There is a rapid sketch by Vincent van Gogh of a sunny square in the south of France where a man is waiting expectantly by an open door. In the distance, a steam train is arriving, puffing smoke into the sky. It is just a simple drawing of a corner of Arles in 1888. But when we realize that the man is the artist himself, and that the sketch is part of a happy invitation to his brother in Paris, it brings the drawing to life. This then is the yellow house where he could "live and breathe, think and paint." Behind the green shutters is the room he decorated with a vase of sunflowers. Here he painted some of his greatest works before illness led to the clinic in Saint-Remy.

Although van Gogh is celebrated for his oil paintings, drawing was an essential part of his artistic expression, and is valued in its own right. A new exhibition of drawings from the archives of the Van Gogh and H.W. Mesdag Museums in Holland has opened at the Yasuda Kasai Museum of Art in Shinjuku. It opens up the private, extraordinary world of a great artist.

The experience is quite different from an exhibition of finished oil paintings. "The drawings speak so directly to us," says Sjraar van Heugten, head of collections at the Van Gogh Museum. "They have an intimacy that paintings can lack."

Certainly, the first exhibits are immediate, poignant mementos of the man behind the myth. They are simply two little sketchbooks, crumpled from being pulled in and out of a jacket pocket, and full of the most intriguing sketches and notes. The first book is from the early years of his career in 1884-5; the second still has empty pages, as it was the last book he used before his suicide, six years later.

The date of the final sketchbook, 1890, highlights the remarkable fact that in a career of just 10 years van Gogh progressed from a novice illustrator to one of the most powerful, original artists of the modern age.

Due to their fragility, this is the first time the sketchbooks have left the museum in Amsterdam. They are opened at one page, and the others can be seen on a video program.

Van Gogh's struggles with life and art took him to several parts of his native Holland before moving to Paris and rural France. The exhibition follows the same route, and at the same time shows the work of various artists who influenced his ideas and work.

This thoughtful selection of related work is most helpful in understanding the artist's development and achievement. In the early years, for example, we can see the influence of the Hague School of artists such as Willem Maris and Jozef Israls, whose quiet interior "Sewing School in Katwijk" was greatly admired by van Gogh.

These contemporaries were part of a long Dutch tradition of naturalistic landscape art, which in turn influenced their French counterparts, the Barbizon painters such as Charles Francois Daubigny. Van Gogh admired both of these schools for their unpretentious style and sensitivity to nature.

The two paintings by Anton Mauve are especially interesting, as he was a distant cousin of van Gogh. For several months in the winter of 1881 Mauve taught the aspiring artist at his own home in The Hague. Here, his "Wood Sale" has influenced van Gogh's "Sale of Building Scrap" and "The Poor and Money." Both painters had observed everyday scenes, and depicted them in the typically sober palette of the Dutch school. While Mauve's delicate treatment was widely admired, though, van Gogh's solid grouping of figures and sturdy peasants had limited appeal.

Of all the influences, that of Jean Francois Millet was perhaps the most profound. Van Gogh was greatly impressed by the noble simplicity of Millet's peasants, at work or at prayer in the fields. Before he tried his hand as an artist, van Gogh had been a preacher and studied theology, and even gave everything he owned to the poor in a fit of literal-mindedness. It is not surprising then, that his work shows great sympathy with the poor, and that he sees the landscape and tillers of the soil as symbols of eternity.

In a drawing of corn stooks and a mill, from 1885, the stooks twist up from the earth with the energy of living things. An early copy of Millet's "Sower" and a later drawing entitled "Sower and Setting Sun" reveal the rhythmic assurance he achieved in just a few years.

Although the impetuous side of his personality is well known, one must also credit van Gogh with much intelligent analysis and sheer hard work. From the beginning in 1880, when his brother Theo suggested he could make a living as an artist, Vincent worked steadily on improving his drawing skills. Partly for lack of money, partly as a discipline, he did not touch oil paint for the first three years.

Throughout the exhibition, there are experiments with different media. The bold drawing of a wistful girl in a shawl, for example, dated 1883, was a successful experiment in "painting in black" with a lithographic pencil. Later, in Arles, he made his own pens cut from reeds that grew by the river. With these old-fashioned pens, he created the energetic, spontaneous style that was one of his great achievements.

But before Arles, there was Paris. Van Gogh joined his brother there early in 1886, determined to try the more acceptable art of portraiture. Again, though, he was drawn to the small life of the streets, depicting a lonely drinker here, a lamplighter there. Brighter colors seeped into his drawings, and bold, modern angles.

He shared rooms with Theo, and here we can look over his shoulder at the view through the window. Theo van Gogh was a hard-working art dealer at Goupil & Compagnie, where he traded in fashionable works as well as taking great risks in the avant-garde. He was one of the first to buy from Monet, Sisley, Degas and even from his brothers' more radical new friends, Toulouse-Lautrec and Paul Gauguin.

Sadly, the talents of both brothers went largely unrecognized, although it is very fortunate for us that Theo was able to discover and support artistic potential in others.

It is also rather sad to move from the windswept landscapes of Arles to the orderly interiors of the clinic at Saint-Remy, where Vincent tried to recover his health in 1889. There are views of the garden seen through cool corridors, and a drawing of the courtyard, raging with detail, which includes a tiny signature on the watering can. From this point, says van Heugten, "he stopped signing his work. There was no need, because his signature was everywhere."

It ends with two remarkable drawings in blue. The writhing trees of the "Peasant Woman in an Old Vineyard" pose a final enigma: Is this the result of frenzy? Or the vision of a genius who was achieving his goal, to become the Millet of the modern age?

Two months later, Vincent was dead, and his heartbroken brother followed soon after. But there is a postscript, in the permanent exhibition of oil paintings to the left. Here, the sunflowers from Vincent's happy days in Arles are blazing still.