Last November I went to Tokyo to meet with Yayoi Kusama. I hadn't seen her since the beginning of 1999, when an exhibition of her work that I co-organised made its final stop at the Museum of Contemporary Art in that city.¹ 'Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958-68' covered most, but not all of the years that the artist lived in New York.

She did not return permanently to Japan until 1973, but 1968 seemed a logical terminus for the show for a number of reasons: after 1968 performance became Kusama's primary mode of expression; her happenings were ephemeral and there was only spotty documentation of them; 1969-73 were troubled times for Kusama, when she was largely nomadic, living between Europe, the US and Japan. Once in Tokyo, it took time for her life to stabilise. In 1975 she was hospitalised for a period, and in 1977 she moved permanently into the psychiatric hospital where she still resides. The hospital environment and the treatments she received were, and continue to be beneficial.²

Although Kusama never stopped making visual art, in the 1970s much of her creative energy was spent in writing a series of novels and collections of short stories and poems inspired by her life in New York.³ In the 1980s, when visual art again occupied Kusama with the intensity that it had in New York, her objects were different in character from those of her New York production. The truth is that in 1995 I was not at all certain that I understood the work from her Tokyo period. I went to