Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015. xvii, 242 pp. (Figures.) US$50.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-3938-3.
This study’s main thrust is to dispel the obsession in ukiyo-e studies both with authorial intention and with single-sheet colour prints. This is accomplished through the examination of the larger network which constituted “the floating world” of vernacular production in late eighteenth-century Japanese urban centres, to which Davis persuasively applies Howard Becker’s concept of the “art world.” The book revolves around four study cases addressing “four dimensions of cultural inquiry vital to the floating world: the status of art, the definition of beauty, the physicality of the body, and the inquiry into the intellect” (19).
Chapter 1 follows an atypical “floating world” artist: Toriyama Sekien, accomplished in a range of painting styles and significant as “a key point of transfer of traditional painting style for the floating world” (23). Going beyond recent scholarship’s recognition of painting as an important medium in the “floating world,” Davis explicates the imbrication between styles and practitioners of painting and print formats. This is exemplified by the focus image, a collaboration between Sekien and his pupils Kitagawa Utamaro and Toriyama Sekichūjo: Utamaro’s children reacting to Sekien’s lion on a painted screen prompts an engaging discussion of “an extended play upon the conceit of copying, representation, and mimesis” (20) that would nevertheless have benefitted from references to studies such as Wu Hung’s The Double Screen.
Chapter 2 focuses on the book The Mirror of Yoshiwara Beauties, Compared (Seirō bijin awase sugata kagami), “designed from the start as a collaborative process” (77) between illustrators Kitao Shigemasa and Katsukawa Shunshō, publishers Tsutaya Jūzaburō, and the “brothel owners as possible financial contributors” (91). The book emerges as representative of a “floating world” culture configured by “material distinctions in support of rank and prestige” (102). Davis characterizes these “illustrated books” as “nameable, knowable and visible work, one of many such commodities openly available in the print market” (107). The analysis reveals the social dynamics of the media apparatus of this “economy of pleasure” (61, recalling Lyotard’s “libidinal economy,” often employed for Edo’s prostitution quarters but rarely discussed in-depth).
Chapter 3 explores the exquisite Scroll of the Sleeve (Sode no maki), which poses two tricky issues: it is an erotic scroll, carrying no information on authorship. Instead, “style and production values serve as the indexical markers for designer and publisher” (114), convincingly identified as Torii Kiyonaga and Nishimuraya Yohachi, respectively. This is followed by one of the most significant critical discussions in the book: that of labels for such erotic images. Davis reaches to a larger art-historical discourse when settling for the term “erotica”—all the more commendable since the book had already gone to print by the time the 2013 British Museum exhibition and catalogue “Shunga: Erotic Art in Japan” had materialized. This shows that the discussion of eroticism in Japanese culture is maturing and, more specifically, erotic images are being taken seriously as an integral part of ukiyo-e studies. Davis acknowledges the broad range of readership and audience response, and spells out the logical conclusion of a serious study of erotica: all “floating world” images contain “implicit eroticism” (142).
Chapter 4 unpacks a collaboration between the author Santo Kyōden and the illustrator Kitao Masayoshi: Greatest Sales Guaranteed: Quick-Dye Mind Study (Daikokujō uke aiuri: Shingaku hayasomegusa, 1790). Unlike the previous study cases, this satire of the populist doctrine Shingaku is a non-elite work whose humour depended on historically situated facts often difficult to recover. Research on this challenging genre of yellow-backed novels (kibyōshi) has been the province of literary studies, and the work in question has already been translated into English. However, Davis shows how art historians read such works differently than literary historians, effectively claiming this genre as art-historically relevant: no ukiyo-e specialist can now afford to ignore it. Davis’s unpacking of the visual rhetoric is highly entertaining, and close analysis makes the political satire clear, going against the received view in Japanese scholarship, where such kibyōshi with themes from popular religion are considered apolitical in the wake of late-1780s censorship.
Some observations: while discussing the revenge of the Good Spirit Family on Evil Spirits during the scene of the protagonist’s repentance, Davis states that “Good Spirits … may knock down their enemies but they shall not slay them” (173). However, the illustration clearly shows a Good Spirit slashing an Evil Spirit, blood gushing out. Additionally, Kyōden’s extended creative use of the theme of Good and Evil Spirits would have been worth mentioning: the 1793 Yoninzume nanpen ayatsuri replaces them with devils and Buddhas controlling characters with puppet strings, and in the 1796 Onikoroshi kokoro no tsunodaru various Spirits compete for the characters’ control (both works available on Waseda University Library’s Japanese & Chinese Classics online database). And while Davis mentions “handbills, short books, talismanic images, and chapbooks for children” (150) promoting popular religion, the possibility of kibyōshi referencing these materials, both textually and visually, remains unexplored. Kyōden’s title, for instance, ends with the term “gusa,” which most probably parodies titles of illustrated children’s books such as Wakizaka Gidō’s 1784 and 1793 Yashinaigusa or the 1791 Mutsumajigusa (the latter available on Waseda University Library’s database).
In each chapter, the author’s thorough research is patiently deployed in unpacking the logic of the complex argument which, besides collaborative networks, encompasses formats, subjects, and practices of appreciation. This is a welcome variation from the urgency of journal articles and from Japanese scholarship too often content with classification and vague critical discussions.
Though it has been clear for some time that “the floating world” meant much more than single-sheet prints, this is one of the first studies taking its complexity seriously. It reveals that beyond formats and content, the “floating world” was essentially a network of artistic collaboration. This dense and entertaining book shows the maturity of the field of ukiyo-e studies and reaches towards a syncretic study of the “floating world.”
Radu Leca
Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures, Norwich, United Kingdom
pp. 669-671