In Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country, beauty often resides not only in the thing itself, but also in the faint presence that remains as it is about to disappear.
Snow, reflections in a train window, distant lights, and passing human figures are never fixed objects. They shift with our gaze and with distance, appearing for a moment before slipping away.
This sensitivity to brevity, distance, and disappearance comes close to the mono no aware I pursue. It is not simply sadness. It is the way our looking grows quieter and more attentive once we understand that things are finite.
Ballpoint drawing shares something meaningful with this feeling.
A ballpoint line is cumulative. Every mark leaves a trace. Lines added later may cover, interrupt, or reorganise those that came before, but they can rarely erase them completely. An image therefore forms more like an accumulation of time than a clean result obtained through repeated correction.
From this perspective, the nature of the ballpoint pen lies not only in precision or patience, but in its ability to preserve the process. Hesitation, deviation, and every decision remain within the surface.
The landscapes of Snow Country work in much the same way. What matters is rarely a complete and clearly defined image, but the state that remains after light, memory, distance, and vision have overlapped. What I hope to leave in a drawing is not a world in which everything has been fully explained, but a faint presence that has not quite dispersed after something has gone.