FT264
Last year’s sell-out exhibition of Kuniyoshi’s woodcuts at the Royal Academy introduced many of us to the ukiyo-e school of art. His “crazy pictures” (sugar-pink octopodes wrestling and doing acrobatics), and his images of ghosts and warriors fighting blue-faced monsters, hinted at significant sub-genres beyond the idealised life, evanescent beauty and unworldly interests of the ‘floating world’ art that dominated 19th-century Japan. Dream Spectres starts where this exhibition ended and just keeps on going…
The first of the book’s three sections deals with erotic or ‘spring’ pictures. (‘Spring’ was a euphemism for sex.) Many of the better known ukiyo-e artists produced shunga prints, often anonymously and – after 1842 – illegally. The homosexual, heterosexual and fetishistic encounters depicted seem pretty ho-hum beside the images of bestiality, and Hokusai’s ‘Diving girl and octopus’ shows the roots of anime’s tentacle porn.
The second section deals with muzan-e (bloody ukiyo-e) and includes Yoshitoshi’s Eimei Nijuhasshuku, translated here as ‘28 famous murders with verse’ but rendered elsewhere as ‘28 plebeian verses about glorious figures’. All 28 frames, whose titles parody a Buddhist sutra, are reproduced twice: once, presumably as they now are, and in a smaller, lurid version as they might have been before the colours faded. Unsurprisingly, given the gore and nihilism of his images, Yoshitoshi underwent a nervous breakdown, though he rose again with the new moniker Taiso (‘Great resurrection’).
Ukiyo-e prints were cheap enough to be accessible to Tokyo’s middle classes. The blood-soaked and ultraviolent nishiki-e (penny dreadfuls) briefly experienced an even wider distribution before the images of the ‘sashimi murder-suicide case’ roused the ire of the censors and they were suppressed.
The final section deals with the supernatural in ukiyo-e. In 1770, Toriyami Sekien started compiling a compendium of supernatural creatures from Japanese folklore, and added in a few of his own invention. His Gazu Hyakki Yako, or ‘The 100 Demons Night Parade’, features such beasties as the snow woman who can freeze men to death – lovely smile, though – and monster cats. Sawaki Suushi’s grotesques include the cow devil, which has the head of a bull and the body of a God-knows-what; the ouni, a sort of yeti with attitude; and a dog demon. And Kuniyoshi’s ground spider, a monster that drinks men’s blood and summons demons, would give modern SFX horrors a run for their money.
This section also has ethereal ghosts (including the vengeful yurei, who now turn up in films such as The Ring); mythical beasts; and designs for the tattoos which have since been adopted by modern yakuza. And skins tattooed with these patterns now hang in museums… Nice. One question leaps out: why are so many of the images so small?
MORE REVIEWS
Bookmark this post with: