2-11 "Beauty in the Painting" by Matsumoto Fūko I

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Words Spun Out of Images: Visual and Literary Culture in Nineteenth Century Japan

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The University of Tokyo

Words Spun Out of Images: Visual and Literary Culture in Nineteenth Century Japan

172 calificaciones

In their ambition to capture “real life,” Japanese painters, poets, novelists and photographers of the nineteenth century collaborated in ways seldom explored by their European contemporaries. This course offers learners the chance to encounter and appreciate behavior, moral standards and some of the material conditions surrounding Japanese artists in the nineteenth century, in order to renew our assumptions about what artistic “realism” is and what it meant. Learners will walk away with a clear understanding of how society and the individual were conceived of and represented in early modern Japan. Unlike contemporary western art forms, which acknowledge their common debt as “sister arts” but remain divided by genre and discourse, Japanese visual and literary culture tended to combine, producing literary texts inspired by visual images, and visual images which would then be inscribed with poems and prose. Noticing and being able to interpret this indivisibility of visual/literary cultures is essential in understanding the social and psychological values embedded within the beauty of Japanese art.

De la lección

Painted Beauties

Visual images of women produced in Japan before the introduction of photography can be divided into two types: portraits of women who actually existed in society, and painted or printed images of idealized “beauties,” whose resemblance to physical reality was subsumed often to an intense interest in mode and situational aspect. Like samurai portraits, images of women, both real and imagined, would often be inscribed with texts which instruct viewers how to understand and appreciate them. In this module, we will overview several painted and printed images, and learn how contemporary viewers used these images and their texts as a tool to understand the world.

2-9 Beauties in Writings I6:22

2-10 Beauties in Writings II8:05

2-11 "Beauty in the Painting" by Matsumoto Fūko I9:16

2-12 "Beauty in the Painting" by Matsumoto Fūko II2:57

2-13 Beauties in Photographs I7:57

2-14 Beauties in Photographs II9:05

Conoce a los instructores

Robert Campbell
Emeritus Professor, The University of Tokyo
Director-General, National Institute of Japanese Literature

The traditional image of the beauty or bijin-zu or

bijin-ga as we say in Japanese, was something that become very popular from

about the 17th century into the 18th century,

was successful, commercially, we see hundreds and

hundreds of images of imagined beauties in ukiyo-e or floating art,

floating world art in the 18th and 19th century.

We see that the production of images of beauties doesn't stop right at the end

of the Edo period, but is carried on into the modern era,

into the 1870s, into the 1880s, but is not a static form.

We see the image of women, young women,

appearing in various new style of expression.

For example, the newer forms of fiction,

which we see emerging in the 1880s and the 1890s.

The image that I want to introduce today in our lesson is from a collection

of ghost stories, the Demonic Tales from a Nocturnal Window,

which was written and published, the first edition of it, in 1889.

It was written by a man named Ishikawa Kōsai, who was a a Sinitic scholar and

literary person active in Tokyo in the Meiji era,

and it was written entirely in classical Chinese.

When we translate it into modern Japanese or English, it reads like a modern novel.

But in fact, the whole text was written in classical Chinese.

Lafcadio Hearn, by the way who was living in Japan at the time, was an avid reader.

He really, really liked this story a lot, and

used some of the short stories in it to translate and

to re-adapt into English in his famous Kuaidan, or Ghost Stories, book.

But anyway, the image that we have right here is

the illustration of a short story, which was titled Beauty in the Painting.

We can see the title here right above me right here.

It says ga-bijin which means "painting beauty," It's kind of hard to translate it.

It's sort of a term on its own.

It refers to beautiful women as paintings.

In other words, beauties who never existed but exist as paintings.

I translate it here as beauty in the painting.

We can see a hanging scroll in this very, very sort of old-style Japanese room.

We know that it's old style because the young man who's sitting here

leaning against his desk has an old sort of feudal-style

sort of hairdo, so we know that it's from the Edo period.

Anyway, he has a tokonoma area here in the room

in order to display flowers and beautiful pottery and also hanging scrolls.

And he has one scroll that's hanging there and it's white.

There's nothing written on it at all.

We can see that this is a sort of smoky tale here.

Excuse me, there's a smoky trail here.

And it leads into the sort of full blown picture of this woman, who is descending,

literally, from the scroll into the room.

We can see that she's moving out of the tokonoma towards him, and

he's kind of taken aback, and sort of moving back here.

This is one of the scenes from the story.

So let me give you a summary of this story itself.

This young man lives in a manor in Edo.

This is towards the end of the Edo period, perhaps in the 1830s or the 1840s.

He's recovering from an illness.

He's very, very, bookish, so he's happy to be at home.

And during his recovery, an uncle of his, who is a samurai for

the bakufu government, traveled west to Nagasaki.

And when he came back from business, he brought,

as a souvenir from Nagasaki, a painting, a hanging scroll which he had bought there.

Of course, Nagasaki was, in the Edo period,

the single open port to trade with China.

And there are a lot of things that you could buy in Nagasaki,

which had just come off the ship, literally, from China.

So he bought this scroll, hanging scroll, in which was depicted a very, very,

beautiful young woman.

He thought that his nephew, who was not feeling well, would really enjoy it.

And it might, sort of encourage him, to get up,

and walk around, and recover more quickly.

So anyway, he's given this lovely scroll by his uncle, and he hangs it in his room.

And as he's reading, he sort of wanders off in his thoughts and he dozes,

he sort of has a daydream.

Right before he has his daydream, though,

he writes a poem, a quatrain, in classical Chinese,

as he's looking at the portrait, he finds a fascinating, very,

very attractive, very, very beautiful woman.

He's attracted to her, and he writes a poem, which, he says,

is to be inscribed on the painting.

In other words, he dedicates his words to

the woman who's portrayed in the picture itself.

As we've seen before, these images of young women and

young men who write poems dedicated to them, but one step further,

were conceived to be inscribed onto the so-called body of the painting themselves.

These were very, very popular, very common on this period,

so he's writing this quatrain there, so dedicating and

devoting it to this beauty whom he knows he will never meet.

Anyway, he wanders off into his dreams, and

then this young woman appears in front of him.

We can see already this is a very, very classical sort of ghost story.

And she tells him her story.

For some reason, she's fluent in Japanese, although it's a Chinese figure, and

she's come from China.

She describes to him how she came to be portrayed in this picture.

This young woman was alive in the 1840s,

the daughter of a very prominent, very, very wealthy merchant family in Nanjing.

The period was 1850, maybe 1851 or so,

right at the beginning of the Taiping Rebellion.

So the forces of the Taiping Rebellion,

these who would usurp and form this sort of coup d'etat.

And take over Nanjing, making it their own capital, drove

out all of the old capitalist merchant families and so forth.

Many of them escaped, and this is historically accurate,

escaped south to Shanghai.

So she escaped to Shanghai from the rebellion in her home town.

But in Shanghai, she ended up being separated from her parents and

sold into a brothel as a prostitute in Shanghai.

This obviously shocked her very, very much, made her very, very depressed, and

she was terrified by the experience.

In Shanghai at this time, many brothel owners would have portraits

drawn of their most beautiful and well-selling, so to speak,

prostitutes, in order to show prospective customers and so forth.

And she had her portrait drawn.

Right after she had the portrait drawn,

which was what this work of art is, she passed away.

She became very, very sad, became ill and wasn't able to recover, so

she died at a very, very young age.

So her spirit, her very, very frustrated, very, very sad,

unrequited soul remained in this portrait itself, and was fixed in it,

in other words, and then removed from Shanghai by someone who bought it.

Moved it, actually carried it into Japan and she was delivered to his house.

She realized that he was someone that would understand her.

All of her travails and hardship that she had, and

her own sort of essence by the quatrain, the poem that he wrote for her.

So in other words, the ghost,

which she is, emerged from the painting in response to the words,

to the force of the words that he wrote in order to inscribe on the painting itself.

The whole story, I'm not going to give away the end of it here,

though is about the relationship which grows,

from this moment between someone who is a sort of extraterrestrial,

or on the other side of mortal life.

This ghost who has come back across the ocean to meet

this young samurai, perhaps in the 1850s or so.

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