In their ambition to capture “real life,” Japanese painters, poets, novelists and photographers of the nineteenth century collaborated in ways seldom explored by their European contemporaries. This course offers learners the chance to encounter and appreciate behavior, moral standards and some of the material conditions surrounding Japanese artists in the nineteenth century, in order to renew our assumptions about what artistic “realism” is and what it meant. Learners will walk away with a clear understanding of how society and the individual were conceived of and represented in early modern Japan. Unlike contemporary western art forms, which acknowledge their common debt as “sister arts” but remain divided by genre and discourse, Japanese visual and literary culture tended to combine, producing literary texts inspired by visual images, and visual images which would then be inscribed with poems and prose. Noticing and being able to interpret this indivisibility of visual/literary cultures is essential in understanding the social and psychological values embedded within the beauty of Japanese art.
3-3 "On Reading" by Miyaoi Yasuo II
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Из курса от партнера The University of Tokyo
Words Spun Out of Images: Visual and Literary Culture in Nineteenth Century Japan
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The University of Tokyo
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The Literary Photograph I
What methods did early modern Japanese artists and writers have at hand to “capture the moment,” and how did these methods influence the introduction and adaption of western photography in the mid-nineteenth century? In this module we will see how photographic modes of representation were assimilated into the literary tradition of portraiture, which was covered in modules 1 and 2.
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Robert CampbellEmeritus Professor, The University of Tokyo
Director-General, National Institute of Japanese Literature
The short-lived fortune teller of Shiba district,
Mr. Nakagawa, left all of his possessions, his cherished books to his wife.
She was heartless, she sold all of them and very shortly married another man.
Let's take a look here, just to give you a more concrete
sort of image of what these books might have been like.
Here is an example of an instruction book for people who want to be fortune tellers
or a sort of sample of ways to use the I Ching, the sticks and
the patterns that they make once you've chosen them to tell people's fortunes.
This was published in the west of Japan in 1703.
But there are a lot of different commentaries and illustrated books,
actually manuals to show you how to tell people's fortunes using the I Ching.
I imagine Nakagawa having tons and tons of these books,
books that were published decades before he was alive, and
putting them all together, collating them, thinking of them, thinking about them and
writing sort of assiduously into the margins above and below.
And you can see that there's lots of white space in these old Japanese
books that you can actually sort of write things into.
Anyway, he's gone off to the netherworld, left all of them behind and
his books have scattered, basically, to the wind.
The story goes on, "It didn't take long for
Nakagawa's ghost to appear everyday at Mr Kokuzan's row house.
Kokuzan couldn't fathom why, so he asked the ghost,
in great deference, his reasons for showing up in such wretched form.
To which Nakagawa replied, 'for years, I studied under your tutelage,
concentrating on these fortune telling books,
until I was able to come upon ideas unknown to the ancients.
I wrote eagerly into the books I owned, guarding them as my treasures.
But as fate demands, my life came to an end and I've passed into the beyond.
My faithless wife, though, stupidly sold off all the books I'd worked so
hard on and cherished, then remarried to boot.'"
He's less concerned and angry about the fact that she remarried,
she's free to remarry, it was true in the 19th century,
the 18th century in Japan as it is today, than the fact that she
didn't keep all of his books together and perhaps give them to his teacher or
another disciple who was perhaps a little bit younger than him.
In other words, she released everything and invalidated all of the work and
the passion that he poured into his studies and into these words.
So he has not been able to ascend into Buddhist paradise,
he's stuck in the world as this frustrated ghost.
He comes back and
sort of tells his teacher he wants to know why, why did this happen.
So anyway, this Mr Kokuzan, who owns a house where he rents some of the rooms and
one of the rooms was rented to Nakagawa, is kind of stuck in this hard position.
He has to sort of negotiate with this ghost and try to quell him, make him
feel a little more sort of comfortable so that he can go off to rest for eternity.
But Nakagawa is extremely angry. "'Overcome with resentment,
I slaughtered both of them two or three days ago.
On top of this, the fellow who bought my inscribed I Ching texts has been spreading
around the best part of my work as if it were his own,
while treating the weaker parts like they were dirt.
Totally unbearable, I let my anger loose and decided to slaughter him too -
everyday since I've been beating him up, making his life miserable.
The reason I came back in this form is because I want you to retrieve all my
I Ching texts for me.'"
At this point, I imagine merchant men or
women in Edo in the 1830s listening to this story,
this story is probably rather than being read individually by a lot of people,
it was sort of orally transmitted, we can assume.
I can imagine them sort of thinking, Gosh, this is a ghost story.
What's going to happen?
He's taking his revenge, it's a vendetta tale,
most vendetta tales in the Edo period in Japan have to do with samurai honor,
and you take revenge on someone for sullying the name of your domain or
your house or your Lord or so forth, in order to protect your pride.
Here, this man has come back from the beyond to
murder his wife, to take revenge on the fact that his work,
his life work has been dispersed and destroyed.
Anyway, the books have been sold to someone else,
who is basically plagiaring him.
And he's come back to his mentor Kokuzan to
try to get him to retrieve the books, to bring them back, to recover them.
Next passage, hearing the ghost's tale, Kokuzan learned the addresses of
both his wife and the man who bought his books from her.
The first thing he did was to visit the wife's house, he asks the neighbors
about her, and they told him exactly as the ghost had, that the couple had
contracted some feverish disease and died just two or three days ago.
Obviously the two had been murdered by Nakagawa's spirit,
emerged from the realm of the dead.
Kokuzan immediately walks around, listens,
asks a number of people, and finds the address, the new address of the wife and
the man and learns that they've succumbed to some horrible disease,
which was obviously the revenge of Nakagawa and he's convinced by that.
"The next thing Kokuzan did was look up the man who had bought
all those divination texts.
As expected, he was also in the throes of a violent fever.
Kokuzan told his story and
asked him whether the books were still in his possession.
Indeed, this was the guy who purchased all those scribbled-in I Ching books.
Flabbergasted, he handed over each and every one to Kokuzan,
who carried the books home and asked the ghost what exactly he should do with them.
The ghost pleaded with him to store them away, which he did, but
still the phantom showed up daily at Kokuzan's door."
It's a rather unfortunate, sort of sad ghost here.
Kokuzan is convinced that if he doesn´t stop this sort of cycle of revenge,
doesn't retrieve, recuperate all of these books, all of the scribblings, the words
behind which this very powerful demon is lurking,
that more and more people, their lives are going to be destroyed.
So anyway, he negotiates to have the books taken back to him and
he talks again to the ghost.
The ghost seems to be satisfied, he says he's going to store them away but
still he shows up.
He's not able to release himself, to be released beyond this sort of
mortal coil and go off into peace as a spirit.
"This was insufferable, so Kokuzan confronted him, 'why on earth do you keep
popping up every day, even though I brought back all those books for you?'
To which the ghost replied, 'the rules are that once we enter the realm of the dead,
we can never go back to human shape or speak out to human beings.
But I broke the rules by resuming my original form, so
it's impossible for me to return to the netherworld.
Please, I beg you, if you could build a small shrine and pray for my spirit,
that would put me to rest, and I'll be able to disappear.'"
The ghost himself is in a very hard place, he wants to disappear.
He wants to rest, but he's not able to because he's left the netherworld once and
appeared in front of people.
He's acted upon people, he's destroyed the lives of two people already.
This passage here, reflects late Edo period,
early Meiji period, Shinto thought.
What happens to the spirit after we die, after the corporal reality of existence?
What goes beyond that?
What exists, in other words, in the other world?
This is a very, very Buddhist-sounding text.
But in fact, a lot of Shinto activists and
ideolouges in the late Edo period were also
thinking about spirituality and the concreteness,
what happens to the spirit itself after physical death.
Anyway, Nakagawa is hoping,
he's longing for rest after his books have been gathered.
"Kokuzan headed straight for Zōjōji temple in Shiba, where he acquired a small
plot of land for a tiny shrine in order to pray Nakagawa's spirit.
This worked and the ghost showed up no more.
This goes to show us that whenever we read, the spirit of the author is watching
over us, listening, that from the beyond, our world is plainly visible, so that
one must realize nothing can be hidden from spirits in the realm of the dead."
It's a rather gruesome story, it's a horror tale.
It's a horror tale about reading, which is I think probably,
in the history of the world, is rather rare.
But he's trying to get the message out to us, to as many young people,
prospective students of the Chinese classics or the Japanese classics,
more modern works and so forth, that one needs to respect the commitment and
the passion that authors have people who write down,
who scribble in the margins, as well as writing books and so forth.
The hope that they have
in their work to make the world a better place and
to guide the lives of young men and women who would be reading or
would be listening to the texts that they've left on.
Anyway, I was fascinated when I first came across this text and
went straight to Zojoji, which is still exists in Shiba, in Tokyo,
and I searched for the small, perhaps little shrine or a stone sort of steely,
a monument to something to this man's ghost who wasn't able to find it.
So at this point, I'm not going to be able to tell you whether this story
is grounded in any reality or whether the man who wrote this story
just made everything up, whether there was a grain of truth in this story,
the man Nakagawa, whether he actually existed or
not is probably less important than the fact that in the early 1830s,
educators, a man like who wrote this book,
took on the story, used it, adapted it to demonstrate and
convince younger people the importance of the written word, and
how the written word is perhaps the singular sole way to convey,
to transmit a passion, a belief, or ethical truths throughout the years,
and the decades, and the centuries.
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