East Asian Publishing and Society East Asian Publishing and Society 3 (2013) 215-227 brill.com/eaps

Book Reviews

Ukiyo-e Caricatures. Noriko Brandl and Sepp Linhart, eds. Beiträge zur Japanologie, 41. Vienna: Abteilung für Japanologie des Instituts für Ostasienwissenschaften, Universität Wien, 2011. ISBN 9783900362249. 30 € Ukiyoe Caricatures—online database. Department of East Asian Studies - Japanese Stud- ies, University of Vienna. http://kenkyuu.eas.univie.ac.at/karikaturen/

Ukiyo-e Caricatures brings together the papers presented at a symposium held in May 2006 on ‘Comic Pictures and Caricatures in the Late Edo and Meiji Periods’. The symposium and this volume are part of a project underway at the University of Vienna since 2004 to catalogue and interpret satirical and topical woodblock prints published in Japan between the Tenpō reforms (1842) and the Russo-Japanese War (1905). As the editors state in the Introduction, this is ‘the first collection of essays not only in English but alsoin Japanese that devotes itself solely to ukiyo-e caricatures’ (p. 10). In this respect alone it is a valuable contribution to the field, though the publication suffers from a number of problems. The volume is divided into three sections. ‘Genres of Ukiyo-e Caricatures’ covers early examples of satire in kibyōshi of the 1780s, humour in death portraits (shini-e), the peren- nial Chūshingura, battle prints, and graffiti. In ‘Caricatures at the End of the Edo Period,’ works by Utagawa Kuniyoshi receive much attention (as is to be expected from this master of the comic medium), as well as perceptions of riddle pictures and Hirokage’s Fish and Vegetable Battle. ‘Caricatures from the Meiji Period’ covers Boshin War prints, works by Kawanabe Kyōsai and Kobayashi Kiyochika, and reactions to foreign residents and their customs. As expressed in the Introduction, ‘the culture of play dominating Edo society made everything a possible object of humor’ (p. 10). Comic, satirical, and topical prints form an incredibly rich vein of visual culture, but they require the teasing out of numerous puns and allusions. As the editors explain on the project’s website, scholarly attention has long privi- leged the aesthetic qualities of woodblock prints, driven by both exhibition and art market demands. Topical prints, by contrast, have drawn far less notice, often due to problems of availability, textual complexity, or interpretation. Several essays in the volume stand out as coherent, well-argued pieces. Simon-Oika- wa’s is a clear summary of the phenomenon of moji-e, graffiti pictures formed from kanji to be found primarily within book illustrations, which ‘tell us a lot about both visual subculture and the relationship between text and image in pre-modern Japan’ (p. 84). Satirical designs succeed by their very ambivalence, allowing viewers to sup- ply the necessary information and arrive at their own interpretation. Yuasa’s essay is particularly instructive in this respect, illustrating the perils of over-interpretation,

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI: 10.1163/22106286-12341250 216 Book Reviews / East Asian Publishing and Society 3 (2013) 215-227 both in the nineteenth century and today: ‘The time of publication, . . . the rumor of Kuniyoshi himself explaining that the print was a caricature as well as the expecta- tion caused by [this] enforced [sic] common people to read too much into the matter’ (p. 90). Similarly, Iwakiri’s piece is an admonition against over-interpreting the reasons behind satirical designs: the cats in Kuniyoshi’s designs were present before the Tenpō Reforms, linked to the popularity of a serialized novel and a kabuki dance (and Kuniyoshi’s own ailurophilia), reminding us that ‘it is always essential to observe and interpret nishiki-e prints within the cultural framework that supported and gave rise to them’ (p. 109). Lin- hart provides a succinct summary of the place of Kuniyoshi’s humorous and satirical prints in his oeuvre (and this perhaps would have better preceded Iwakiri’s contribution), and analyses several examples of this genre in the fan-print medium. He presents a convincing argument that fan prints, as both more visible (at outdoor activities in summer) and more ephemeral, were a particularly effective medium for propaganda. One of the strengths of the volume is its span from the 1840s through to 1905, safely dispelling any assumption of radical changes in approach after the Meiji Restoration, and allowing us to comprehend the continuities of satirical treatment. However, the mixed approach in arranging the essays—based on both genre and chronology—does not create a clear structure. One based purely on genre (or, in the case of Kuniyoshi, artist) might have worked better. Humorous and satirical imagery hinges on questions of boundaries and definitions, pushing at their limits to create something transgressive and provocative, whether of laugh- ter or outrage, depending on your stance. Terminology can be hard to pin down, and the volume would have benefited from a fuller discussion of the definition and use of various terms. One doubts if the editors’ division of ‘funny pictures . . . into pictures with the aim to make people laugh and pictures which ridiculed certain social and political circumstances’ (p. 9) really holds. Surely these two functions often overlapped? The book’s title itself is in fact misleading: ‘caricature’ refers to the exaggeration and distortion of an individual’s physical and facial characteristics, whereas the essays here are concerned with the general category of humorous and satirical imagery. The prints taken up by the project include memorial pictures, earthquake pictures, measles pictures, Yokohama pictures and ken-game pictures, and thus ‘topical and satirical’ perhaps best encompasses the variety. The broad- est term in Japanese is perhaps giga, meaning ‘pictures for fun’ or ‘playful pictures,’ and other terms—among them fūshi, fūryū, mitate and yatsushi—cover concepts such as satire, parody, and ‘elegant re-workings’ of classical themes. The essays present much valuable information, gained from careful reading of the prints and through contextual investigation. Yet overall the volume fails to cohere; it remains a collection of conference papers and suffers from some of the problems associated with that format: there is much repetition of basic contextual information across the essays, and many of the pieces seem frustratingly brief, leaving the reader wishing the author could have worked the paper up into a full-length essay (for instance, Iwakiri). Others, however, are disjointed and repetitive and would have benefited from editorial intervention. There is also a lack of consistency across the contributions: for example, the title for the famous design of Minamoto no Raikō and the Earth Spider is given in several different English translations. The lengthy list of subdivisions in Zöllner’s article may have been useful to him in organizing his research, but it adds nothing to the piece and seems more appropriate for a science journal (the same could be said of Tomizawa’s piece). Crucially, none of the