Amazingly, once you notice the many overlapping things progressing from front to back – the bamboo hat, the sink, the young woman, the kettle, the shoji screen, the gold low table, the box with red lacquerware with patterns carved in relief, the hanging scroll of Amida Buddha – you begin to recognize depth in a picture that had appeared flat (and has ambiguous perspective, in the case of the sink). It seems that the artist sought to maximize the image’s sense of flatness, as nearly all the motifs are depicted head-on, with only the sink seen diagonally, and even the young woman’s kimono is almost completely free of shadows. Nonetheless, the work was evidently still insufficiently flat, and the artist critiqued his own painting as “smelling strongly of realism” (“Creativity and Struggle of Nihon-ga Painters in the Ministry of Education Exhibition”) (Taiyo, November 1917).