Haraiso
FSC-GR-780.275
Commentary by Alicia Volk
Posted October 17, 2016

“My! At long last we’ve arrived in Paradise,” begins Kawakami Sumio’s poem-picture book Haraiso (Paradise). [1] A gentleman is shown in a ruffled collar, baggy pantaloons, and a jacket adorned with a crucifix. Holding a rosary in one hand, he beckons with the other to angels welcoming him into heaven. Both the figure’s exotic garb and the book’s Christian subject harken back to the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, when for a relatively brief time Portuguese nanbanjin 南蛮人, or “southern barbarians,” brought trade, European technology, and Christianity to Japan via the port of Nagasaki.

Kawakami, an amateur poet and artist who worked as an English teacher, brought his fascination with this moment of intercultural dynamism to Haraiso and numerous other works during his long printmaking career from the 1920s through the 1960s. Other printed books with a Christian theme include Inheruno いんへるの (Hell; 1944) and Adan to Ewa あだんとえわ (Adam and Eve; 1955).

Privately published in 1951 in an edition of fifty, Haraiso recalls early modern printed Japanese and European books. In accordance with Kawakami’s signature style and working method, the small book’s text and images are woodblock printed in black sumi ink with hand-applied coloring. This method and the resulting aesthetic effect are similar to early Japanese hand-colored woodblock-printed books (tanrokubon 丹緑本) of the early Edo period.

Each of the nine images in Haraiso—eight hand-colored and one monochromatic—is paired on the same page with hand-carved Japanese-language text phonetically rendered in Roman letters. The lettering’s archaic calligraphic style is reminiscent of incunabula, early European printed books predating the sixteenth century.

Haraiso abounds with Christian iconography: seraphim, haloes, rosaries, the crucifix, wine, roses, Saint Gabriel, the Virgin Mary, Christ, and even Lucifer, who is pictured in a fiery hell with card-playing, demonlike gamblers. It also introduces recognizable Japanese iconography. For example, the male figure with a shaved head who appears on the opening and closing pages is likely a Japanese supplicant, and the young woman dressed in a Japanese kimono with a rosary worn around her neck in the fifth image is suggestive of the female kabuki dancers who mesmerized Kyoto with their lewd performances in the early seventeenth century.

With a dose of affection and humor, Haraiso looks back at the origins of Japanese exchange with the West from Kawakami’s vantage point in the mid-twentieth century when, ultimately, Japan’s program of modernization on the European model had resulted in war, defeat, and occupation.

Selected readings

Kawakami Sumio 川上澄生 , Waga shihen 『我が詩篇』 (Atami: Ryūseikaku, 1956).

Kawakami Sumio 川上澄生, Kawakami Sumio zenshū 『川上澄生全集』, 14 vols. (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1978–79), vol. 6 (1979).

Oliver Statler, Modern Japanese Prints: An Art Reborn (Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, 1956).

Alicia Volk, Made in Japan: The Postwar Creative Print Movement (Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum, 2005).

Copies in other collections

Kanuma Municipal Art Museum of Kawakami Sumio

[1] Author’s translation.