Page 38 - Edo: Art in Japan, 1615–1868

cat. 118
Attributed to Katsushika
Hokusai, Buddhist Priest Warding
off a Demon, c. 1845,
hanging scroll; ink and color
on paper,
150x240(59 X94V2),
Sójiji, Tokyo

37

flowers, and plants. As Timón Screech has amply documented, this increased fascination with forms
may have had something to do with the expansion of the eye through a variety of optical instruments,

telescopes, microscopes, and loupes. 57
This protoscientific interest coexisted very comfortably with a titillating curiosity for weird
forms displayed in the popular shows that came and went with bewildering variety and speed in
58
Edo. The numerous street performers of many unusual skills fed this same appetite for the sensa-
59
tional. In the realm of religion the present catalogue includes some striking representations of what
must have seemed odd. A depiction generally described as of Kobo Daishi (Shingon's founder) taming
a demon (cat. 118), for example, seems slanted toward the fantastic if not exotic. In another painting a
demon and dóji constitute a strange, rather incongruous pair (cat. 117). Furthermore, a teasing, perhaps
even sacrilegious, visual pun in two pictures plays on the traditional depiction of the Buddha on his
deathbed surrounded by his disciples. In one painting Ariwara no Narihira, the famous poet from antiq-
uity, is bidding farewell to all his lovers; in another the Buddha has been replaced by a big radish rest-
ing in the middle of a circle of vegetables (cats. 120,121).
In the folk art of street performances imitation, usually comic mimicry, was a major mode. In
Edo the gômune, an incorporated group of street corner mimes that allegedly harked back to masterless
samurai origins in the seventeenth century, specialized in twelve different styles. They mimicked
puppet balladeers, readers of warrior tales, pairs of comic mimes (manzai) usually seen only at the New
60
Year, religious solicitors, and sermonizers (tataki) (cat. 88). Nishiyama has catalogued the various
types of popular performing arts that flourished in the last half-century of the Tokugawa period: tricks
and acrobatics (twelve kinds), special abilities (seven kinds, including genres in which a performer
takes on eight, fifteen, eighteen, or more roles), five kinds of mimicry (impersonations, birdcalls,