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lacquer artists of subsequent generations had access to drawing manuals illustrat-
ing the motif, and by the early nineteenth century such popular themes from the
Rinpa repertoire had become further disseminated through woodblock-printed

books (cat. 6).
Compared to the courtly fiction of Genji and Ise, the great medieval military
epic The Tale of the Heike (Heike monogatari ) was a more unusual source of inspira-

tion for major works by Rinpa artists, whose refined clientele — steeped in the
elegant poetry, novels, and diaries of the Heian era — would no doubt have looked
unfavorably on gory scenes celebrating samurai feats of military valor. Indeed,
when the Sōtatsu studio was commissioned to create a set of screen paintings
based on The Tale of the Heike, the episode selected was, understandably, the visit

of the Retired Emperor Go-Shirakawa (r. 1073 – 86) to Ōhara: in essence, a symbol
of courtly society escaping to the tranquility of the countryside (cat. 7). Since the
artist and his studio had no adequate pictorial precedent for the episode, certain

clusters of figures appear to have been drawn from Sōtatsu’s designs for an unre-
lated subject from Japanese classical literature, such as The Ise Stories. Even in
these earliest manifestations of the Rinpa aesthetic, there is less interest in con-
veying the particulars of the scene than in conjuring escape from the workaday
world into an idealized or imaginary landscape.

Early nineteenth-century artists availed themselves of the woodblock medium
to create illustrated books or single-sheet prints to transmit the repertoire of
Rinpa themes, including some based on literary sources. Suzuki Kiitsu, for

instance, a celebrated Rinpa artist of the day, imaginatively reinterpreted an
episode from The Tale of the Heike in which Lady Kogo, consort to the emperor,
flees the palace to live in seclusion in Saga, on the outskirts of the capital (cat. 8).
The courtier Minamoto no Nakakuni, commanded to discover her whereabouts,
sets off by horse to search for her and eventually discovers Lady Kogo’s hiding

place when he recognizes the sound of her playing the koto, a zitherlike instru-
ment. (This episode from The Tale of the Heike was sometimes paired with depic-
tions of the “Royal Visit to Ōhara” [Ōhara goko].) The poems that accompany the
-
image are not directly related to the narrative. Rather, they served to convey
New Year’s greetings among the members of the poetry group that commis- designing nature
sioned the sumptuous diptych from Kiitsu.

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