Kaidō kyōka awase 海道狂歌合

FSC-GR-780.286.1-2

Commentary by Ellis Tinios

Posted September 5, 2016

Kaidō kyōka awase (A matching of comic verses along the highway) is a collaborative work combining a sequence of poems by Ueda Akinari with thirty-six paired illustrations matching verses by two Kyoto artists, Kawamura Bunpō and Watanabe Nangaku. This project was brought to fruition by the publisher Yoshidaya Shinbē (Bunchōdō 文徴堂). The book was conceived in two volumes: the first presents Akinari’s poems, the second Bunpō and Nangaku’s images.

The book’s history is complicated. From an early date—if not simultaneously with the publication of the two-volume edition in 1811—the volume of images was issued by Yoshidaya Shinbē as a complete work in one volume. Variant titles appeared on the title slips, and prefaces were chopped and changed in different printings of both editions. However, the visual content remains unchanged. Therefore, the Pulverer books catalogued as Kaidō kyōka awase (two volumes) and Kaidō sōga (one volume; FSC-GR-780.285) are identical in terms of their visual content.

A touching preface by Kawamura Bunpō appears in some editions of the book. This preface is absent from both Pulverer copies and is viewable in a copy on the website of the Art Research Center, Ritsumeikan University (Ebi0653). In that preface the artist explains that some years earlier, Akinari, a personal friend, had presented him with a collection of poems titled Kaidō kyōka awase and requested that he illustrate them. This encounter took place between 1805, the date of Akinari’s preface to the collection, and the poet’s death in 1809. Bunpō praises Akinari’s success in conjuring up images of people met on the road: wealthy and poor, laymen and monks. He laments that the years slipped by and Akinari died without seeing the poems in print.

In the final lines of the preface, which are omitted in some late single-volume editions (see EbiM011, Art Research Center, Ritsumeikan University website), Bunpō explains that Akinari had arranged his poems in pairs and attributed them to two imaginary travelers, the paper merchant Mr. Kōzo, or “Mr. Mulberry,” and the lower-class doctor Mr. Takamura. [1] The character for Kōzo (楮) refers to the inner bark of the variety of mulberry used to produce paper in Japan, and here offers a clever wordplay.

That the verses were meant to represent two distinct voices perhaps explains why two artists were engaged to design them. Nangaku was responsible for the lines assigned to Kōzo, and Bunpō was responsible for those given to Takamura. In total, each artist contributed eighteen double-page illustrations. They present scenes that might be seen on any of the great highways linking the major cities of Japan. For this writer, Nangaku was an accomplished artist, but few of his designs can bear direct comparison with Bunpō’s in this volume. Nangaku’s contributions are, with one exception, dominated by figures drawn to the same scale and placed so as to fill the image field evenly. In most cases he also provides a carefully worked-out setting. Bunpō, in contrast, varies the scale of his figures considerably. Some seem to strain against the limits of the book page; others are subordinated to a landscape. Some are cut off by the edge of the page; others are set off by broad sweeps of empty space. Where Nangaku elaborates a locale, Bunpō makes do with a clump of grass or a bench. This author believes Nangaku’s designs are animated but safe. Bunpō’s are startling and often very close to the powerful, unvarnished vision of the vicissitudes and simple pleasures of daily life found in his pupil Kawamura Kihō’s Kafuku ninpitsu (FSC-GR-780.288), published by Yoshidaya Shinbē in 1809, two years before this book appeared.

The Pulverer copy of Kaidō kyōka awase was printed in the mid-1810s. At some point the first three pages of the second volume were excised. Lost is a one-page preface by the publisher, signed Funya Shigetaka 文屋茂喬 (died circa 1821), and a two-page table of contents that lists the titles for the thirty-six illustrations. The visual content is complete. At the end of this copy of the second volume, the publisher bound in a four-page descriptive catalogue of books available from him (zōhan mokuroku 蔵板目録).

Selected readings

Louise Norton Brown, Block Printing and Book Illustration in Japan (London: George Routledge and Sons: E. P. Dutton, 1924).

Jack Hillier, The Art of the Japanese Book, 2 vols. (London: Sotheby’s Publications by Philip Wilson Publishers, 1987), esp. vol. 2, 690, 693–65.

Roger S. Keyes, Ehon: The Artist and the Book in Japan (New York Public Library in association with University of Washington Press, 2006).

Owen E. Holloway, Graphic Art of Japan: The Classical School (London: Alec Tiranti, 1957).

C. H. Mitchell, with the assistance of Osamu Ueda, The Illustrated Books of the Nanga, Maruyama, Shijo and Other Related Schools of Japan. A Biobibliography (Los Angeles: Dawson’s Book Shop, 1972).

Suzuki Jun and Ellis Tinios, Understanding Japanese Woodblock-Printed Illustrated Books: A Short Introduction to Their History, Bibliography and Format (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013).

Kenji Toda, Descriptive Catalogue of the Japanese and Chinese Illustrated Books in the Ryerson Library of the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago: 1931; repr., Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino Publishing, 2004).

Copies in other collections
Art Institute of Chicago

British Museum, London (multiple copies)

Ebi Collection (private) (viewable on online database of the Art Research Center, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto) (multiple copies)

Freer Gallery of Art Library, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC (multiple copies)

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Museum Volkenkunde, Leiden

New York Public Library, New York (multiple copies)

Victoria and Albert Museum, London

[1] The characters for the names Mr. Kōzo and Mr. Takamura are 楮道心 (Kōzo Dōshin) and 篁處士 (Takamura Shoshi), respectively.