Blue Sheet and Yellow Flowers [left of a pair]

The figure in the screen references Ono no Komachi, a famously beautiful waka poet from the Heian period who became a popular character in Noh theater. In the play Sotoba Komachi (Komachi on the Stupa), the poet devolves into a haggard beggar wandering the countryside, a storyline that Tarō adapted to a contemporary setting. Though she sits in a blue tent of the sort erected in Japanese parks today by the homeless, Komachi retains an ethereal beauty, clothed in layers of blankets or perhaps the robes of the Heian court. A deferential reference to Japanese culture, the work is also a critique of Japanese disregard for the country’s growing homeless population.