Seasonal Pyramid, Parody, and Botany
The widespread influence of haikai, a new interest in food, a booming culture of parody, and the rise of medical botany left a deep imprint on the culture of the four seasons in the Edo period (1600–1867). Haikai (popular linked verse), which emerged in the Muromachi period (1392–1573) and came to the fore in the seventeenth century, transmitted the seasonal associations and images that had been developed in waka (classical poetry), even as it added a vast new sphere of poetic topics—from kabuki to unpleasant insects. With the shift of the capital to Edo (Tokyo), two major port cities (Edo and Osaka) became the cultural and economic centers, moving the general urban perspective from inland basins (Nara and Kyoto) to the coast and the sea, which became an important source of food. One result was that fish and food became major components of visual and literary culture, playing an influential role in such arts as the tea ceremony and haikai. Popular culture, while still depending on a knowledge of the literary classics (both Japanese and Chinese), now had the temporal distance and social difference to parody them extensively in the literary and visual arts and to make them the object of mitate (visual transposition), creating double images of past and present, elite and popular. Added to these popular influences was that of medical botany (honzōgaku), which provided a detailed, visual, and scientific view of plants and which had a deep impact on the development of horticulture, the cultivation of cherry trees, and the spread of private flower gardens in the major cities. These new representations of nature, which are very apparent in the emerging print culture, did not supplant earlier literary and cultural representations so much as supplement them, creating a wide array of representations of nature and the seasons.
The Seasonal Pyramid
The popularization of waka-based seasonal associations in the Edo period owed much to the rapid rise and spread of haikai, which became the most widely pursued literary and cultural genre in the seventeenth century, spreading from the major cities to every corner of Japan.
Haikai, which was practiced either as linked verse or as an autonomous opening verse (hokku, now called haiku) of a linked-verse sequence, required the use of seasonal words (kigo) and, by implication, the knowledge of seasonal topics (kidai). By the end of the seventeenth century, the seasonal words in haikai formed a vast pyramid, capped by the most familiar seasonal topics of classical poetry—cherry blossoms (hana), small cuckoo (hototogisu), moon (tsuki), bright leaves (momiji), and snow (yuki)—representing spring, summer, autumn, and winter, respectively. Spreading out from this narrow peak were other topics from waka—for example, spring rain (harusame), warbler (spring), willow (spring), orange blossoms (summer), and returning geese (autumn)—and those that had been added by renga (classical linked verse), such as paulownia flower (kiri no hana), a seasonal word for summer. Occupying the base of the pyramid were the new haikai words (haigon), which numbered in the thousands by the mid-seventeenth century. In contrast to the elegant, refined images at the top of the pyramid, the seasonal words at the bottom—such as dandelion (tanpopo), garlic (ninniku), horseradish (wasabi), and cat’s love (neko no koi), all spring words—were taken from everyday commoner life and reflected popular culture in both the cities and the countryside. The pyramid of seasonal words embodies the hybrid character of haikai, with its roots in waka and renga and its unbounded contemporary sociocultural horizons, and is emblematic of Edo culture as a whole.
With the dramatic growth of haikai in the seventeenth century, the number of new seasonal words grew rapidly. Matsue Shigeyori’s (1602–1680) Hanahigusa (Sneeze Grass, 1636), one of the earliest haikai handbooks, contains over 590 seasonal words divided by month, and his Kefukigusa (Blown-fur Grass, 1645) includes 950 seasonal words for haikai and 550 for renga, listed separately. Saitō Tokugen’s (1559–1647) Haikai shogaku shō (Instructions for Haikai Beginners, 1641) lists more than 770 seasonal words, and Kitamura Kigin’s (1624–1705) Yama-no-i (The Mountain Well, 1648), the earliest handbook devoted entirely to kigo, has over 1300 seasonal words. Finally, Takase Baisei’s (d. ca. 1702) Binsen shū (Available Boat Collection, 1669) includes as many as 2000 seasonal words. But while the number of seasonal words grew at an astounding pace, the number of seasonal topics remained relatively limited.
Haikai poets, like renga poets before them, made a distinction between seasonal words (kigo), which indicate simply a particular season, and seasonal topics (kidai), which have an established cluster of poetic associations, usually centered on a poetic essence (hon’i), such as the loneliness identified with the cries and flight of wild geese in autumn. Most new seasonal words, such as “garlic,” indicate a particular season (spring) but lack such poetic associations. The spring section of Matsue Shigeyori’s Enoko-shū (Puppy Collection, 1633), a haikai collection of the Teimon school (led by Kitamura Kigin), consists almost entirely of familiar, established classical topics such as plum blossom (ume), lingering snow (zansetsu), spring grass (shunsō), and spring moon (haru no tsuki).
Over time, some new seasonal words evolved into seasonal topics. A good example is “cat’s love for its mate” (neko no tsumagoi)—later simply called cat’s love (neko no koi)—a haikai seasonal topic for spring that became popular in the Edo period. Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694) composed the following hokku in 1691 and included it in Sarumino (The Monkey’s Raincoat): “(At a farmhouse) A cat’s wife—grown thin from love and barley?” (Mugimeshi ni yatsururu koi ka neko no tsuma).1 Bashō humorously depicts a female cat that has grown emaciated not only from being fed barley instead of rice—an economy that reflects a poor farmhouse—but from intense love-making. Another hokku, composed by Bashō in 1692, juxtaposes the loud caterwauling with the subsequent quiet of the misty moonlight (oborozuki), a classical seasonal word for spring, causing the two erotic moods to interfuse: “Cats making love—when it’s over, misty moonlight in the bedroom” (Neko no koi yamu toki neya no oborozuki). If the stag’s longing for his mate—expressed by his mournful cries—is the archetypal seasonal topic on love in waka, then cat’s love—with the baby-like crying of the male as it chases the female—embodies the down-to-earth, humorous character of the seasonal topic in haikai.
In the haikai treatise Uda no hōshi (The Uda Priest, 1702), Morikawa Kyoriku (1656–1715), one of Bashō’s samurai disciples from Ōmi Province, divides poetic topics into “vertical topics” (tate no dai), the “province of classical poets,” and “horizontal topics” (yoko no dai), the “province of haikai poets.”2 The difference lay in the approach, particularly to the poetic essence, which was generally fixed for waka poets but unrestricted for haikai poets. Unlike classical poets, who could not leave their own province, haikai poets were free to enter and explore either province. Of the two regions, they ultimately spent more time in what Kyoriku calls the “province of waka,” tending to gravitate toward classical seasonal topics and established poetic places (utama-kura)—such as Yoshino, Tatsuta River, Suma, Akashi, and Matsushima—which had a rich cluster of associations (Tatsuta with bright foliage, Suma with the autumn moon, and so on). Haikai poets were drawn to the classical topics at the top of the seasonal pyramid—such as cherry blossoms, small cuckoo, moon, and snow—which offered a poetic matrix around which a poet could build an entire hokku and which were no doubt easier to parody and make humorous variations on than the haikai topics at the bottom of the pyramid. Developed through hundreds of years of waka history, classical seasonal topics implied a rich world shared by poet and audience, one that could not be easily duplicated by new seasonal words or topics.
Thus Bashō and other haikai poets favored the top of the seasonal pyramid, but they approached these topics, as they did utamakura, from a haikai angle, often using haikai or vernacular words. In a hokku by Bashō, zansho (lingering summer heat) is the seasonal word for early autumn: “In a cowshed, mosquitoes buzzing darkly—lingering summer heat” (Ushibeya ni ka no koe kuraki zansho kana). The classical poetic essence of lingering summer heat is the contrast between the desire for the coolness that normally accompanies the arrival of autumn and the unbearable reality of the lingering heat. In a haikai-esque twist, using non-classical vocabulary (such as “cowshed”), Bashō approaches the classical topic and its poetic associations from a farmer’s point of view.
One way in which haikai poets sought new approaches to classical topics was to observe the topic in its actual physical state. The classical poetic essence of the small cuckoo (hototogisu) is its voice, which was the object of yearning but which was heard only sporadically: “The small cuckoo—where it disappears, a single island” (Hototogisu kieyuku kata ya shima hitotsu). In this poem, which Bashō wrote in 1688, during his Oi no kobumi (Backpack Notes) journey, the speaker implicitly hears the hototogisu, but by the time he looks up in its “direction” (kata), it has disappeared, replaced by an is-land—presumably Awajishima, the small island across the Inland Sea from Suma and Akashi, where the speaker stands. This hokku departs from classical waka in focusing on the cuckoo’s physical motion: the arrowlike flight of the bird, the sharp cry being heard only once before it disappears from view. “Where it disappears” (kieyuku kata), which may refer to either the voice or the body of the hototogisu, is replaced on the horizon by “a single island” (shima hitotsu). In haikai fashion, the hokku is also parodic, twisting a well-known classical poem in the Senzaishū (Collection of a Thousand Years, 1183): “When I gaze in the direction of the crying cuckoo, only the moon lingers in the dawn” (Hototogisu nakitsuru kata wo nagamureba tada ariake no tsuki zo nokoreru [Summer, no. 161]). The flight or sound of the hototogisu leads the eye of the reader not just to one island but, in a haikai twist, to the classical past.3
The manner in which haikai expanded the perspective on nature and the four seasons is evident in its treatment of insects, which is a key topic in waka but exploded in popularity in Edo-period haikai. The most frequently encountered insects (mushi) in the first eight imperial waka anthologies are the frog (kawazu), butterfly (kochō), pine cricket (matsumushi), katydid (kiri-girisu), bell cricket (suzumushi), and cicada (higurashi). The frog, along with the snake, was considered an insect before the Edo period. Except for the frog (spring) and the butterfly (summer), all these insects are autumn topics. Furthermore, except for the butterfly, the focus of all these insects is on their voices and singing, which became their poetic essence. (Most of these insects do not actually sing or cry, but rub their wings together to produce sound.) Poems on singing or crying insects appear for the first time in large numbers in the first autumn book of the Kokinshū (Collection of Japanese Poems Old and New, ca. 905): “Though autumn does not come for me alone, when I hear the sound of the insects it makes me sadder than anything else” (Waga tame ni kuru aki ni shi mo aranaku ni mushi no ne kikeba mazu zo kanashiki [Autumn 1, no. 186]). As the end of autumn approaches, the sound of the insects weakens, deepening the pathos.
In waka, small birds sing in high voices in the spring or summer, and their voices are generally considered bright and full of life. By contrast, the sounds made by insects were thought to be thin and lonely, and they came to symbolize the passing of the season. Many insects begin to sing with the arrival of evening, a time associated with decline or endings. The Buddhist notion of impermanence also had an impact, making some insects (such as the utsusemi [shell of the cicada]) a symbol of transience.4 In the Heian period (794–1185), waka poets were also interested in homophonic associations. For example, the primary interest of the matsumushi (pine cricket) was the word matsu (to wait), which associated the cricket with love (longing), while the main interest of the suzumushi (bell cricket) was the word suzu (bell) and the notion of ringing (furu).
Renga manuals list insects under either early autumn (Seventh Month) or autumn, a practice that was continued in Edo-period haikai anthologies. This association is a key to understanding most poems on insects, such as a hokku by Raizan (d. 1716), an Osaka haikai poet of the Sōin school (led by Nishiyama Sōin [1605–1682]): “Even bathing outdoors occurs on alternate days—sound of insects” (Gyōzui mo himaze ni narinu mushi no koe). From late spring through summer, commoners bathed outdoors, using a bucket (gyōzui), but with the arrival of autumn, this daily practice decreased to alternate days. In the poem, the sound of insects echoes the increasing coolness of autumn.
By the first half of the seventeenth century, haikai was poeticizing small, everyday insects, which came to represent aspects of commoner society. For example, Kefukigusa, a haikai handbook and anthology edited by Matsue Shigeyori, includes such everyday insects as the ant, louse, mole cricket (kera), snail, slug (namekuji), flea, and fly. In the lists of tsukeai (associated words used to link verses), louse (shirami) is linked to beggar (kpjiki), sick person, boat, thicket (yabu), old wadded cotton clothes (furui nunoko), and flower-viewing time (hanami-koro).5 These became the new haikai poetic associations of the louse.
In contrast to classical insects, which are primarily autumn topics, the overwhelming number of new insects—such as the ant, lizard, hairy caterpillar, fly, earthworm, and centipede—are primarily seasonal words for summer. In Makura no sōshi (The Pillow Book, ca. 1000), Sei Shōnagon lists mosquitoes among “unpleasant things” (nikuki mono). But in the Edo period, the mosquito, fly, and flea became popular seasonal words for summer. The summer section of Matsue Shigeyori’s haikai collection Enoko-shū contains a subsection on “mosquitoes and summer insects,” with eight hokku, including one that parodies the classical notion of singing insects: “In the summer evening, noh chanting to the accompaniment of mosquitoes” (Natsu no yo wa ka no tsukegoe no utai kana).6
From the Heian period, the fly had been associated with unpleasant noise and was not considered a poetic topic. In the Edo period, however, haikai poets focused on its weakness and helplessness, making it a victim to be pitied, the object of empathy, as in Kobayashi Issa’s (1763–1827) hokku written in 1819: “The fly on the veranda, swatted as it rubs its hands!” (En no hae te o suru tokoro wo utarekeri). Another famous hokku is in Issa’s Hachiban nikki (Eighth Diary, 1821): “Don’t swat it! The fly rubs its hands, rubs its feet” (Yare utsu na hae ga te o suri ashi o suru).7 These poems reflect a larger cultural fascination with and sympathy for small creatures, particularly insects, which function as metaphors for the condition of low-level commoners and farmers.
Food and Fish
In the Edo period, various foods—particularly fish and vegetables, which were seasonally identified—became seasonal words, playing a key role in haikai and popular culture. In the seventeenth century, the tea ceremony (chanoyu), particularly in the forms of light cuisine (kaiseki) and confectionary or cakes (wagashi), helped to elevate food to the level of art, where it became part of the culture of the four seasons. The impact of haikai, which transformed the names of foods and fish into seasonal words, was equally large. Generally speaking, waka and renga avoided the treatment of food, which was regarded as low or vulgar. However, in Muromachi-period haikai, which deliberately broke with this tradition, the humor frequently comes from linking a vulgar subject (food, sex, the body, bodily excretions) with an elegant topic (flowers, birds, nature, love), as in the opening hokku to Chikuba kyōgin shū (Hobby Horse Comic-Verse Collection, 1499): “Something that Kitano, the Lady of the House, likes: the plum blossom” (Kitano-dono no on-suki no mono ya ume no hana). Kitano-dono (literally, “Lord of the Northern Field”) refers to Sugawara no Michizane (845–903), who was associated with plum blossoms and with memory due to a famous poem he had written while in exile, and to the lady of the house (who occupied the northern quarters) who likes (suki) sour things (suki-mono), such as pickled plum (ume-zuke), because she is pregnant. The web of elegant associations (Michizane, plum blossom, poetry, and devotion to the arts) is humorously mixed with the web of “low” associations (pregnancy and food) lurking within the poem. The cultural history of the plum begins with the flower, which came to the fore in the Nara period (710–784); moves to the scent, which dominated poetics in the Heian period; and culminates with the fruit and taste in the Muromachi and Edo periods.
Fish also emerged as a topic in Edo-period haikai. The sea plays a significant role in the early chronicles and in the Man’yōshū (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves, ca. 759), but in the Heian period, when the capital was inland, the sea was a distant place. When it does appear, it is often hostile and dangerous, as in the search for the jewel in the dragon’s neck in the South Seas in Taketori monogatari (Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, ca. 909) or in The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari, early eleventh century) when Genji is exiled to Suma and Akashi, on the Inland Sea, where he encounters high tides and storms. This situation was to change dramatically in the Edo period, with the development of two major waterfront cities, Osaka and Edo; the growth of the fishing industry; and the spread of new transportation methods, which made sea fish a key part of the food chain.
A symbol of the new Edo cuisine was Ryōri monogatari (Tales of Cooking, 1643), which reflects the new commoner values and attitudes toward food. The first half of the book begins with “fishes of the sea,” giving seventy-one species, starting with the sea bream (tai), and followed by “grasses of the sea,” featuring twenty-five kinds of seaweed. Next are river fish (nineteen types), birds (eighteen), animals (seven), mushrooms (twelve), and vegetables (seventy-six). In short, Ryōri monogatari begins with the “treasures of the sea” (umi no sachi) and ends with the “treasures of the mountains” (yama no sachi). In the medieval period, the fishing industry rapidly grew, while the hunting of land animals diminished but never died. In Ryōri monogatari, the category “animals” (kedamono) lists four-legged animals—deer, badger, wild boar, rabbit, otter, bear, and dog—that were eaten more widely in the pre-Edo period than is usually imagined. From 675, when Emperor Tenmu (ca. 631–686, r. 673–686) issued his prohibition on the consumption of meat (which reflected the extensive hunting practices of the time), the custom of avoiding meat gradually spread, together with the Buddhist proscription on killing and the Shinto notion of pollution (kegare). But Tenmu’s prohibition was restricted to five animals: cattle, horses, dogs, monkeys, and chickens. It did not include deer and boar, which continued to be important sources of food. Many aristocrats did not eat meat, but most commoners continued to do so. In the Edo period, however, the aristocratic avoidance of meat began to penetrate society as a whole, and a prejudice developed against those who handled meat.8 Vegetarian cuisine (shōjin ryōri), which had emerged from Zen temples in the Kamakura period (1185–1333), slowly spread and was followed in the early Edo period by kaiseki ryōri, a light cuisine that sometimes included fish and fowl, but was fundamentally vegetarian. Whereas Kyoto aristocratic cuisine was based essentially on vegetables, Edo commoner cuisine was based on fish, particularly small fish (kozakana) and shellfish. The dishes that are today considered representative of Japanese cuisine—su-shi, tempura, kabayaki (eel grilled and basted in sweet sauce), hamo (pike conger), dojō (loach), kai-nabe (shellfish stew), tsukudani (food boiled down in soy sauce)—were created as a result of the availability of fresh fish and shellfish from Edo Bay, referred to as the Edo waterfront (Edo-mae).
In the classical poetic tradition, sight, sound, and smell were considered to be elegant sensations, while taste was regarded as vulgar. But in the Edo period, the preparation and presentation of food became a major cultural activity, and a wide variety of foods were “seasonalized” in haikai. By the mid-Edo period, cultural awareness of the seasons stemmed in significant part from the growth of gastronomic culture, which was reflected in the enormous surge in the number of seasonal words derived from food. Rantei Seiran’s Haikai saijiki shiorigusa (Guiding Grass Haikai Seasonal Almanac, 1851) was the most influential seasonal almanac (saijiki) for poets in the late Edo period,9 and the scholar Morikawa Akira calculates that it includes as many as 480 food words out of around 3400 seasonal words—that is, some 14 percent of the total:10
SPRING
Celebratory rice-vegetable soup (zōni), herring roe (kazu no ko), black soybean (kuromame), seven-spring-herbs soup (nanakusa), whitebait (shirauo), corbicula clam (shijimi), baby-neck clam (asari), cherry bass (sakuradai), white rice wine (shirozake), bracken (warabi), butterbur (fuki no tō)
SUMMER
Oak-leaf rice cake (kashiwa-mochi), first bonito (hatsu-gatsuo), eggplant (nasubi), selling cold water (hiyamizu-uri), agar weed (tokoroten), young bamboo shoots (takpnokp), quick vinegared fish (haya-zushi)
AUTUMN
New rice wine (shinshu), potato (imo), sweet potato (satsumaimo), shiitake mushroom, matsutake mushroom, chestnut (kuri), chrysanthemum-flower banquet (kikka no en), grape plant (budō), persimmon (kflki), watermelon plant (suika)
WINTER
Medicinal eating (kusuri-gui), blowfish (fugu), scallion (negi), pulling up Japanese radishes (daikon-hiki), clay-pot stew (nabeyaki)
This list, which represents only a fraction of the existing seasonal words related to food, reflects the range of foods (particularly fish and shellfish) that took on seasonal connotations in haikai. A notable exception to the practice of not eating meat is kusuri-gui, which involves cooking and eating deer meat as a cure for illness.
In contrast to meat (beef, pork, chicken, and lamb or mutton), which does not change fundamentally during the year, fish, like vegetables, are eaten in season. Two words that were key to Japanese cuisine were shun (peak season or tastiest time)—when a particular fish, vegetable, or fruit is at its best—and hashiri (first of the season)—when a particular fish, vegetable, or fruit first appears, also known as hatsu-mono (first things), which implies the anticipation of something new and tasty. The bonito (katsuo), a fish that lives in warm and tropical waters, rides on the Kuroshio Current in the Pacific Ocean, going from Kyushu to Shikoku at the beginning of spring and then up the Honshu coast to the Chiba area (near Tokyo) by early summer. The first bonito (hatsu-gatsuo) was the first bonito of the year, harvested around the Fourth Month at the beginning of summer. The word hashiri (literally, “running”) is said to come from the running that was required to bring a fish to market. In the Edo period, bonito were caught at Kamakura or Odawara (present-day Kanagawa Prefecture) and rapidly couriered to Edo, where they arrived by night (thus the name night bonito [yo-gatsuo]).11 A hokku by Bashō captures this practice: “Were they alive when they left Kamakura? The first bonito” (Kamakura wo ikete idekemu hatsu-gatsuo).12 The classical waka equivalent of hashiri would be the first song of the bush warbler or of the small cuckoo. A hokku by Yamaguchi Sodō (1642–1716), a contemporary and colleague of Bashō, brings these elements together: “Before my eyes the green leafed hills, the small cuckoo, and the first bonito” (Me ni wa aoba yama hototogisu hatsu-gatsuo). This famous hokku grasps early summer through three senses: sight (new green leaves in the hills), sound (the voice of the small cuckoo), and taste (the first bonito).
Parody and Mitate
The reception of the “Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang” (Shōshō hakkei), a major Chinese painting and poetry (kanshi) topic (see figure 12), is a good example of the impact of “haikai culture” on both visual and poetic genres. Except for Lake Dongting and the Xiao and Xiang rivers, the “Eight Views” are not specific place-names. The flexibility of locale in the “Eight Views” allowed the Japanese artist, poet, and audience to graft their own favorite domestic and local places onto them. This led to the “Eight Views of Ōmi” (Ōmi hakkei), “Eight Views of Edo,” “Eight Views of Kanazawa,” and so forth. The “Eight Views” became so popular in the Edo period that they sprang up in various provinces. The earliest and most famous of these groupings is the “Eight Views of Ōmi,” a province on the southern shore of Lake Biwa, northeast of Kyoto, which gave rise to the following eight views:
Clearing Storm at Awazu (Awazu seiran)
Sunset over Seta (Seta sekishō)
Sails Returning at Yabase (Yabase kihan)
Night Rain at Karasaki (Karasaki yau)
Vesper Bell at Mii Temple (Mii banshō)
Autumn Moon at Ishiyama (Ishiyama shūgetsu)
Descending Geese at Katata (Katata rakugan)
Evening Snow on Mount Hira (Hira bosetsu)
In this series, the atmospheric, celestial, and seasonal motifs are the same as those in the “Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang,” but the locations are now bridges, temples, and famous local sights in the Ōmi area. As Haga Tōru has pointed out, many of the “Eight Views of Ōmi” had already appeared as utamakura in famous-place paintings from as early as the Heian period.13
Konoe no Nobutada (1565–1614), a high-ranking noble in the service of Emperor GoYōzei (1571–1617, r. 1586–1611), created the first illustrated album with eight waka on the “Eight views of Ōmi.” The waka on “Autumn Moon at Ishiyama” is “Ishiyama—the moon that shines over Lake Biwa, like that of Akashi and of Suma, how extraordinary!” (Ishiyama ya nio no umi teru tsuki kage wa Akashi mo Suma mo hokanaranu kana). The harvest moon at Akashi and Suma, on the Inland Sea, had become famous in the Heian period because of The Tale of Genji, in which the Shining Genji gazes at the autumn moon from Suma. Even more important was the medieval legend that Murasaki Shikibu, gazing at the reflection of the moon on Lake Biwa from Ishiyama Temple, had been inspired to write The Tale of Genji, beginning with the “Suma” chapter. Suzuki Harunobu (1725?–1770), a noted ukiyo-e master, used Nobutada’s poem in his print Autumn Moon at Ishiyama (Ishiyama shūgetsu [Museum of Fine Arts, Boston]), from the “Eight Views of Ōmi” series he did in the early 1760s.
The topic of “Eight Views of Ōmi” was so popular that by the 1760s it had become the object of visual and textual parody. A classic example is Harunobu’s series “Eight Parlor Views” (Zashiki hakkei, 1766):
Clearing Breeze from the Fans (Ōgi no seiran)
Evening Glow of the Lantern (Andō no sekishō)
Returning Sails of the Towel Rack (Tenuguikake kihan)
Night Rain on the Heater Stand (Daisu no yau)
Vesper Bell of the Clock (Tokei no banshō)
Autumn Moon in the Mirror Stand (Kyōdai no shūgetsu)
Descending Geese of the Koto Bridges (Kotoji no rakugan)
Evening Snow on the Floss Shaper (Nurioke no bosetsu)
In Harunobu’s domestic variation, the scene “Autumn Moon at Ishiyama” becomes Autumn Moon in the Mirror Stand, with a woman looking into a mirror that has the shape of a round moon (figure 26). The miscanthus grass (susuki) bending in the breeze outside the window is a seasonal sign, turning the mirror into the harvest moon and, by implication, the moon at Ishiyama Temple. Using the familiar ukiyo-e technique of mitate, of seeing X as Y, Harunobu creates a double vision, superimposing the exterior landscape of the “Eight Views,” with its specific atmospheric and seasonal associations, onto the interior world of urban commoners in contemporary Edo; the two are held together by the visual pun of the mirror reflecting the lovely young woman, much as serene Lake Biwa reflects the harvest moon in the waka tradition.14
AUTUMN MOON IN THE MIRROR STAND
In Autumn Moon in the Mirror Stand (Kyōdai no shūgetsu), a print in Suzuki Harunobu’s series “Eight Parlor Views” (Zashiki hakkei, 1766), the mirror becomes a visual pun on the autumn moon, creating a parody of “Autumn Moon at Ishiyama” (Ishiyama shūgetsu), one of the “Eight Views of Ōmi.” (Color woodblock print; chūban, 11.3 × 8.1 inches, Clarence Buckingham Collection, 1928.898, The Art Institute of Chicago. Photography @ The Art Institute of Chicago)
This kind of parodic mitate, apparent in a wide range of genres from kabuki to kibyōshi (yellow books), grew directly out of haikai and kyōka (comic poetry; literally “wild poetry”), which became a major parodic genre in the second half of the eighteenth century. Kyōka uses the same form (thirty-one syllables) as waka, but unlike waka, it is unrestricted in content and diction. A “visual transposition” link (mitate-zuke) in haikai can be seen in the following sequence from Kōbai senku (Crimson Plum Thousand Verses, 1653):
| Koganebana | The golden flowers |
| mo sakeru ya hon no | have also bloomed! |
| Hana no haru | The true flowers of spring. |
| shinchū to miru | The yamabuki look like brass, |
| yamabuki no iro | the color of the gold coins.15 |
The first verse presents the beauty of the golden flowers, and the second, or added, verse compares them to brass coins. The two are linked by a pun on yamabuki (yellow kerria), a seasonal word for spring that in the Edo period also became the name for a gold coin. The mitate link transforms the yellow of an elegant and poetic flower of waka culture into the yellow money of plebian culture. The haikai link, in other words, creates a double image of court culture (hovering in the background) and popular culture (pushed to the foreground).
An even further parodic twist appears in Autumn Moon in the Mirror Stand from Harunobu’s “Fashionable Eight Parlor Views” (Fūryū zashiki hakkei, ca. 1769), an erotic (shunga) series produced for private consumption (figure 27). Harunobu depicts a man grasping a half-naked woman from behind and fondling her genitals as she dresses in front of a mirror. Outside, on the veranda, is a pot of flowering pinks (nadeshiko; literally “petting a child”), one of the seven grass flowers of autumn, which alludes to the erotic action indoors. The kyōka inscribed at the top of the print reads: “Moon of an autumn evening, climbing the pedestal until it can be seen through the clouds—moon of an autumn evening” (Aki no yo no kumo ma no tsuki to miru made ni utena ni noboru aki no yo no tsuki). The moon in Harunobu’s kyōka refers to the half-naked woman, who is emerging from the robes (clouds) that are being pulled off by the man embracing her, and the round (moon-like) mirror. The moon can also represent the man, who is “climbing” the woman, symbolized by the utena (pedestal), on which the mirror rests, which also means “calyx,” a metaphor for female genitals.16 In short, Harunobu uses text and image to create a complex, intertwining parody that can be read and viewed on multiple levels.17
AUTUMN MOON IN THE MIRROR STAND
This version of Autumn Moon in the Mirror Stand (Kyōdai no shūgetsu), a print in Suzuki Harunobu’s series “Fashionable Eight Parlor Views” (Fūryū zashiki hakkei, ca. 1769), parodies his own print of the same name in “Eight Parlor Views,” which in turn plays off the scene “Autumn Moon at Ishiyama.” This multilayered parody is typical of the way in which late-eighteenth-century genres such as haikai, kyōka, and ukiyo-e treated classical topics. (Color woodblock print; 7.9 × 11.2 inches. Private collection)
Straddling both popular and elite culture (ga-zoku), haikai moved in two fundamental directions: either it could seek the high in the low, or it could seek the low in the high. In the seventeenth century, the poems of Matsuo Bashō exemplified a kind of haikai that sought spiritual and aesthetic value in everyday, commoner topics. This occurs in the “Eight Views of Ōmi,” which were elevated by being associated with the “Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang.” In mitate ukiyo-e, noted courtesans are similarly elevated by visual and textual allusions to Murasaki Shikibu, the female poet Ono no Komachi, famous female characters from The Tale of Genji (such as the Third Princess), and bodhisattvas and other Buddhist figures or goddesses.
Like kyōka, though, haikai often reduced the elegant to the popular, sometimes using scatological or vulgar imagery. Essentially, this occurred in two ways. The first method was elegant. Harunobu’s series “Eight Parlor Views” exemplifies witty and refined “dressing down.” In place of the high culture represented by the “Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang,” Harunobu depicts the everyday culture of urban commoner women. The second way was erotic or sometimes pornographic, as in Harunobu’s series “Fashionable Eight Parlor Views.” Whether the artist or poet was seeking the high in the low, finding the low in the high, or doing both, the classical representations of nature and the four seasons were radically recast, often becoming the object of humor and parody.18
Medical Botany
In the late Edo period, the cultural and visual representation of nature was heavily influenced by medical botany (honzōgaku), a pharmaceutical science centering on plants but also including animals and minerals. In 1803, Kyo-kutei Bakin (1767–1848) published Haikai saijiki (Haikai Seasonal Almanac), which contains more than 2600 seasonal topics (kidai) arranged by the four seasons and the twelve months of the year with haikai examples. Haikai saijiki, which is detailed in its description and citation of sources, is the first seasonal almanac centered on Edo, the new cultural center of Japan.19 In 1851, Rantei Seiran published a revised and expanded edition called Haikai saijiki shiorigusa, better known as Shiorigusa (Guiding Grass), which was widely used in the modern period. By the end of the Edo period, there were two basic types of seasonal almanacs: collections of seasonal words and topics for haikai practice and encyclopedic almanacs, which provided information about almost every phase of everyday life. Shiorigusa, which represents the culmination of the latter trend, drew on a variety of sources: the haikai collections of seasonal words (kiyose); the topically arranged poetry collections (ruidaishū); dictionaries such as Minamoto no Shitagō’s Wamyō-ruiju-shō (Collection of Japanese Words, 931–938), Japan’s first Chinese—Japanese dictionary; and encyclopedias. The last source included Li Shizhen’s Honzō kōmoku (Ch. Bencao gangmu; Compendium of Materia Medica, 1578), a great compendium of bencaoxue (Jp. honzōgaku) imported to Japan in 1607; Kinmōzui (1666), Japan’s first illustrated encyclopedia; and Wakan sansai zue (Sino-Japanese Three Worlds Illustrated Encyclopedia, 1712), edited by Tera-jima Ryōan. Particularly important was Honzō kōmoku, which had an impact on East Asia as a whole.
By the mid-Edo period, the classical associations of nature and the four seasons in haikai began to overlap with new scientifically based views of nature, particularly as the result of medical botany, which had evolved to the point that it approached what is now regarded as natural history (hakubutsugaku). In the medieval period, there had been a widespread belief (evident, for example, in the military narratives) in the four birth types (shishō), which divide sentient beings by the way in which they are born: womb birth (taishō), egg birth (ranshō), humidity birth (shisshō), and spontaneous or supernatural birth from an unknown source (keshō). In contrast to mammals, which were born from wombs, and birds, which were born from eggs, insects were thought to be born from humidity or spontaneously, which placed them at a lower level than and at a farther distance from humans, weakening the implicit prohibition against killing them.
Honzō kōmoku divides insects into three birth types. Insects in the egg-birth category include the bee, silkworm, butterfly, dragonfly, spider, ant, fly, mite, and louse. The humidity-birth category contains such insects as the frog, centipede (mukade), earthworm (mimizu), snail, slug, and whirligig beetle (mizusumashi). In the spontaneous-birth category are earth insects (jimushi), tree-eating insects (ki-kui-mushi), cicada, goldbug (kpganemushi), praying mantis, mole cricket (kera), firefly, silverfish, wood louse (waraji-mushi), locust (inago), and wasp. A major change in this view of insects, however, occurred in the mid-Edo period with the introduction of the microscope, which revealed that insects mate and do not arise from humidity or by spontaneous generation. Hiraga Gennai (1728–1779) asserted that all insects mate and that there is no difference between insects and human beings in this respect. Gennai’s contemporary Shiba Kōkan (1747–1818), a painter and printmaker, used a microscope to enlarge his view of small insects, which allowed him to accurately draw them. The impact of the microscope is evident in an illustration by Utagawa Kunisada (1786–1864) in Santō Kyōden’s (1761–1816) gōkan (bound book) Matsu to ume to take tori monogatari (Tale of Gathering Pine, Plum, and Bamboo, 1789), in which a man dreams of being attacked by monsters that are depicted like insects enlarged under a microscope (figure 28).
The effect of honzōgaku on classical views of nature is also apparent in late-eighteenth-century ukiyo-e. These woodblock prints were originally designed to depict the “floating world,” primarily the licensed quarters and the theater, illustrating beautiful courtesans (bijinga) and kabuki actors (yakusha-e [actor prints]). But under the influence of Edo-period Tosa and Kanō school bird-and-flower (kachōga) screen paintings, which were produced primarily for powerful warlords, the imperial family, and wealthy merchants, ukiyo-e artists began to make bird-and-flower woodblock prints that had wider social circulation. With the emergence in 1765 of the fully polychromatic ukiyo-e (nishiki-e; literally, “brocade painting”), the bird-and-flower prints began to have some of the full-color appeal of the Kanō and Tosa school paintings.
Around 1790, the ukiyo-e master Kitagawa Utamaro I (1753–1806) produced realistic bird-and-flower pictures for illustrated kyōka books (kyōka ehon), which opened up a new and vibrant field of visual culture. Wealthy samurai and urban commoners, who worked in groups, commissioned ukiyo-e artists such as Utamaro to illustrate their kyōka collections. Utamaro’s most noted work in this vein is a three-part kyōka picture book series: Ehon mushi erami (Illustrated Book of Selected Insects, 1788), which depicts insects and flowers; Shiohi no tsuto (Gifts of the Ebb Tide, probably 1789),20 which illustrates shellfish; and Momo chidori kyōka uta-awase (The Myriad Birds Comic-Poetry Contest) 1790), which portrays birds. Momo chidori kyōka uta-awase, which pairs thirty kinds of birds (such as skylark and quail, green pheasant and barn swallow, and egret and cormorant), goes beyond the classical circle of birds to include those (such as chicken, pigeon, tree sparrow, and barn swallow) found in everyday, commoner life. Illustrated in a highly naturalistic manner, each bird is accompanied by a kyōka in a poetry-contest format (figure 29). The kyōka on the skylark in “Skylark and Quails”—“Conceited skylark, flying high in the sky, even you must come down to Earth when night falls” (Oozora ni omoiagareru hibari sae yūbe wa otsuru narai koso are)—puns on the verb omoiagaru (to be proud or conceited), which contains another verb, agaru (to rise high), for which the skylark is known.).21 As Imahashi Riko has shown, the kyōka picture books, which eventually led to a new type of bird-and-flower ukiyo-e, grew out of two important predecessors: illustrated haikai books (haisho) and illustrated honzōgaku books, which copied birds, insects, and plants as accurately as possible for scientific and medical purposes.22
INSECTS AS MONSTERS
These monsters (flea, louse, mosquito, and red mosquito larva), appearing in a man’s dream in Santō Kyōden’s Tale of Gathering Pine, Plum, and Bamboo (Matsu to ume take tori monogatari, 1789), were inspired by illustrations in Stories from Holland (Kōmō zatsuwa, 1787), edited by Morishima Nakara, which show mosquitoes, cockroaches, fleas, and other insects under a microscope. (From Santō Kyōden zenshū, ed. Mizuno Minoru [Tokyo: Perikansha, 1999], 7:363. Courtesy of Perikansha)
BIRDS WITH KYŌKA POETRY
The illustration for “Skylark and Quails” in Kitagawa Utamaro’s Myriad Birds Comic-Poetry Contest (Momo chidori kyōka uta-awase, 1790) combines naturalistic images of birds with corresponding kyōka by Zeniya Kinrachi (for the skylark) and Tsuburi Hikaru (for the quail). (Color woodblock print; horizontal ōban, 10 × 15 inches. Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, William S. and John T. Spaulding Collection, 1921, no. 21.6589)
The visual impact of medical botany on the world of poetry is also evident in Haikai na no shiori (Haikai Guide to Names, 1780), a haikai seasonal almanac edited by Tani Sogai (1733–1823) that identifies the characteristics of each bird and that was illustrated with scientific and naturalistic precision by the noted ukiyo-e artist Kitao Shigemasa (1739–1820) (figure 30).23 The almanac was designed so that haikai poets could identify plants and animals that they knew about but had never seen. A similar degree of visual accuracy is apparent in illustrations of fish, which also became the subject of bird-and-flower—style color woodblock prints in the latter half of the Edo period. Most noteworthy is the so-called Fish Series (Sakana-zukushi) of twenty-one color prints that Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858) did in his last years.24 Hiroshige had turned his attention to bird-and-flower ukiyo-e in the Tenpō era (1830–1844),25 at about the same time that he began to create his noted famous-place (meisho) landscape prints. In the “Fish Series,” Hiroshige, drawing under the obvious influence of honzōgaku, substituted different fish for the usual birds found in earlier bird-and-flower paintings and prints. One of the kyōka in the print Abalone, Peach Blossoms, and Halfbeak reads: “Matching the menu, the halfbeak changes to summer clothes, stripping off its skin, taking out its guts, and preparing itself for a meal” (Kondate no awase sayori mo koromogae wata wo nukite zo koshiraenikeru) (figure 31). In Hiroshige’s print, the fish is personified in much the same way that flowers and birds are personified in waka, but with a humorous twist that links it to food culture.
BIRD GUIDE AND SEASONAL WORDS
Tani Sogai’s seasonal almanac Haikai Guide to Names (Haikai na no shiori, 1780), with illustrations by Kitao Shigemasa, categorizes plants, birds, fish, and insects by season (beginning with spring) and depicts them in scientifically accurate fashion, allowing poets to identify and use them as seasonal words in verse. Each bird is identified by name and accompanied by a seventeen-syllable hokku. On the upper left are the crested flycatcher (hitaki) and rosy finch (mashiko), seasonal words for autumn, and in the middle and lower right are the nuthatch (gojūkara) and cuckoo (kankodori), seasonal words for summer. (Courtesy of the Kaga Collection, Tokyo Metropolitan Central Library)
Medical botany (honzōgaku), which expanded to what is now regarded as natural history (hakubutsugaku), had an impact on a wide variety of fields—horticulture, gardening, agriculture, pet culture, and animal exhibitions (misemono), or mini-traveling zoos, to mention only the most obvious—and led to a profusion of illustrations and color woodblock prints of plants, insects, reptiles, fish, and other animals, all of which were replicated with uncanny accuracy. As cities grew larger in the Edo period, and as urban dwellers became separated from the natural environment, the practical medical function of honzōgaku faded and medical botany and related fields expanded to encompass knowledge of nature. Thus at the point at which urban dwellers were separated from the natural environment, “nature” was partially recovered or reproduced both through a virtual nature, in illustrated books and ukiyo-e, and through a recultivated nature, in such forms as flower gardens, ikebana, and famous places.
One of the most striking aspects of the culture of the four seasons in Japan is the deep impact of classical poetry and its seasonal associations, which spread to commoner society in both the cities and the provinces in the Muromachi and Edo periods. The influence was so significant that by the mid-seventeenth century—when commercially based, urban culture came to the fore—the classical associations had become both a requirement for the education of urban commoners and, increasingly, in the hands of poets and artists, the object of parody and humorous variation. Parody occurs only when the form and content have become distanced (desacralized) and yet remain familiar enough to the audience that the slightest variation strikes a humorous or witty chord. This dual aspect—as both basis for education and object of humor—is best embodied in the phenomenon of haikai, which, while making available to commoners the canon of seasonal associations, produced its own earthy, popular variations on these familiar topics and motifs, thereby expanding and revivifying the culture of the four seasons. The multiple roles of haikai are also visible in the seasonal pyramid, which was capped by the classical associations but had a broad and extensive base of popular, contemporary words and images. The haikai poet could travel through either the “province of waka” or the “province of haikai” or explore both at the same time.
Emblematic of these large changes are the new perspectives on insects and fish. In the hands of haikai poets, insects—known for their song in the waka tradition—became the embodiment and metaphor of everyday, gritty commoner existence (including the unpleasant heat and humidity of summer) both in the farm villages and in the cities. Haikai also focused on fish and seafood, which had never been part of the classical literary tradition but emerged as important elements in visual and literary culture as a result of changes in the environment, the rise of medical botany, and the impact of new popular genres.
BIRD-AND-FLOWER GENRE UNDERWATER
In Abalone, Peach Blossoms, and Halfbeak (ca. 1840–1842), a print in his “Fish Series” (Sakana-zukushi), Utagawa Hiroshige combines the realistic depiction of nature underwater with the humor of kyōka and the brilliance of color ukiyo-e, giving new life to the bird-and-flower genre. (Color woodblock print, horizontal ōban, 9.8 × 14.4 inches, Courtesy of Forest Where the Sea Appears Art Museum [Umi no mieru mori bijutsukan], Hiroshima)
The haikai spirit of parody and comic inversion also informed new visual genres, such as the woodblock print, which, as in Suzuki Harunobu’s variations on the “Eight Views of Ōmi,” combined Japanese poetry with fresh visual images that alluded to and parodied the Japanese and Chinese models on both the pictorial and textual levels. As a result of the coexistence of multiple poetic genres—waka, haikai, kanshi (Chinese-style poetry), senryū (satiric haiku), and kyōka—representations of nature and the seasons in visual and literary culture were many-layered, drawing on classical associations and interweaving references to contemporary life and events.
Further complicating the situation was the increasing impact of medical botany (honzōgaku) and the natural sciences, which, by the eighteenth century, both observed natural phenomena scientifically, including under a microscope, and had a huge impact on artists and designers. Honzōgaku changed the Japanese understanding of nature, particularly the classification of species, and profoundly influenced the visual representations of plants, animals, and other natural phenomena, particularly in the new print culture. The surprising combination of scientifically observed birds, flowers, insects, and sea creatures with poetic parody, wit, and allusion is evident in the illustrated kyōka books (kyōka ehon), which encapsulate the new representations of nature and the four seasons that emerged in the mid- to late Edo period.
