Gift

''At one time, I dreaded everything I was making.' Yayoi Kusama (Winter 1999) First it is just a measling of the tablecloth but soon it spills in all colours, all gaiety: desk floor lamp flowers tatami, my underwear then dares to paw across Mother’s face, so smilingdelirious. Twenty years in a twelve square metre room with the thuds of tennis balls the only music tells me that suffering is necessary and more powerful than healing and I wish to cover all territory for once—hospital beds, chinaware, bed linen, your bland skin with the pattern and fear of all my dots— by the old wharf on Naoshima I make my yellow wartime pumpkins. I know my home is not a country anymore, just a festering colony of the mind: these shuddering trees that come and talk to me each night, the whispers of the white nurses and the star-dances of my Japanese kaleidoscope. Come haunt me still. Do what you may. I won’t return. I’m not afraid.