Page 276 - Edo: Art in Japan, 1615–1868

humor (at Goyu) and seriousness (daimyo procession atTsuchiyama); between rain (atTsuchiyama)
and a beautiful sky (at Mariko); and between anecdotal details of a river crossing (at Rokugô) and a
"cooler" distant view (at Kanaya).
Hiroshige throughout the series decorously neutralized Ikku's high-spirited vulgarity. He surely
took into account, however, the likelihood that the majority of his audience was familiar with Ikku's
wildly popular comic novel. There is an intertextual exchange between the two where the ghost of
Ikku adds its little giggle to Hiroshige's hymn of tribute to the open road. At the Rokugo crossing, for
example (cat. 180), which Hiroshige treated as a narrative of picturesque ruralism, Ikku had Yaji
and Kita harassing the waitress, misreading the painting in the alcove, getting in trouble for failing to

fig. 5 genuflect to a passing daimyo procession, and exchanging a rude observation about the pageant of 275
Detail from figure i
marching samurai ("Kita: 'Look at the helmets of those fellows with the bows. They look as though
their heads were swollen/ Yaji: 'And look at the length of their cloaks; you can see their whatyoumay-
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callems peeping out'"). Hiroshige had in fact depicted a daimyo procession in the preceding print
of Shinagawa (cat. 179), showing them with the sobriety appropriate to their station. A close analysis
of the relationship between Ikku's text and Hiroshige's illustrations would reveal a logic of intertex-
tuality as carefully crafted as Buson's reinterpretation of Bashó.
Both Buson and Hiroshige took a work of travel literature as their point of departure, retraced
the journey personally, and pictorialized the original with an immediacy born of direct experience, all
the time operating within the boundaries of the Japanese visual narrative tradition. In both cases the
artist's own vision changed the nature of the original text substantially, particularly mitigating the
extremes to which Bashó and Ikku were prone. Just as Buson represented Basho's diary in at least seven
versions (each different), so Hiroshige created more than one thousand different designs of the fifty-
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three stages of the Tókaidó. It was perhaps a deep, emotional commitment to their respective subjects
that spurred these artists to reach so profoundly into their imaginations and produce works that
invested mundane experience with transcendent timelessness.

S E E I N G Although the categories of scenic views offered up for contemplation to the Japanese audience did not
I S K N O W I N G undergo much change over a millennium — "pure" landscapes, cityscapes, famous literary or religious
landscapes, and travel imagery were staples of the Japanese landscape painter's diet — the manner of

depiction underwent thoroughgoing transformation during the Edo period. One striking feature is the
enormous number of artists working in experimental modes of painting that were virtually nonexis-
tent when the Edo period dawned. If "empiricism" is perhaps too strong a word to use in all cases, one
can certainly speak about a new visuality, a way of seeing — and rendering — that gives Edo painting
its character.
The "raiment" of style always clothes the "body" of the landscape. The choice of style is not
neutral. Style and ideology are sisters. Style communicates as much meaning as subject. And painting
style became bound up with the act of looking to a degree never witnessed before. 42
Seeing became a form of privileged knowledge during the Edo period. It was equated with
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virtue in the Confucian system. It was invested with powers of protection. Consider the western-style
sketches by Tani Bunchó (cat. 185) from his tour of coastal defenses with Chief Councilor Matsudaira
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Sadanobu. Conversely, the same style carried ideological overtones that were threatening to other