Author: Julie Davis

Artist: Shōkōsai Hanbē 松好斎半兵衛 (active 1795-1807)

Authors: Girō 義浪 and Gojaku 吾雀

Title: Kensarae sumai zue 拳会角力図会 (Pictures of Sumo Hand Competitions)

Publisher:  Kawachiya Tasuke 河内屋太助, Ōsaka

Date: 1809

Medium: Woodblock printed, ink on paper

Gift of Arthur Tress, Arthur Tress Collection, Box 29, Book 8

The hand gestures game called “janken” in Japan–and known as “rock-paper-scissors” abroad–is very well known today. It is often played by children and adults for fun as well as in competitions, perhaps over whose turn it is to do the dishes or to ride in the front passenger seat of the car. Hand gesture games were popular in the Edo period as well. But “rock-paper-scissors” is not as old as it seems–instead this variation evolved from others in the mid to later nineteenth century.

In this book published in 1809, we learn more about the popularity and the rules for “ken-asobi” (拳遊び) or  “hand-gesture play” for earlier forms. These were often enjoyed as drinking games. Some were even styled  after sumo wrestling competitions. In the opening pages of this book, Osaka artist Shōkōsai Hanbē shows participants and fans hurrying to the site of play, then packing into the hall to sit in small groups eating, drinking, and playing the hand gesture games.

Some hand-gesture games were styled as matches played around miniature wrestling rings, like the one shown in the illustration at the top of this post, in imitation of sumo wrestling competitions. These games were refereed by judges carrying fans, just like they did in sumo matches, and in the pages preceding this image, we learn more about the rules and the role of the referees. Some competitors became famous for their skill, as the list of names of players from Osaka, Kyoto, and Nagasaki at the end of the book demonstrates.

Two variations of hand gesture games are illustrated in another opening, with the pages preceding and following describing the terms used during the game. One variation used all five fingers, as seen on the right, in a game where each player selected a hand gesture for a number and then shouted a prediction for the total made by both players (see the essay by Linhart listed below).

On the left, we are shown the very popular variation with three distinct hand forms called mushi-ken (虫拳). This version featured three protagonists: the snake, the frog, and the slug. These animals were classed as mushi, a word often translated as “insects,” but this class of animals also included amphibians and reptiles in period taxonomies. This form of the game originated in China with the protagonists as the snake, frog, and poisonous centipede. The shift from centipede to slug in the Japanese version happened due to a misreading of the characters for centipede.

In the illustration here, the snake is performed by the index finger, the frog by the thumb, and the slug by the pinky finger. Each of these animals is afraid of being consumed by one of the others, so the snake wins over the frog, the frog over the slug, and the slug over the snake. Below the hand gestures, Hanbē has illustrated an item called a “kenkin” (拳錦) or a “competition brocade,” a cover that could be attached to the hand, presumably to hide the player’s hand movement while forming the gesture.

Games like these were played at home as well as in a variety of other locations. Images of the licensed brothel quarters often show clients and sex workers playing a game featuring a fox, a hunter, and the village headman. In that version, the wily fox outsmarts the village head, the village head bests the hunter, and the hunter trounces the fox.

This large format book features printing on fine paper. Mr. Tress recalls finding this book, volume one of two volumes, in 1970, on his second trip to Japan. For complete digitization of both volumes, see the example held in the Pulverer Collection (pulverer.si.edu).

Other copies:

Pulverer Collection:  http://pulverer.si.edu/node/934/title

Berlin State Library (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin)

University of Kyoto Library along with another seven libraries in Japan

Selected Reading:

Kitagawa Hiroko, “Commentary,” Kensarae sumai zue, The World of the Japanese Illustrated Book (http://pulverer.si.edu/node/934/title/1)

Linhart, Sepp, “From Kendo to Jan-Ken: The Deterioration of a Game from Exoticism into Ordinariness,” The Culture of Japan as Seen through Its Leisure, SUNY Press (1998), 319–344.

Posted by Julie Nelson Davis, August 24, 2020

Artist: Tosa School, style of

Title: Bunshō ぶんせう (Bunsho)

Date: 17th century

Medium: Manuscript: ink, color, and gold on paper

Size: 23.8 x 17.6 cm

Gift of Arthur Tress, Arthur Tress Collection of Japanese Illustrated Books
Tosa School 1, Kislak Center for Special Collections

When is a book an event? For a period in early nineteenth-century Japan, the New Year was a time for fresh installments of the phenomenal Nise Murasaki Inaka Genji. Even earlier the ritual reading of lavish hand-copied productions of an auspicious tale had marked this most important holiday. Colorfully illustrated, they told of the miraculous rise in fortunes of a common salt maker named Bunda.

The Tress Collection contains a single volume of Bunshō sōshi, or “The Story of Bunshō,” bearing the simple title Bunshō. (Bunda upgrades his name to Bunshō in accordance with the abundant wealth he earns after coming in to his own making salt that keeps people young and healthful.) Thirty openings beautifully render the life of this honest, pious, and hard-working man (second illustration) and, perhaps more importantly, his daughters. For it was the daughters of merchant families who read–or had read to them–this tale on the second day of the lunar new year in the hopes of happy and prosperous futures.

Imagine the scene: among your tasks as the old year ends is to order a copy of the story with elegant calligraphy for the text and familiar but grand versions of the expected illustrations. The workshop that produces the books, hoping to maximize profits and avoid the crush of orders before the holiday, puts together an assembly line with artisans responsible for paintings, for text, for covers. All must be fit together, attractively and with no waste. The Tress manuscript demonstrates this reality while also relating how prayers to the Kashima Shrine in Hitachi province (shown in the third illustration) resulted in the birth to Bunshō’s wife of two girls. They were of such perfection that their hands in marriage were sought by a courtier from the capital and even the sovereign. First, however, as the pictures show us, the daughters steadfastly resisted the suits of a local governor, the Kashima priests’ sons, and local lords.

Many copies of Bunshō sōshi survive (in excess of eighty), but their artists are anonymous, just like the author of the story itself. Short or mid-length narratives in this vein are sometimes known as Muromachi monogatari, tales from the high medieval era, or otogi zōshi, “companion tales,” a name that derives from a collection published in the early eighteenth century, Otogi bunko. More than four hundred such tales, dating from the early fourteenth to the early seventeenth century, have come down to us, but Bunshō sōshi was first in the Otogi bunko selection. The format is often referred to as Nara ehon, “Nara picture books,” a misnomer because they were not produced in the city of Nara. Typically it indicates a medium-sized booklet, bound with thread and sporting indigo covers (although some are in scroll format). The covers have delicate floral motifs in gold, the dark and light combination imitating the decoration for the highest class of Buddhist scriptures.

The Tress text holds few surprises, differing from a popular recension by minor variations. The pictures, five interspersed among pages of flowing brushwork, are delightful but usual. Only the painting of Bunda making salt is not always found in manuscripts. It is hard to date or place the Tress copy relative to other versions, some of which elaborate different aspects of the story. The reverse sides of some pages have their secrets, however. On the back of the fourth illustration, we can see a basic ink sketch of the daughters who are finely finished on the front in polychrome. The front and back covers are lined with reused paper, fragments of what appear to be correspondence. More oddly, the first page of our book is a superfluous copy of a page in the middle of the story—the extra page corresponds to the left side of the eleventh opening, although it uses different character variants, and has almost twice as much text on it as the corresponding main page. Someone has brushed a large “X” through this “first” page, so originally it too was no doubt pasted down, its blank back forming the inside of the front cover. We cannot be sure how many pages or volumes are missing from our copy. The front cover has a cartouche with the title written in nonstandard characters, as well as “first volume.” It is possible that there were two more; certainly there was a second volume.

Among other surprises about these hand-painted and brush-written tales, many were copied from printed editions. We often assume that the advent of print culture to Japan in the late sixteenth century meant the end of the manuscript, but such is not the case. Printed books imitated the free and personalized style of manuscript, while some manuscripts used well-done printed editions as models.

Selected Readings

Araki, James T., trans. “Bunshō Sōshi: The Tale of Bunshō, the Saltmaker.” Monumenta Nipponica vol. 38, no. 3 (Autumn, 1983): 221-49.

Keene, Donald. “Muromachi Fiction: Otogi-zōshi.” In Seeds in the Heart: Japanese Literature form Earliest Times to the Late Sixteenth Century, 1092-1128. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1993.

Marra, Michele. “Economic Success and Aristocratic Legitimation: ‘The Story of Bunshō’.” In Representations of Power, 140-43. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993.

Ruch, Barbara. “Medieval Jongleurs and the Making of Japan’s National Literature.” In Japan in the Muromachi Age, edited by John W. Hall and Takeshi Toyoda, 279-309. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1977.

Shirane, Haruo. “Muromachi Tales (Otogi-zōshi).” In Traditional Japanese Literature: An Anthology, Beginnings to 1600, 1097-1100. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.

Written by Linda H. Chance
Posted April 6, 2022

Artist: Tosa School

Title: Tsuru no sōshi 鶴のさうし (The Tale of the Crane)

Date: 17th century

Medium: Manuscript, ink, color, and gold on paper

You will not be surprised to learn that a crane features prominently in The Tale of the Crane, but here’s the part you probably didn’t expect: the crane marries a human man.

This odd couple will seem a little less odd if you are familiar with Japanese lore, where narratives of interspecies romance abound. Such stories—known as irui kon’in-tan, or tales of marriage between kinds—appear in Japan’s earliest recorded myths from the eighth century, multiplied and diversified over the years. No generalization can encompass the vast body of irui kon’in-tan that exist today, but more often than not, they end unhappily. Many irui kon’in-tan can be read as a kind of dark funhouse mirror to Western fairy tales such as Beauty and the Beast or The Frog King: instead of an apparent animal becoming a desirable human spouse, an apparently desirable human spouse is revealed to be an animal, and almost inevitably the union dissolves.

The Tale of the Crane bucks this trend, ending with a rare happily ever after—or at least, this is the case for the copy of The Tale of the Crane in the Tress collection. Multiple manuscripts of The Tale of the Crane exist, and despite their shared title they differ significantly, although they can be divided into two lineages that are more or less consistent within themselves. The manuscript from the Tress collection belongs to the three-volume lineage, so named because the tale is divided into three volumes, the last of which concludes with the human protagonist and his crane-wife living in wedded bliss. By contrast, the shorter and simpler one-volume lineage follows the more typical pattern of revelation and separation.

Although the one-volume lineage has strong roots in folklore, it was produced within the upper echelons of society; the original manuscript was illustrated by the court painter Tosa Mitsunobu (1434-1525), the founder of the Tosa school of painting. The three-volume lineage developed somewhat later, with the first manuscripts dating to the early Edo period (1603-1868). Perhaps because of its more complex plot and cheerful ending, the three-volume version of The Tale of the Crane survives in numerous versions, as here in manuscript copy the Tress collection. Some are woodblock-printed books; others are the work of commoner artisans, with bold, simple illustrations; and yet others were created by skilled artists for moneyed audiences. This last is the case for the manuscript in the Tress collection, which was illustrated by an unnamed Tosa-school artist. The paintings are dynamic and detailed, sumptuously ornamented with gold flakes. Finely-made manuscripts of auspicious tales, like this one, became a standard item in the trousseaus of upper-class brides. The copy of The Tale of the Crane in the Tress collection is of unclear provenance, so we cannot make any definitive statement about its intended purpose—but use as a “bridal book” (yomeiribon) is certainly one possibility.

Written by Laura Nuffer
Posted April 6, 2022

Selected Readings:

Kimbrough, Keller, and Haruo Shirane, eds. Monsters, Animals, and Other Worlds: A Collection of Short Medieval Japanese Tales. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018.

McCormick, Melissa. Tosa Mitsunobu and the Small Scroll in Medieval Japan. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009.

Nüffer, Laura. “Humans and Non-Humans: Animal Bridegrooms and Brides in Japanese Otogizōshi.” In A Cultural History of Fairy Tales in the Age of the Marvelous, edited by Suzanne Magnanini, 95–118. London: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2021.