"I was born in Manila three years after Japan closed itself off from the world. When I was a boy I would beg my father to take me up on his boat so that I could see where we came from, but by then he was an old man and the boat was a worm-eaten wreck. He contented himself with painting pictures of the landmarks that he had used to navigate from Manila to his smuggler’s cove on Honshu. My efforts here— One Hundred and Seven Views of the Passage to Niigata —are a miserable pastiche of the art that he made.