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.
从本节课中
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.
(Former Affiliation) Professor, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo (Current Affiliation) Director-General, National Institute of Japanese Literature
Again, to return to this rather faded original print of the photograph here,
we see it in the way that it was actually taken.
I want to again turn the photograph around to see what's on the back of it.
We can see there's handwriting here by brush.
There's no sign here.
There's no signature here, it doesn't say, there's nothing on the back of
Masaoka Shiki's photograph which says who actually wrote this.
So I can't claim to you with 100% authority that this is actually
Masaoka Shiki's writing or that the poem was composed by it himself.
I can assure you though,
that I've compared the writing on the back of this with a lot of the writing,
the manuscripts and the letters that he wrote in the last two or
three years before he passed away.
Often some of the same words occur.
Also the poem that he writes here is similar in some ways to other
poems that he had written earlier.
So I'm pretty much convinced, in other words, that what we're looking at
right here is a poem, a piece of writing by Masaoka Shiki, done probably shortly
after the photograph was taken after it was developed and delivered to him.
I would imagine, as in the case of other people like Hosokawa
Junjirō who we've seen in other lessons,
that Masaoka Shiki would have made several copies of these,
perhaps written on the back of them, and handed them out to his associates as well.
[COUGH] Let's take a look at what it actually says.
"The new year's calendar Amida Nyorai has no date for the hour of his death."
Once again, just to look at the words themselves.
We can see right here, the first words, the new year's calendar.
It's hatsu goyomi, is what's written here.
This is a so-called seasonal word.
A word that denotes, just in itself, what season the poem is taking place in.
New calendar is the first month of the year.
Masaoka Shiki, according to this poem has just gotten the new year calendar.
Each year at the end of the year, newly printed calendars are handed out.
You can buy them, exchange them.
Still calendars are very, very important,
they're gifts often that people give each other or you buy
beautiful calendars at the beginning of the year here.
He's looking through the new calendar,
and he's thinking to himself, hey Amida Nyorai, the Buddha.
There's no date in the calendar here, that says when he's going to die.
It's a very enigmatic poem, it's kind of a puzzle in a sense.
What is he referring to when he's calling Nyorai?
Why does he associate the calendar with Nyorai and his death?
Let's move back a couple of steps to look again at the photograph of Masaoka Shiki.
Masaoka Shiki in his late years.
Basically has a clean scalp.
He shaves his hair so its easier for his mother and
his sister to take care of himself.
And his friends often, for example Natsume Soseki is one of them,
sort of chide him in saying that he looks like a Buddha.
He looks like a buddhist sculpture in a sense.
So he often sort of refers to himself, sort of sarcastically, comically,
as a sort of Buddha figure as sometimes in his poem.
Here he's referring to the Buddha and the fact that the Buddha
doesn't have a date to die, as opposed to his own sort of position.
He sees his death coming, he sees it approaching.
He doesn't know what month or what date it's going to be, but he's thinking,
gee, if I was really the Buddha, there would be no date,
there would be no day here for me to end my life.
Masaoka Shiki, at this point in his life,
at this sort of crux in his illness, is in excruciating pain.
He has morphine injections more and more regularly, often in the mornings.
There's only a sort of clear sort of window of clear consciousness late
in the afternoon when he does his writing and
dictating to his disciples and to write.
He has a column in the newspaper, and so forth.
So anyway, he seeing time,
he sees time as something that's limited very, very much.
And when he gets the calendar, he sort of looks at it intuitively,
imagines what month, what day, when is the end?
The end point of his life, he sort of begins to look for it.
And remembers that people are often calling him or chiding him.
Sort of laughing at the way that he looks,
almost like he's a Buddhist sculpture in a sense.
Very black humor here.
But also very, very sort of warm in a sense,
when you imagine him passing this on like other people.
So many people in the generation before him as well, had passed onto others,
almost as a calling card.
Or a sort of snapshot in words of his mentality,
of his physical or psychological sort of condition
at the moment when he was having his photograph taken.
Robert Campbell(Former Affiliation) Professor, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo
