Book Reviews

EAST ASIAN PUBLISHING AND SOCIETY East Asian Publishing and Society 1 (2011) 177-188 brill.nl/eaps

Book Reviews

Ewa Machotka. Visual Genesis of Japanese National Identity: Hokusai’s Hyakunin Isshu. New York: P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2009. ISBN 9789052014821. Paperback $44.95

Hyakunin isshu uba ga etoki 百人一種乳母が絵解き or One hundred Poets, One Poem Each, Pictorial Explanation by the Nurse, published between 1835-38, is Hokusai’s last major print series. Although Hokusai likely completed designs for all the pictures illustrating this poetry anthology compiled circa 1230 by Fujiwara Teika, only ninety-one survive. About a third of these were actually issued as full color woodcuts, with the remainder known through preliminary drawings, hanshita-e 版下絵, or photo-mechanical reproduc- tions made in France in the late nineteenth century. Despite its incomplete state, as Hoku- sai’s most ambitious single-sheet print project, this series has long aroused considerable interest among collectors and scholars. Ewa Machotka’s is the third English-language publication devoted to the pictorialization of Hyakunin isshu. The Japanese print collector Peter Morse produced in 1989 a handsome book with full color illustrations of all the surviving prints as well as the extant drawings from the series. Joshua Mostow’s 1996 Pictures of the Heart presented a scholarly introduc- tion to the anthology and its poetic and pictorial exegesis. The book under consideration builds significantly on this as well as the extensive research carried out by Japanese scholars with the aim of situating Hokusai’s magnum opus at the intersection of a variety of cultural discourses in its own time. The author scrutinizes closely both text and image to see how they reflected Hokusai’s highly idiosyncratic artistic imagination, while also drawing attention to the changing role of classical poetry and its pictorialization, and the nativistic over- tones these took on in the Tenpō era (1830-44). In adopting this approach, her larger agenda is, as indicated in the book title, to throw light on how Hokusai contributed to “the visual genesis of national identity.” The book is organized in three parts, each comprised of several chapters. The first offers a historiographical overview, genealogy of the pictorialization of the anthology, and Hoku- sai’s relationship to it; the second turns to a close reading of the pictures and the series title; and the third, entitled “narrating national identity,” examines the sources of Hokusai’s unusual artistic approach to the series, his role in “constructing Japan,” and finally his engagement with the larger community through his expression of yonaoshi 世直し, a desire for world renewal. Hyakunin Isshu does not have the long tradition of pictorialization of other poetry com- pilations, and yet by the end of the Tokugawa period it is fair to say that it had come to define the classical poetic tradition for a wide swath of the literate population. In the first part of her study, Machokta explains how this came about, arguing that the dissemination of this anthology was inextricably tied to the spread of nativism through commoner poetry circles that included women. Access to Hyakunin isshu interrupted the previously one-sided

flow of cultural production, creating an environment in which interactive experience of poetry flourished, thereby binding people together in collaborative social networks. These networks included followers of nativist studies, kokugaku 国学, for whom the time- honored cultural activity of poetry exchange was central. Hyakunin Isshu was first illustrated in the seventeenth century and, surprisingly, it did not develop a fixed iconography, leaving artists who took it on considerable creative free- dom. Hokusai’s approach follows some standard models of poetic illustration—such as depicting the poet, yomibito 詠み人, or the celebrated place, meisho 名所, identified in the poem—but far more often it eschews this courtly tradition in favor of genre scenes that celebrate rural life. While the resulting landscapes can be enjoyed in their own right, because they are often premised on complex visual verbal puns, their relationship to the poems is not always easy to decode. This difficulty may help to explain why this series did not find an audience and was discontinued before its completion. Following on her introductory points about the role of this anthology in the growth of female literacy and cultural aspirations, Matchokta devotes considerable attention to Hokusai’s addition of the phrase uba ga etoki as part of his title. In the context of the time, uba, she points out, was not simply understood as an infant’s nurse but also as a female instructor, an interpretation reinforced by the term etoki, usually used in the context of the didactic picture explanations that were sometimes conducted by itinerant nuns. It is pos- sible that, by adopting this title, Hokusai was trying to target the anthology’s growing female readership. What led Hokusai to undertake this project and to illustrate it in the way he did are the questions addressed in the final chapters. In the absence of any written explanation on the part of the artist, there is no firm answer, but Matchotka offers convincing evidence that Hokusai was active in poetic circles and that his associational rather than literal interpretation of the anthology, with its heavy reliance on visual and verbal puns, grew out of his experience of illustrating kyōka 狂歌 for privately commissioned prints, surimono 刷り物. His emphasis on landscape both shaped and reflected the popularity of this genre in the 1830s: such views helped to translate the tradition of meisho-e, pictures of famous places, into a new more accessible form while also appealing to the growing number of commoners who engaged in leisure travel. At a time of widespread crop failure and famine in the Tenpō era, the attention Hokusai devoted to the representation of agricultural production and harvests in these scenes is significant. These auspicious motifs, Matchokta speculates, may have given expression to the artist’s aim of making his poetic and pictorial project a kind of magical instrument that would restore the proper balance between heaven and earth. Hokusai casts a long shadow in the world of nineteenth-century prints. His Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, Journey to the Waterfalls of all the provinces, and One-hundred Poets, one poem each, pictorialization by the nurse, all were part of the wave of prints depicting places around the country of which he was but one of numerous exponents. To claim his last series as the “visual genesis of national identity” is thus to reductively attribute complex cultural developments to the efforts of a single artistic genius. This argument is especially hard to sustain given the fact that Hokusai’s interpretation of Hyakunin isshu was hardly a best- seller. While the circulation of prints in general, and serial views of the countryside and its activities in particular, may have fostered the growth of an “imagined community,” this development owed as much—and possibly more—to Hiroshige than Hokusai. It is esti- mated that more than 20,000 impressions of each picture in the Hōeidō edition of his