Imayo kushi kiseru hinagata 櫛鏨雛形

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Commentary by Ann Yonemura

Posted November 2014

Imayō kushi kiseru hinagata is a small, three-volume book of designs for decorating combs and tobacco pipes. These objects for personal use could be richly embellished, unlike clothing and accessories, which were worn in public and strictly regulated by the Tokugawa shogunate. The law restricted luxurious materials, such as gold and silver, to the uppermost social classes—the nobility and elite warriors, such as the daimyo. Merchants, kabuki actors, artisans, and other commoners risked punishment if they displayed their wealth in public. Moreover, since jewelry was not customary in Japan, the taste for beautifully crafted objects could be expressed in such personal objects as combs, pipes, and fans.

Hokusai was intimately familiar with the world of craft production. These volumes—two with designs for combs and one for pipes—include a wide variety of exquisitely detailed sketches, most based on plant motifs or landscapes. Many of the designs conform to the shapes of the objects and are extended to indicate that they should wrap over the tops of combs or around the stem of a pipe. Hokusai follows a longstanding and distinctive preference among Japanese designers to compose landscapes and natural motifs continuously around three-dimensional objects rather than frame them in bands or panels or repeat the same design on the front and back.

The title of these volumes includes the term imayō, which specifies that they are contemporary, modern designs. The pipe-stem designs seem easily adaptable to engraving into metal. The comb designs—naturalistic floral sprays and landscapes—are intended for inlaying or lacquering, both techniques that employ a range of colors. In volume 2, renderings of Mount Fuji adapted for the curved shape of a comb prefigure Hokusai’s Fugaku sanjūrokukei (Thirty-six views of Mount Fuji), issued by the same publisher, Nishimuraya Yohachi, in the early 1830s.

Selected reading:

Jack Hillier, The Art of Hokusai in Book Illustration (London: Sotheby Parke-Bernet Publications; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 181–84.

Copies in other collections:

British Library, London

Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Library

Rijksmuseum vor Volkenkunde, Leiden (1353-49)