When I was a child, I remembered my grandmother crying as she polished rice.
I decided to write a piece about her grandmother's generation, who married into her heir's family.

*The woman in the photo is not my grandmother. Her grandmother has long passed away, so I hired a model and searched for a location that matched the image of the work.

For me, who was born in 1975, my grandmother's generation was affected by the war.
My grandfather and my grandfather's older brother served in the military. Originally, only my grandfather was supposed to be drafted into the military, but my grandfather's older brother had already dropped out of junior high school under the old system and enlisted before the war even started, so they both ended up serving in the military. It happened. During the invasion of China before the Pacific War, the two were dispatched to Yichang, a city on the upper reaches of the Yangtze River.

The Chinese Nationalist Government, led by Chiang Kai-shek, who had been forced out of Nanjing, the capital of China at the time, established a provisional government in Chongqing, on the upper reaches of the Yangtze River (the Nanjing Massacre also occurred during this period). In order to attack Chongqing, the Japanese army advanced as far as Yichang, just before Chongqing. My grandfather's brother died in battle there. After the war, my grandfather, who survived, had two inferiorities. The fact that we lost the war, and the fact that I survived instead of his brother.

When I was a child, whenever war news or images of Emperor Showa were shown on TV, my grandfather would become distraught and emotional, even to me, his grandson. At times like this, my grandmother comforted me by saying, ``I guess the war is over now.''

Before the war started, my grandmother was trying to get married to my grandfather's older brother, but he died in the war, so she ended up marrying her younger brother, my grandfather. Her grandfather had a troublesome side, whether it was because of the war or because of his natural personality, and when her grandmother was told something unreasonable, she cried in the kitchen at night, sharpening rice and making pots. I was polishing it. It was her grandmother's role to soothe and comfort her.

Her grandmother always got up earlier than everyone else in her family, and she never missed sweeping the tea room or praying at the Buddhist altar.She liked the field behind her house and often visited it. There was a small field built into rows, and perhaps because of similar circumstances, she got along well with her neighbor, an old woman who worked in the field and said, ``When I'm out in the field, I can forget all the bad things.''

Her grandmother was a kind person and she never saw her angry.
However, when creating this work, I wanted to create an image of someone reaping the flowers of the other world and purifying the weeds around the house, or reaping the regrets of growing old while thinking about their family lineage for many years. Although it's not a direct way of attacking someone, I wanted to create a piece that has an aggressive appearance.

Every now and then, when I see old Japanese houses built in the suburbs, I think that they were supported by self-sacrificing heroines like my grandmother.

There's nothing wrong with red spider lily, but...
Higanbana is a bulb. The leaves grow after the flowers, so they do not affect photosynthesis, and even if you cut the flowers, they will bloom again next year.

We asked the model to be a person whose parents were brought back from Manchuria and who still have remnants of a time when they were at the mercy of war.