Because of strong pressures to belong and conform in Japanese society, the country can be a difficult place for those otherwise inclined. One reaction to this is the hikikomori phenomenon, in which chiefly young males reduce contact with society to a minimum by staying in their rooms. A recently suggested variant is sotokomori — those who escape over-intense social interaction by choosing to live abroad.

Although 20th-century Japanese artists and writers had good professional reasons to study abroad, there is also the possibility that one of the attractions was the escape it offered these sensitive and original types. This motive is all the more apparent in "Two Lives in Palau: Literary Genius, Atsushi Nakajima & Japan's Gauguin, Hisakatsu Hijikata" at the Setagaya Art Museum till Jan. 27. The exhibition looks at Hijikata (1900-1977) and Nakajima (1909-1942), who were from Tokyo's Setagaya Ward, and their meeting on Palau, today a small independent island territory 3,200 km south of Tokyo, but in those days a territory administered by Japan.

Unlike artists who justified moving to Paris to "drink from the fount" of art, when Hijikata arrived in Palau in 1929, it was such an artistic backwater that he was enlisted in a government-sponsored program teaching the natives art skills. But such isolation may have suited Hijikata — in Japan, he'd been unable to find an artistic group to belong to.