Page 46 - Designing_Nature_The_Rinpa_Aesthetic_in_Japanese_Art Metropolitan Museum PUB

calligraphy from a courtier of Sōtatsu’s day (the set is now dispersed among various
collections, mostly in Japan). A shikishi from the set generally believed to be from
Sōtatsu’s own hand illustrates the famous “Mount Utsu” (Utsu no yama) episode in

The Ise Stories (cat. 1). According to the tale, a courtier traveling on the mountain
(whose name means “mountain of sadness”) meets an itinerant monk on his way
to Kyoto, whom he asks to give his regards to acquaintances in the distant capital.

The encounter between an elegantly garbed courtier and a monk with a portable
altar on his back eventually became emblematic of the entire episode. The same
scene, which conveys a sense of remoteness and the despair of forlorn love, is
depicted on a fan painting attributed to Fukae Roshū, an eighteenth-century
artist who worked in what was by then the archaic Sōtatsu style (cat. 2).

The Tale of Genji, penned by Murasaki Shikibu (d. 1014?) and completed by
about 1010, has been called the world’s first “psychological novel,” likened to
Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past in its nuanced evocation of love, yearning,

and despair. Centering on the life and amorous pursuits of the “Shining Prince”
Genji, this long novel, comprising fifty-four chapters, became the foundation of the
Japanese literary canon and has inspired more deluxe art in Japan than any other
work of fiction. As with Ise, an iconography evolved for each chapter, so that
when certain scenes were illustrated — even without texts — they would have

been instantly recognizable to the literate viewer, conjuring up a particular
episode or poetic exchange from the novel (cats. 3, 4). The iconography of the
woodcutter found on a Kōetsu-style lacquer box, for example (one of four in the

Metropolitan’s collection, all copies after an earlier prototype by Hon’ami Kōetsu
now in the MOA Museum of Art, Atami), may have been inspired by a scene
from either the “Bracken Shoots” (Sawarabi) or “Beneath the Oak” (Shīgamoto)
chapters (cat. 5). Some have even speculated that the old man is a self-portrait by
Kōetsu himself, one of the most renowned calligraphers in all of Japanese art.

Another theory is that the image derives from the story of Otomo no Kuronushi
(active 885 – 897), the great poet of the ancient Heian court. The tale of Otomo
gathering firewood in the mountains during the spring cherry-blossom season

was widely circulated in popular literature and Noh theater, including the play
Shiga by Zeami Motokiyo (1363 – 1443), in which the poet appears as a woodcutter designing nature
who keeps his true identity secret from a courtier on a flower-viewing excur-
sion. Although the original woodcutter design dates to the seventeenth century,

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