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.