Last Wednesday, in the early evening, a tremendous thunderstorm crashed through Tokyo. There were blackouts, the lightning started fires, even the rain-or-shine Yamanote Line was shut down for three hours. Meanwhile, Yumiko Okui was putting up her show at the Kenji Taki Gallery in Shinjuku.
"This always happens," she later told the opening party guests, some of them damp and some of them soggy. "It seems that whenever I have an opening, there's a big storm."
I jokingly suggested that Okui might be some sort of rain goddess, who, when she isn't down in a gallery, watches the world from a distance, from a place somewhere up in the clouds. After checking out Okui's new paintings and chatting with the artist for a while, I realized I was almost right.