Yayoi Kusama, the visionary Japanese artist whose death at 97 was announced on Thursday, had a complicated relationship with her home country. She endured a traumatic childhood and was later shunned by the Japanese cultural elite for her provocative style.

But as news of Ms. Kusama’s passing spread, Japanese artists, scholars, politicians and art lovers rushed to celebrate her legacy, describing her as a cultural giant who helped bring Japanese art to the masses.

Ryutaro Takahashi, a prominent collector of Ms. Kusama’s works, said she was a genius who was “simultaneously the most avant-garde and the most accessible artist imaginable.”

“Her recognition in Japan was a case of playing catch-up with the rest of the world,” he said. “At the time, there was simply no room in Japan to accept her.”

Even as she earned global renown in the 1950s and 1960s for her immense abstract paintings that she called “Infinity Nets,” Ms. Kusama, who died on Aug. 14 in Tokyo, faced criticism from Japanese commentators. Her embrace of nudity in her works ran counter to conservative postwar values in Japan, and she was regarded by some Japanese as an outcast and embarrassment.

In Matsumoto, Ms. Kusama’s hometown, about 100 miles northwest of Tokyo, a local newspaper, the Shinano Mainichi Shimbun, published a special edition on Thursday announcing her death. The newspaper hailed her as a “world-renowned avant-garde artist.”

The mayor of Matsumoto, Yoshinao Gaun, said that she had helped elevate the profile of her hometown. Her sculpture “Phantom Flowers,” of tulips covered in her signature polka dots, stands at the entrance of a local art museum. Some of the city’s buses feature a polka-dot design that honors her.

“Her works and activities, highly acclaimed both in Japan and abroad, instilled pride in our citizens and served as a vital bridge connecting our city to the world,” Mr. Gaun said in a statement.

Ms. Kusama was born in 1929 to a wealthy family in Matsumoto. Her parents ran a wholesale seed business on a plot of land that the family had owned for more than a century.

She had a difficult childhood, enduring physical abuse from her mother and the trauma of her father’s infidelities, according to Ms. Kusama’s autobiography, which she published in 2002.

In 1948, despite the objections of her parents, she enrolled in art school in Kyoto and studied the Nihonga style of painting, which incorporates mineral pigments.

She left Japan in 1957 for the United States, eager to embark on an international career. Before she departed, she destroyed thousands of early drawings along a riverbank in Matsumoto — using a hatchet for some, and burning others — in the hope that she would create better work once she moved.

After a short stint in Seattle, Ms. Kusama went on to New York, where her career took off. She became one of the most successful contemporary artists of her generation.

She returned to Japan in 1973, feeling that Americans had lost interest in her. In 1977, she checked herself into a mental hospital in Tokyo, making it her permanent home and building a studio nearby, where she continued to work for decades.

She experienced hallucinations throughout her life, which she said helped inspire her semiabstract paintings.

“I am pursuing art in order to correct the disability which began in my childhood,” she said at one point.

Daisuke Miyatsu, a professor at the Yokohama University of Art and Design and a collector of Ms. Kusama’s works, said that he admired her ability to make a name for herself in the United States at a time when the art world was dominated by white men.

“Her physical body may have faded,” he said, referring to Ms. Kusama’s death, “but I believe she is the type of person whose consciousness continues to paint.”

In her autobiography, Ms. Kusama said she did not fear death, seeing it as “merely stepping into the next room.” She said that her mission was to create art that serves as a “requiem for myself — art that encompasses the significance of death, the beauty of its colors and spaces, the quietude of its footsteps, and the ‘nothingness’ that follows.”

“Living and dying are one and the same,” she wrote. “This is a truth I feel deeply.”