Early on in Natsume Soseki's 1908 campus novel "Sanshiro" — one of the most important expositions of the inter-connectedness of visual and literary art ever written — a young scientist, Nonomiya, looks up at a long, thin, white cloud floating diagonally in the sky.

"Do you know what that is?" he asks the titular Sanshiro. "That's all particles of snow. When you look at it down here, it's not moving in the least. But up there, it's moving with a velocity greater than that of a hurricane. Have you read Ruskin? ... It would be interesting to sketch this sky."

When people think about the literature of modern Japan, they tend to think that most of its influences have been, well, literary, whether native or foreign in origin. But in fact — as I would like to show in this four-part series tracing the story from the 19th century to the present — revolutions in painting and visual art have played a defining role in the creation of diverse and often unappreciated aspects of modern Japanese literature.