Abstract
Set in a sanatorium on a highland plateau, HoriTatsuo’s novel The Wind Rises, which uses a tense writing style and serene descriptions of nature to depict the psychology of the protagonist as he faces the imminent death of his fiancée, has been published in two beautiful limited editions. The prewar Noda Shobo edition(1938) and the Hosokawa Shoten edition(1949), published four years after the Second World War in a time of scarce supplies. In contrast to the Noda edition, which had no illustrations at all, the Hosokawa edition had five illustrations by Oka Shikanosuke, a Westen-style painter who studied in France for 15 years. The illustrations were not dipictions of characters or scenes, but rather unique paintings of flowers and butterflies that depicted the atmosphere of the novel’s five chapters. The miniature paintings made with the Gillott No.291, a British-made ultra-finepen, later made Oka a representative painter of theemblems(pictorial images) of Hori’s literary world. This article introduces the exchange between the artist and the literary figure that began with the production of the illustrations for Hosokawa’sversion of The Wind Rises, centred on the text of a postcard(new material) addressed to Oka by Hori that was written during the exchange.
