Ehon kyōka yama mata yama

Ehon kyōka yama mata yama 画本狂歌 山満多山

FSC-GR-780.236.1–3

Commentary by Ann Yonemura

Posted November 2014

This three-volume collection of kyōka verse, Ehon kyōka yama mata yama, was published in 1804 by the renowned publisher Tsutaya Jūzaburō. Hokusai illustrated it with full-color scenes of districts in the north and northwestern areas of Edo, which  were located on hilly, high ground. They focus in particular on the area known as Yamanote (toward the mountains), which included districts such as Koishikawa, Ushigome, Aoyama, Ichigaya, and Yotsuya. This area was populated by elite members of the warrior class and others of high status. The shitamachi  (“low city”), built on marshy land along the Sumida River and near Edo Bay, was home to merchants and artisans like Hokusai. Present-day Tokyo still reflects some of the social and cultural distinctions between the “high city” and “low city” that were established during the Edo period (Seidensticker 1985).

A wrapper (fukuro)  for this three-volume set is known through an example in the British Museum (Hillier 1980, pp. 58–59). Survival of fukuro  is rare, since they were wrapped around books or multivolume sets like modern dust jackets, removed after purchase, and usually lost. In this case, the wrapper has a bold and humorous full-color illustration of the strong boy Kintoki and the mountain woman (yamauba)  who raised him. The woman holds a signboard inscribed with the title and the artist’s signature while Kintoki peers curiously at the tip of the brush. The illustration on the wrapper follows the contemporary fashion for close-up head-and-shoulder (ōkubi-e)  prints of courtesans and actors made popular by artists such as Utamaro, whose publisher, Tsutaya Juzaburō, also published Hokusai’s Ehon kyōka yama mata yama.

Hokusai’s illustrations, most of them composed as double pages, occupy much of the space on each page. They form a continuous sequence with the kyōka poems arranged in a band of mist across the tops of the scenes. The scenic views include some with Mount Fuji in the distance, prefiguring Hokusai’s Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjūrokkei)  published in the early 1830s. The focus is on the foreground, where men, women, and children carry on their daily activities and provide engaging glimpses of life in the less-populated parts of Edo and its suburbs at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Selected reading:

Jack Hillier, The Art of Hokusai in Book Illustration  (London: Sotheby Parke-Bernet Publications; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 56–59.

Edward Seidensticker, Low City, High City: Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake: How the shogun’s ancient capital became a great modern city, 1867–1923  (San Francisco: Donald S. Ellis, 1985).

Toda Kenji, Descriptive Catalogue of Japanese and Chinese Illustrated Books in the Ryerson Library of the Art Institute of Chicago (1931; repr., Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2005), p. 241.

Ann Yonemura, Hokusai, 2 vols. (Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, 2006).