Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes

Murakami Hideo was influenced by Van Gogh and Saeki Yuzo and taught himself oil painting.At the age of 20, he moved to Tokyo with the aim of becoming a painter.He experienced a nomadic life in Tokyo, and recounts memories of how he couldn't sell his pen drawings of Tokyo landscapes, so a waitress at a restaurant bought them for him to use as food money, and how he fell into a state of lethargy and spent the night sleeping in a tree in Hibiya Park.Even in such circumstances, he continued to learn painting, using coal tar, clay, and even charcoal that had accumulated at the bottom of a pot as paints.The poem that he wrote about during this period is "Song of the Crow."For Murakami Hideo, the crow motif was a projection of himself.