In The Eyes of Art, Tatsuya reconstructs his life through the relationships and works that shaped it. From adolescence in Tokyo to maturity as a painter, his memory returns to the people who changed the way he loved, chose and saw. What begins as an artistic search becomes a more difficult question: how much do we truly understand of what has shaped our lives?

A remark Ayumi makes about the three loves stays with Tatsuya for decades. He tries to fit his story into that theory and comes to believe that art occupies the place people could not hold on to. Yet his most important work, The Eyes of Art, contains a red centre towards which three gazes converge, and its meaning resists even its creator.

More than a story about an artist's rise, the novel explores memory, interpretation, responsibility and relationships that refuse simple categories. To what extent does a creator understand what he has created? How much of a life belongs to the decisions we make, and how much to the stories with which we later try to explain them?

Takeri Katsuhiro constructs an intimate novel in which artistic creation and emotional experience reflect one another without offering perfect answers. The Eyes of Art begins with a simple idea: a work can contain meanings its author does not immediately recognise, and a life, like a painting, rarely ends up obeying the categories with which we try to order it.