The masterwork stands -- or rather, abides -- alone in the center of the first gallery of Sunazawa Bikky: Sculpted Spirits in Wood, a show running through 18 June at the Museum of Modern Art, Hayama. Tongue of God is at once erotic, comical, wild; at rest and yet very much alive. Two meters high and more than half that around, it's a solid mass of oak that looks so natural one wonders if it was brought in from the woods as is. Closer inspection reveals that its cracked and weather-stained surface is covered in thousands of rhythmic, tightly flowing dimples shaped by a chisel. The rippling caresses invite us to reach out and touch it. Unfortunately, this is not allowed.

The sculpture is said to resemble the tapered end of the ikupasuy, a prayer stick used in Ainu rituals to communicate with the gods. The tongued portion of that instrument is typically carved with a design that identifies the worshipper. Sunazawa's monument seems an apt mediator for an individual who was larger than life and whose gift was expressing, in abstract form, a mythology derived from Ainu traditions yet driven by his own poetic visions. In Ainu folklore, oak is a benevolent tree spirit that's willing to provide assistance. Indeed, Tongue of God seems to hum expectantly as you stand before it. It's held in the permanent collection of the Sapporo Art Museum, but is only occasionally brought out on display, and even less frequently lent out for tours. Take this opportunity to converse with it in Hayama if you can.

Born in 1931 to parents who were leaders in the movement for Ainu land and civil rights, in his late teens Sunazawa worked with his family and other households to establish a new settlement. At day's end he would sketch the cattle and horses. "In the beginning I just wanted to draw a horse as it was and capture its sturdiness and strength. But the more I drew, the more I wanted to capture the essence of the horse -- and eventually the animals I drew turned into abstract forms." Leaving Hokkaido for Tokyo at the age of 21, he became caught up in the avant-garde art world of the 1950s and '60s. Of this time he later wrote, "I learned more from the free-spirited conversations with artists than from anything else . . . We were of the same opinion that a work can't be called art if it doesn't have eroticism in it." By the 1970s he was back in Hokkaido and involved in the Ainu liberation movement. (Quotes from Asu o tsukuru Ainu minzoku [The Ainu Who Would Create Tomorrow] by Tsutomu Yamakawa, 1988, and a personal correspondence to filmmaker and graphic artist Katsumi Yazaki, 1981)

Sunazawa's graphite and watercolor nudes, 22 of which are on display in this show, reveal his playfulness and fascination with the sensual. One also sees in them the lines of tree limbs and the girthy forms of logs and stumps, the raw material of his sculptures. Like them, his drawings seem steeped in a vision of nature that goes beyond physical form to address the spirit-life it's endowed with.

Sunazawa was a proponent of participatory art, a stance rooted in the Ainu belief that all things in nature, animate or otherwise, have kinship. He believed that sculptures should be touched, and that one's tactile sense would lead to a different, even transcendent, way of "seeing" the work. He would sometimes cover his creations with a black cloth and let people explore an exhibition hall with their hands alone -- to literally grasp, in a sight-centric world, the deeper meaning of what it is to be human. His hope was to stimulate the senses that are more often used by animals. In 1982 he debuted his Juka (Wooden Flower) series by preparing truckloads of stripped willow branches for viewers to affix to a tree, rather like birds preparing a nest.

Sunazawa believed that through his woodworking, and as a part of nature himself, he was giving new life to the spirit of a fallen tree. Like the tree's gift of material, his visions were sometimes decades in the making. Toy of Three in the Morning, a series named for the hours before daybreak when he did most of his work, is a collection of whimsical insect-like forms he produced in earnest from the mid-1980s but which can be traced to Aoi sakyu ni te (In Blue Sand Dunes), a collection of prose and poems he published in 1976. The book, in turn, was inspired by images that had come to him in dreams as early as 1964. In contrast to his bold sculptures with textured surfaces that show signs of his axing and adzing and chiseling, these smaller works have smoothly polished finishes and deftly engineered movable parts.

Sunazawa Bikky: Sculpted Spirits in Wood 8 April - 18 June 2017 The Museum of Modern Art, Hayama

	Susan Rogers Chikuba Susan Rogers Chikuba, a Tokyo-based writer, editor and translator, has been following popular culture, architecture and design in Japan for three decades. She covers the country's travel, art, literary and culinary scenes for domestic and international publications.