While staying with Sakamoto Hanjiro and other friends on the Mera shore at Tateyama, Chiba Prefecture, Aoki Shigeru created, in addition to A Gift of the Sea (cat. no. 135), several paintings of waves striking the shore. Here the rocks, gleaming in the hot sunlight, catch the strong waves of the Pacific. The wild, vivid pointillist style reminds one of Claude Monet in the 1880s. Aoki must have learned of Monet’s work in some way, but he said nothing about it. This painting was owned by the Symbolist poet Kambara Ariake, with whom Aoki was close, and was added for a time to Kawabata Yasunari’s collection after World War II.