware, the chairs that didn't wobble or need caning, the dining room table they had to disassemble to get through the door, but left the sagging bed, the ironing board, and the leaking refrigerator, the plastic gas-station tumblers and the scant dust-rimmed books. They shut off the water, took the phones out of the jacks, and flung the electric fuses into the woods for sport.

Later that summer vandals jimmied the door-latch and broke or stole what little of value they found, stripped the pipes and shattered the windows with stones, leaving nothing but a few mildewed magazines, broken bottles, and shotgun casings. They lit a fire but it wouldn't catch and they gave up. Rain blew in and soaked the floors, and before long the faded wallpaper began to peel down in ruined curls. Mice nested in the insulation and swallows built under the porch eaves, and the house soon stank of their urine and droppings.

Within a few years a thicket of young maples grew up around the foundation, and a dark green stain of algae spread up the white clapboard walls. Shingles slid from the roof to the ground and were buried in the next fall's leaves. Finally not even the ghosts remained.

Tatsuro Kiuchi

Following up on my last post about Rafe Martin's Mysterious Tales of Japan, with pictures by Tatsuro Kiuchi, here are some samples of two of Kiuchi's other projects, both of which use a very different palette and approach from the more conventionally "painterly" (but very appealing) illustrations he created for that book.

The first group are from a series of 294 color illustrations Kiuchi created to accompany Hikaru Okuizumi's novel The New Journey to the Center of the Earth, which was serialized in the Asahi Shimbun in 2002-2003.








The whole set can be viewed as a Flicker slideshow online.

At least one of Hikaru Okuizumi's other novels, The Stones Cry Out, has appeared in translation in the US, but this one apparently hasn't; in fact I'm not even sure it's been released in bound format in Japan. [Update: according to Tatsuro Kiuchi, the book has been published, but sadly without his illustrations.] The little information I've been able to turn up, from the Japanese Literature Publishing Project, seems promising, though:

Okuizumi is known for his parodies of the Meiji-period literary giant Natsume Soseki, but the model he chose for his full-length novel Shin chitei ryoko (New Journey to the Center of the Earth) is the Jules Verne classic. Always full of literary schemes, Okuizumi here recasts the original story as the historical record of an actual journey which he retells in a pseudoclassical style reminiscent of Soseki, transposing the action to early twentieth-century Japan. In late Meiji, a scientist who believes the Earth is hollow disappears, along with his beautiful daughter. He has apparently traveled to the center of Mt. Fuji to prove his theory, but there is another possibility: some say he is really after a secret cache of gold hidden by a feudal warlord. Hooked by his friend's promise to let him use a highly advanced camera, the main character, a painter named Roshu Nonomura, accompanies his friend and two other amateur explorers on an adventurous expedition deep within Mt. Fuji. Along the way, they encounter a cat that glows in the dark, a monster that seems to be a living relic of the dinosaur age, and a race of underground humans. This amply realized work of fantasy, laced with delicious humor, is written on a scale surpassing the original in grandeur.

This could make a hell of a nice volume if it were published here with the original illustrations, but I have a feeling it's not going to happen anytime soon. I'd settle for a Japanese edition -- if one exists -- just to be able to thumb through the pictures at leisure.

The remaining images are from a set of illustrations Kiuchi executed for a Folio Society edition of Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea.




Kiuchi's website, which has both Japanese and English versions, has a biography and a generous selection of his other work, including some animated spots he created for Starbucks.

Late note: a post on the blog of the Heflinreps Illustration Agency has several Kiuchi illustrations for a Japanese children's book called Let's Go Out for a Ride!

Mysterious Tales of Japan

There are countless illustrated versions of Lafcadio Hearn's Japanese ghost stories, but I have a fondness for this one, which was published in 1996 by Putnam and is apparently already out-of-print, though secondhand copies are readily available. A couple of the tales are from sources other than Hearn, but the volume includes three of the four stories on which Masaki Kobayashi's magnificent film Kwaidan was based, lacking only "In a Cup of Tea."





The retelling is by storyteller and author Rafe Martin, the illustrations by Tatsuro Kiuchi, a prolific artist who has worked in a variety of styles both here and in his native Japan. Among his other projects is a series of nearly 300 images to accompany a serialized novel by Hikaru Okuizumi, The New Journey to the Center of the Earth.

Notes for a Commonplace Book (1)

Lafcadio Hearn:

By the use of a few chosen words the composer of a short poem endeavors to do exactly what the painter endeavors to do with a few strokes of the brush, --- to evoke an image or a mood, --- to revive a sensation or an emotion. And the accomplishment of this purpose, --- by poet or by picture-maker, --- depends altogether upon capacity to suggest, and only to suggest. A Japanese artist would be condemned for attempting elaboration of detail in a sketch intended to recreate the memory of some landscape seen through the blue haze of a spring morning, or under the great blond light of an autumn afternoon. Not only would he be false to the traditions of his art : he would necessarily defeat his own end thereby. In the same way a poet would be condemned for attempting any completeness of utterance in a very short poem : his object should be only to stir imagination without satisfying it. So the term ittakkiri --- meaning "all gone," or "entirely vanished," in the sense of "all told," --- is contemptuously applied to verses in which the verse-maker has uttered his whole thought; --- praise being reserved for compositions that leave in the mind the thrilling of a something unsaid. Like the single stroke of a temple-bell, the perfect short poem should set murmuring and undulating, in the mind of the hearer, many a ghostly aftertone of long duration.

"Bits of Poetry," from In Ghostly Japan


Michael Jarrett:

Why didn't the Boatmen's music attract a theory? Why didn't it draw analysis into its orbit? The music was "easy to say." In short, it seemed ordinary. And when music seems ordinary -- self-evident, natural, and familiar -- explanations come off as either forced (arcane) or obvious (banal). Analytical discourse fails not in the face of complexity but when it perceives simplicity.

What remains are associations, impressions, the very sort of observations that analysis derides. [...] The Boatmen find their subject matter in ordinary life and, very often, create a distinctive kind of rhythm and blues, however disguised. They're more Stax/Volt than pop-art avant-garde. [...]

We can talk all day about rock. Making sense of rock 'n' roll is vastly more challenging. For example, why are there so many books on Bob Dylan and so few on the musical significance and contributions of Little Richard and James Brown? Why is Elvis Presley a sociologist's dream and a musicologist's nightmare? What lends itself more readily to detailed description, "I Want to Hold Your Hand" or "Tomorrow Never Knows"? Why is Pink Floyd easy to write about but impossible to enjoy? Why is Led Zeppelin more academically defensible than the Shirelles? Why does Jimi Hendrix matter more than Bo Diddley? Why is self-indulgence easier to theorize than self-effacement?

Liner notes to Wide Awake by The Vulgar Boatmen

Repose

This image of the tomb of Napoleon Bonaparte on the remote Atlantic island of St. Helena was presumably taken sometime during the period from 1859 to 1875, which was the heyday of the popular commercial photographic format known as the carte de visite. The photographer may have been named Hayward, as that last name and a first initial I can't make out are handwritten on the reverse of the card.


The tomb apparently still stands much as it was, although the outer fence shown here has evidently been removed. But even at the time this photograph was executed the emperor was no longer in his tomb, his remains having been repatriated in 1840 at the request of the French government.


This image, on the other hand, is a bit of a mystery. [See update at bottom.] It was issued by one "A. Hall, Photo-Artist" who operated a studio at 217 West Madison Street in Chicago, probably the photographer Albert K. Hall who is listed at that address in the 1876 Lakeside Annual Directory of the City of Chicago, but I haven't been able to pinpoint the scene it depicts. I don't know if the little pinnacle at right is a natural outcropping that's been adapted, or a wholly manmade structure. There's a cross on the roof, so it was presumably located either in a Christian country or in some colonial outpost, which in the second half of the 19th century could have meant almost anywhere. Perhaps a geologist could tell whether the arrangement of rocks on the shoreline is consistent with tidal activity, or just the shore of a large lake. There's no sign of vegetation anywhere, unless the dark stain at the far right is indicative of algae. It reminds me of nothing so much as the final scenes of Planet of the Apes.

Did the door open onto an anchorite's cell, a tomb, or even a tiny chapel? Was it some Crusoe's desolate hideaway at the end of the world? Does it still stand, or has it been long since battered apart by the waves?

Update (2021): The structure shown has been identified as the Capelinha do Calhau in the village of São Vicente in Madeira. Constructed in the late 17th century, it still stands. (Thanks KRW for the identification.)

City

He stands by the window and watches the woman leave. As she reaches the bottom of the landing she lifts her hand from the cast-iron railing, pulls on her gloves, and makes a turn to the right, moving without hurry, eyes on the crowd. A light wind ripples her dress -- a smart lapis print flecked with gold -- and the branches above her stir, but he can't hear the leaves rattle, only the buffeting of the window from the pressure wave of a passing bus. She's standing right in front of him now -- he can make out the individual strands of the curl of dark hair that circles behind her ear -- but she doesn't turn, doesn't seem to be aware of him watching her just above. She might hear him if he called or reached out a hand to tap the glass, but he remains still, his hands at his sides. A knot of pedestrians forms in front of her and then comes undone; she steps forward, shrugs up her collar, and inclines her head almost imperceptibly before the breeze as she begins to walk away. Once or twice he thinks he hears the muffled chock of her heels striking the sidewalk. He is looking over her shoulder now, and his eyes continue to follow her as she moves behind the white curtains and into the maple lattice-work that frames the window. Her head vanishes; he catches one last flair of her dress, the back of a bare calf, her raised heel, and she is gone.

Postcards from a war

These beautiful but somewhat unsettling images are from a set of postcards issued in commemoration of Japanese naval victories in the Russo-Japanese War. The artist is Saitō Shōshū.

The cards are part of the Leonard A. Lauder Collection of Japanese Postcards at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. At least some of the images are viewable on the MFA's own website -- I didn't manage to find all of them there -- but MIT's online exhibition Asia Rising: Japanese Postcards of the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), which draws from the Lauder Collection, has nine of the ten that were originally published (one has not been located), and presents them in a continuous horizontal strip as they were designed to be viewed.










The next two images, also by Saitō Shōshū, form a separate but kindred pair.



And finally there is this delicate collage, which combines depictions of warships with scenes of underwater life and bears the title Naval Boat Kolz, which seems somewhat mysterious given that "Kolz" sounds neither Japanese nor Russian.


All nations that go to war produce propaganda and glorify their heroes, though perhaps not often with such a sophisticated flair for graphic design. What gives these images a slightly sinister quality is not so much knowing that the events they portray were, in a sense, the opening salvos in what would be a forty-year conflict for supremacy with the Western powers, as it is the eerie presence of death that hovers over them, a presence all the more disturbing for its subtle aesthetic pleasures.

Most of these images are also reproduced in Art of The Japanese Postcard, MFA Publications, 2004.

The moth

Homage to Koizumi Yakumo

Many years ago, and very many miles from here, there lived a young woman, the daughter of a powerful daimyo. When she was old enough to marry, her father formed an alliance with another powerful lord; as part of their agreement the daimyo promised his daughter's hand to the youngest son of his newfound ally. Upon learning of the betrothal, however, the young woman burst into tears and declared that she was in love with a young man in her father's retinue, the son of one of his least distinguished swordsmen, and that she would marry no one but him.

The lad in question was immediately sent for and brought into the daimyo's hall There, in the presence of the young woman and the entire court, the daimyo asked him if it was true that he was in love with his daughter. Without trembling or hesitating for an instant the young man declared that it was so. The daimyo then turned to his daughter and ordered her to renounce the young man at once and agree to marry as he had arranged. He asked her if she would obey, and when she firmly responded that she would not he drew his sword and instantly struck off the young man's head with one quick stroke. His daughter screamed and fell to the floor, sobbing wildly and cursing her father and beating at him with her fists. At the daimyo's orders she was carried from the hall and shut inside her room. The body of the young man was taken away and thrown unceremoniously into a ditch.

All that night the young woman wept and raged in her room. Finally she took out a dagger that she always kept hidden in her room and secreted it within her robe, vowing to kill her father at the first opportunity, though she knew full well that it would mean her own death as well. Having thus resolved, she fell at last into a bitter and desolate sleep. Very soon thereafter, however, she was awakened by a strange fluttering at her window. She looked up and saw an enormous moth, bigger than her hand and decorated with the most dazzling and intricate patterns she had ever seen. As if entranced she stepped to the window and stretched out her hand. As the creature alighted on her fingers she felt herself being drawn in, strangely and irresistibly, by its gaze. Within an instant the moth had vanished and she found herself holding the hand of the beheaded man's ghost. His handsome head was restored to its proper place and all was as it had been before her father had so cruelly taken his life.

That night the couple consummated their love and lay nestled together until the first rays of dawn. Then the young man rose, kissed his love goodbye, and promised to return at nightfall. In a quick flutter he vanished through the window.

No sooner had he left than the young woman began to dress. She carefully made up her face and arranged her hair, and when she was ready she tugged at the handle of her door to her room. It was bolted on the outside, but an elderly woman servant who was keeping watch outside slid open the bolt and allowed her to pass. The young woman made her way into her father's presence, knelt before him, calmly begged his pardon, and said that she would henceforth obey him in all regards, including the matter of the marriage to the man her father had chosen for her. The daimyo was secretly greatly relieved at his daughter's change of heart, though he maintained a dignified bearing and accepted her submission with little more than a grunt.

The date set for the marriage was still some weeks off. In the intervening time the young man returned every night, and the couple gave full rein to their feverish passion for each other with little thought for the future. At last, however, the elderly servant awoke one night and heard noises from within which she could not explain. Alarmed, she awakened the daimyo, who tied on his sword and rushed to his daughter's room. Forcing the door open, he saw a horrifying sight: on the bed lay his daughter, in the arms of the gruesomely decomposed body of the young man whose life he had taken. When he perceived the intruder the young man sat up and turned his headless torso toward the daimyo, who lost all composure and screamed in terror; then he turned back to his lover, gave her a final embrace, and vanished through the flowing curtains.

The daimyo pulled his daughter from the bed, struck her several times across the face, and flung her violently down the hall. The girl winced in pain but said nothing, nor did she attempt to protect herself as her father drove her out of the house, kicking her and flailing at her with her fists as he advanced. Only when the door had been barred behind her and she stood naked to the elements did she begin desperately to sob.

She spent that night under a great spruce tree a little ways down the road from the daimyo's house. During the night the elderly servant stole from the house and without a word laid a coarse grey cloak over her as she slept. When the young woman rose she drew on the cloak and set out along the road, knowing that she would never again be safe within her father's domains.

For many years the woman travelled throughout the country, always keeping to the back roads, always dressed in the same gray cloak. She became a mendicant, beloved by children and the infirm to whom she administered what aid she could, never wanting anything for herself except a bowl of rice. She was never known to sleep indoors, or in fact, anyplace where she could be observed. It was believed that her ghostly lover continued to visit her each night, and that even when she passed away, at a very advanced age, and was buried near that little shrine you see just there across the road, she was herself transformed into a moth, of purest white, and flew off to live with her mate in the distant mountains.

As for the daimyo, as a result of the breaking of the agreement with his erstwhile ally the two barons came into conflict. On the field of battle the daimyo's armies suffered a crushing defeat. As they retreated a sudden downpour in the hills provoked a flash flood, which swept most of his remaining retinue away. When at last he straggled home, ruined and alone, he was slaughtered without mercy by the brothers of the young man he had beheaded.

Wild Things on the town

An illustration by Maurice Sendak, specially commissioned in 1971 by the Brentanos bookstore chain (now long since defunct) for an invitation to its "Annual Costume Galla" (sic). The invitation was designed and printed, in an edition of 800 numbered copies, by George Laws & Dennis J. Grastorf at the Angelica Press, New York City.

The text reads as follows:

Brentanos invites you to attend its Annual Costume Galla dressed as a character from a novel you WISHED you had written ... and reveal your secret self! Toast of the town pianist Steve Ross entertains. Prizes for the most imaginative costumes.

I didn't go.

Posada for Children

Though the Mexican engraver José Guadalupe Posada is best known for his topical broadsides and ghoulishly whimsical depictions of skeletons at play, he produced thousands of engravings, spanning a wide range of subject matter, in his forty-year career. The images here spotlight his work as an illustrator of inexpensive books for children.




The dog in the above image has some of the same anthropomorphic expressiveness of the dogs in Maurice Sendak's early work. Since Sendak is a notorious magpie -- I mean that as a compliment, naturally -- it's possible that he was familiar with the image or others like it. The proper Mexican couple below are quite fetching.





All of these pictures are from a delightful book published in 2005 by Editorial RM in Mexico City, Posada: Illustrator of Chapbooks by Mercurio López Casillas. (There's also a Spanish-language version, entitled José Guadalupe Posada: Ilustrador de Cuadernos Populares.) The compact little hardbound volume contains hundreds of color images, including interior art as well as covers, organized into three categories: Songbooks, Children's Books, and "Divers Manuals" (a miscellany, not books on diving).

A good jumping-off place on the web for the whole of Posada's work is this post at Bibliodyssey.

Rain

These images by the printmaker Kawase Hasui (1883 – 1957) are from the extensive online galleries of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.








In Modern Japanese Prints 1912-1989, Lawrence Smith writes of Kawase:

During his career he produced over 600 landscape prints, including seventeen series, covering most areas of Japan, which he constantly travelled. After a period of eclipse following his death, he has now become recognized as Japan's best print landscapist since Hiroshige.

Along the bay

She is, he thinks, as beautiful a girl as he has ever seen. She is studying the cello and he -- without great conviction -- environmental science, but even before they become friends he spies her one day making her way across campus, in subdued but easy conversation with a friend, her long hair loose and falling midway down her back. At first she reminds him, he thinks, of a painting he remembers seeing somewhere, a Rossetti or something like that, but when he gets a closer look he sees that he is mistaken. There is nothing remote or iconic about her face; her features are delicate, her expression open and unaffected. Eventually they meet and become friends but nothing more. He has a steady girlfriend through most of his junior and senior years and she, he believes, has a boyfriend who goes to some other school.

After college they lose touch, but by chance a year later they each spend the summer months in a resort town on the coast. When he runs into her unexpectedly, just as the tourist season is starting to hit, he is waiting on tables in a seafood place on the docks and renting a room by himself in a rickety backstreet walkup, his future plans unknown. She is living by herself in a tiny cottage on the bluffs outside of town, rehearsing for a festival with a local chamber orchestra and preparing to begin her MFA. He calls her up and stops by for dinner one evening and with what seems to him almost miraculously mutual avidity they wind up in bed together. Within a week he has moved in, carrying the few essential possessions he hasn't stowed at his mother's house or his father's place back home: a backpack with an aluminum frame, a sleeping bag, a sackful of CDs, and an outback hat.

On warm evenings, while she waits for him, she moves a chair onto the porch and plays to the distant bay, watching the shadows of the walnut tree that overhangs the building quiver and drift across the floor planks. Then he comes home with fish and chips and a bottle of wine purloined from the kitchen; he is tired but his eyes brighten when he sees her face. She lights a pair of candles and sets them on a table by the picture window. While they eat he tells her stories of his day to make her laugh, and before long they are once again entwined.

Late at night, when the embers of their desire are at last consumed, he likes to lie back in the dark with his eyes open and imagine his future with her, and she curls silently beside him and thinks about how to tell him that he has none.

Angles

In a burst of blue flame the burner catches. She sets the kettle on the stove, yawns, and takes a glass from the drainer, fills it and slowly slakes her thirst. Her lover still sleeps in the bedroom, the shades down, the clock's red digits shifting like the even, unhurried pulse of some silent, cold creature in the deepest part of the sea.

She takes a photograph down from her shelf. Within a gilt and weathered frame a woman she has never met, wearing a stiff grey dress, is standing on a boathouse porch. She is smiling compliantly but her gaze is just perceptibly askew of the camera's lens, and the fingers of her left hand are tense and splayed out from the railing she leans on.

Five stories down the last cars of a subway train rattle up to the platform. The doors open; a man peers out to see the name of the station, takes a step forward, then hesitates and retreats. New passengers fill the car, the stragglers shifting their bags and arching their backs to edge into the narrow spaces that are still unoccupied. At the far end of the car a cell phone chimes as the train lurches into motion.

The man squeezes forward to get off at the next station. In his hand, neatly folded, he holds a Chinese newspaper. His thumb partially obscures the photograph of a beaming figure in a business suit and hard hat. In the background, behind him, are the girders of a skyscraper under construction. As the rider steps from the train he drops the paper into the first bin he passes.

At street level an elderly couple are silently ambling uptown. The man, who strolls a step ahead of the woman, has a full beard and long grey hair, both streaked with day-glo dye. He is wearing a long dress, and a pigeon is resting comfortably atop his head. He smiles beatifically and nods to pedestrians as they go by.

Two teenaged girls from Germany stop in front of the man and ask, in barely accented English, if they can take his picture. The man agrees and poses happily, first with one girl and then the other, then acknowledges their thank yous and continues on. The woman behind him never once looks up.

One of the girls is wearing a thin oatmeal scarf. She stands still for a moment, wrapping its loose ends around her neck and tucking them into her jacket, until her companion touches her arm and says something in German. They pause for a moment, talking, then stride up to the nearest crosswalk. There is no traffic and they cross against the light. Once on the far sidewalk they turn to the left and move quickly away.

Two stories above, a woman in an office is eating a danish and holding the receiver of her telephone to her head as she types. The phone is ringing but no one picks up. On her wall there is a framed black-and-white photograph sent to her by a friend in Brazil. In the photo a little girl in a spotless white dress stands in the middle of an empty plaza. There is no expression on her face; her eyes, ever so slightly raised, are intently watching something off to the left of the picture, just out of sight.

Three miles north the phone rings in a narrow apartment with a view of the river over sycamores and playgrounds. Bookshelves cover every wall, and piles of foxed and jacketless books are stacked on the floor in every room except the loo. There is a broad desk, with a glass top, in front of the window, and on it, nestled between the phone and a stack of manila folders, an answering machine blinks, but the ringing dies away before it picks up.

A few blocks away, along one of the gray spines that twist from uptown to down, a man watches the traffic signals change from red to green and back again. As he sits by himself, nursing lukewarm coffee at a sidewalk table under an awning in the rain, he wonders if he inhabits the city that appears before him or one that he has imagined, though in the end he decides that it is both.