Like all woodblock prints, Courtesan at the Sumitoku Room would have been carefully conceived and executed. Kunisada would have drawn up the designs and the cartouches on paper, and suggested the colours; then the horishi, or woodblock carver, would have carved the obverse of the design into the wood, a mirror image of Kunisada’s conception. Then it would have gone to the printer, who would apply a given colour to the appropriate section of the woodblock and imprint that colour onto the single sheet. This last step would be repeated as many times as there were colours involved.
This print was likely made after the Tenpo reforms of the early 1840s, which promoted frugality and restricted the kinds of paints that could be used. Artists like Kunisada were limited to using only eight colours, when previously they had been able to use around 20. Paintings of courtesans were also banned as part of these reforms – perhaps this one slipped through the cracks.
The woman in the left panel, labelled in the cartouche by her arm as a hikifune, is not a courtesan but an assistant (pictured below); hikifune means ‘boat pulling [a big ship]’. She would take care of the tayu’s practical needs, such as handkerchiefs or water, while the nakai would check that the saké was prepared and that the ink was ready in case any documents needed signing – see the inkbrush and inkstone by her legs.
These women’s clothes are less eye-catching than the tayu’s, but intriguing details can be found in their sashes. The nakai’s ivy-like sash design is influenced by South East Asian patterns, particularly batik styles from Indonesia, which were highly prized in Japan. Meanwhile, the hikifune’s sash bears a flower design, probably the cherry blossom. Many plants came to Japan from China, but the cherry blossom was treasured by the Japanese as an indigenous tree. They have since been cultivated to withstand strong gusts, but the original mountainside cherry blossom trees were very delicate – they would fall in the face of the wind. This reflects a certain sentiment beloved of the Japanese, concerning things that are fragile and transient. The equation of life and death with cherry blossoms is often found in jisei, or Japanese death poems; even a unit of the kamikaze air force during the Second World War was named after the mountain cherry blossom.
Courtesan at the Sumitoku Room in Kyoto Shimabara (c. 1844), Utagawa Kunisada. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven
Stepping back from the detail of the sashes, we can see that the triptych is strikingly composed. Many woodblock prints have a way of demarcating foreground from background, but in this particular piece the brown band running all the way through the centre of the triptych – representing flooring made of unusual, expensive wood, probably hinoki, or Japanese cypress – emphasises the prestige of the Sumitoku Room. The bright green of the floor in the foreground suggests fresh tatami, made of igusa grass reinforced with cotton and hemp threads. It may have been newly installed in the room, or perhaps Kunisada wanted to emphasise this occasion as a fresh start of some sort for the tayu. Certainly, it closely matches the green of the grass in the background, where the evergreen pines, often seen in woodblock works, hint at solidity, prestige and permanence – in fact, the pines you see in this print might still be standing today. They would already have been mature when Kunisada was designing this work – you can see the wooden posts holding up the branches of the pine, which grow so long that they droop without support. In the left panel, you can see two blue vases on a wooden table. These are probably a Shinto offering to the pine trees. They contain folded-up white paper, though we’ll never know what, if anything, was written on them.
What’s remarkable about this print is its detail, which really engages the eye and brings the scene to life. The tayu’s many turtle-shell kanzashi (hairpins), her outer robe – it’s impressive almost to the point of being excessive. The colour might have faded a little – the cinnabar orange of her sash with the blue butterflies would have been much more striking when the print was new. But the fresh green of the tatami, before it’s old and brown, comes across, as does the darker green of the pine leaves; and the blacks of the tayu’s dragon robe, the women’s hair, the stand for the cup in the right panel and the lacquer of the frame of the screen that bridges the right and central panels are as inky as ever.
That screen is a tsuitate, or a windscreen. It blocks the view of people, like those onlookers in the window in the left panel. (These figures are leaning out of a room that is labelled, in the sign below, as ‘aogai no ma’, or ‘blue shell room’ – probably a reference to the beautiful colour of the walls, further emphasising the splendour of this venue.) Of course, the tsuitate in this print isn’t exactly at the right angle to stop those people from looking at the tayu, but the function of such a screen in general is to give women privacy, space and some protection from the wind. The design on the tsuitate looks like the branches of a plum tree – the first tree whose buds open up in the winter. It symbolises strength and the early promise of good things.
So there are a lot of unusual elements in this print. The detail, the tayu, the location – it feels almost like an advertisement, showing off this location of the Sumitoko Room in Shimabara. But there is one intriguing, unintended element, hovering at the top of each of the panels: some dimly visible characters in Japanese script. In fact, they have nothing to do with this particular work. Each ukiyo-e is one sheet of paper, and in order to preserve it you’d use backing paper. Since paper was expensive – you wouldn’t have thrown it away casually; it was so valuable you could pay tax with it – you would reuse it once it had been written on and served its function. So what you’re seeing is the backing paper. What those letters say, however, is a mystery.
From the February 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.