File:Utamakura 歌まくら (Poem of the Pillow) (BM OA+,0.133.2).jpg

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Utamakura 歌まくら (Poem of the Pillow)   (Wikidata search (Cirrus search) Wikidata query (SPARQL)  Create new Wikidata item based on this file)
Artist

Print artist: Kitagawa Utamaro (喜多川歌麿)

Published by: Tsutaya Juzaburo (蔦屋重三郎)
Title
Utamakura 歌まくら (Poem of the Pillow)
Description
English: Shunga, colour woodblock print. No. 4 out of 12 illustrations from a printed folding album (sheets mounted separately). Lovers in front of plum-blossom and bamboo screens.
Date 1788 (New Year, preface)
Medium paper
Dimensions
Height: 25.50 centimetres (ca.)
Width: 37 centimetres (ca.)
institution QS:P195,Q6373
Current location
Asia
Accession number
OA+,0.133.2
Notes This is the first major erotic work by Utamaro, a folding album with a preface followed by twelve colour-printed illustrations and two erotic stories. A wide variety of scenarios and protagonists are presented: young lovers, married couples, townspeople and samurai, sex workers and ordinary types, a middle-aged woman seducing a youth, a widow, a secret lover, a rape. The album begins with mythological river creatures called kappa seizing a female diver and ends with exotic Europeans. There is a clear ambition to show as many different kinds of coupling as possible, which has the effect of emphasizing the universality of sex. Two erotic stories at the end of the album extend the range even further, with scenarios difficult to portray in pictures presented in texts and vocal exclamations. The first describes the fantasies of a young man who dreams of a tryst with the girl next door. In the second, women isolated on the fabled ‘Isle of Women’ (Nyogo-ga-shima), thought to be located in the ocean to the south, get satisfaction by exposing themselves to the southern breezes. On the fan in picture ten is inscribed a verse by the comic kyo-ka poet Yadoya no Meshimori (1753–1830): ‘Its beak caught firmly / in the clam shell / the snipe cannot fly away / on an autumn evening’ (‘Hamaguri ni / hashi o shikka to / hasamarete / shigi tachikanuru / aki no yu-gure’). The same verse also appears in volume five of the anthology Kyo-ka saizoshu-, published by Tsutaya in 1787. It gives a new spin to one of three famous classical poems on autumn themes in the imperial anthology Shin kokin waka shu- (1205), by the monk Saigyo- (1118–90), which ends with the lines ‘… snipe fly from the marsh / on an autumn evening’ (‘… shigi tatsu sawa no / aki no yu-gure’). Taking the fable of the battle between the clam and the snipe from the Chinese Han-period chronicle Zhanguoce, Yance (J. Sengokusaku, Ensaku), it comically depicts the travails of the snipe with its beak caught in the clam shell that it was trying to eat, likening this to the lovers soon to be locked in sexual coupling. The composition is memorable for the softness of the woman’s ear and the line of her nape, the delicate hand gestures and dynamic, flowing lines of the drapery. And thanks to the verse we get the additional dimension of actions unfolding in time. The sense of seduction expressed through the woman’s fingers and her entwining leg is countered by the cool gaze of the man’s one visible eye, as he looks back at her. He may be the snipe, but also perhaps the fisherman of the story who is able to capture both the battling snipe and clam. So intricately are poem and picture intertwined that maybe Utamaro even got the idea for the picture in the first place from reading the verse. The name of the publisher does not appear in the album; however, as previous scholars have suggested, there is strong evidence to suggest Tsutaya Ju-zaburo-; he was the first to discover Utamaro’s talent and was beginning to publish similar luxurious colour-printed books and albums around this time. The preface is signed by one Honjo no Shitsubuka (‘Profligate of Soggy Honjo’) who, in the past, has been identified by the scholar Shibui Kiyoshi and others as the author of popular literature To-rai Sanna (1744–1810).1 However, this relied on the assumption, now discredited, that Sanna and Shimizu Enju- (?1726–86) were one and the same person. Also, the style of the calligraphy is different from the preface written by Sanna for Tokoyogusa of 1784 by Kitao Masanobu (1761–1816).2 The calligraphy of the preface to Utamakura is in the same style as the preface for Utamaro’s kyo-ka illustrated book Shiohi no tsuto of 1789. The distinctive manner of writing the ‘no’ character with such a round shape is unique to the writer Akera Kanko- (1738–98) and his followers. It may not be possible yet to conclude that the preface was written by the same ‘Chieda’ who did the calligraphy for Shiohi no tsuto. However, it can be proposed that the preface for Utamakura was probably done by a member of the Tamagoto group of kyo-ka poets whowere pupils of Akera Kanko- and active in and around the Honjo district at this time. [KF]
Source/Photographer https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/A_OA-0-133-2
Permission
(Reusing this file)		 © The Trustees of the British Museum, released as CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

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