utamaro and the love suicides

A vogue arose in Edo Japan -- the love suicide. Of this, the playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1725) is both chronicler and -- such was the power of his drama -- instigator. His puppet plays, like Saikaku's stories, were based on actual incidents. The one that inspired his "Love Suicides at Sonezaki" had occurred only a month before the play was first staged in 1703.

The Osaka soy-sauce merchant Tokubei and the courtesan Ohatsu are deeply in love, but it is hopeless; she is under contract to her bordello, and Tokubei lacks the money to ransom her. There is only one solution: death. "Did our promises of love," sobs Ohatsu, "hold only for this world?"

The pair flee in the dead of night to the Sonezaki Forest outside Osaka: "Farewell to this world, and to the night farewell."

"They embrace, flesh to flesh," chants the narrator, "then fall to the ground and weep -- how pitiful they are! Their strings of tears unite like entwining branches . . . a symbol of eternal love. Here the dew of their unhappy lives will at last settle."

Tokubei cuts first Ohatsu's throat, then his own. 1

as fascinated as the kabuki-going public was with the telling of these tragedies, none moreso than utamaro kitagawa, artist, printmaker, and storyteller by woodblock.

for the first time, these stories have been told, along with many more; one reading and these are not images on a page but are reflections of lives lived, and of lives ended.

utamaro revealed, by gina collia-suzuki, explores all of the artist's themes, subjects, and motifs, and does so in such a way as to genuinely, as the title says, reveal.

her voice is clear and certain, and her re-telling of the artist's inspirations are wonderfully interesting and easy to read. we are reading, in this book, her lifetime work, along with that of jack hillier and others; it is carefully researched, and collia-suzuki brings us full translations of titles, poems, and contents. we also learn where in the yoshiwara (the pleasure district) each woman lived.

above and beyond the topic of suicide are many other bits of information about the lives of these people we see in the prints that we might not want to read. illumination by its nature destroys illusion, and much of what utamaro's prints did was create illusion.

collia-suzuki responds: I confronted the reality and harshness of Utamaro's time a long time ago, when I was just a teenager. I had an interest in history in general, and the entire globe seemed to be equally harsh to me. Prostitutes may not have been under contract for ten years in Western brothels, but for the most part they were no more free to choose a different life, if they wanted to survive, than the women who were enslaved within the Yoshiwara. There was a time, early on, when I questioned the artists' desire to portray these women as princesses in all their finery, considering the reality of the situation, but the artists who depicted them were governed by laws which made it impossible to portray the realities of everyday life -- the authorities didn't approve of social comment... they didn't approve of a lot of things, as is evidenced by Utamaro being censored at the end of his life. I do think it's important for us to present an accurate image of life at the time now though, although I realise that when we do that we risk alienating the audience. I think that if we try to gloss over the hardship, we do a disservice to the women in the prints.

gina on work: when I was researching the Chinese legends behind Utamaro's prints, I was reading up on Guan Yu, Zhang Fei, and Liu Bei and the oath taken in the peach orchard. I started reading the relevant section from Romance of the Three Kingdoms, but then couldn't stop because it was so inter- esting... and we're talking about a book with 120 chapters. I could just keep going off at a tangent and I'd get nothing done if I didn't force myself to get back to whatever I was doing originally.

when I first started researching the pairs of lovers, [learning] that the people actually existed and often met such tragic ends [was surprising]. In particular, it would have to be finding out about Bunshichi... a man who was responsible for some very violent assaults and was executed for them in 1702. It was surprising to discover that, far from being the chivalrous hero he was portrayed to be, he was a very nasty piece of work. Discovering the true stories behind the theatrical adaptations of them really makes you view the prints differently... in some cases more sympathetically, in others quite the opposite.

menagerie, once again

STILLNESS ... THEN THE BAT
FLYING AMONG
THE WILLOWS
BLACK AGAINST GREEN SKY

KIKAKU


KNOT

Watching the close forest this afternoon
and the riverland beyond, I delineate
quail down from the dandelion’s shiver
from the blowzy silver of the cobweb
in which both are tangled.

I am skillful
at tracing the white egret
within the white
branches of the dead willow where it roosts
and at separating the
heron’s graceful neck

from the leaning stems of the blue-green
lilies surrounding.

I know how to un- ravel
saw- grass- es knitted to iris leaves knitted
to sweet vernals. I can unwind sunlight
from the switches of the water in the slough
and divide the grey sumac’s hazy hedge
from the hazy grey of the sky, the red vein
of the hibiscus from its red blossom.

All afternoon I part, I isolate,
I untie,
I undo, while all the while
the oak
shadows, easing forward, slowly ensnare me, and the calls of the wood peewees catch

and latch in my gestures,
and the spicebush
swallowtails weave their attachments

into my attitude,
and the damp sedge
fragrances hook and secure,
and the swaying
Spanish mosses loop
my coming sleep,
and I am marsh-shackled,
forest-twined,
even as the new stars, showing now
through the night-spaces of the sweet gum
and beech, squeeze into the dark
bone of my breast, take their perfectly
secured stitches up and down. Pull
all of their thousand threads tight
and fasten, fasten.

Pattiann Rogers


GIDDY GRASSHOPPER
TAKE CARE ... DO NOT
LEAP AND CRUSH
THESE PEARLS OF DEWDROP

ISSA

A GATE MADE ALL OF TWIGS
WITH WOVEN GRASS
FOR HINGES ...
FOR A LOCK ... THIS SNAIL

ISSA

why are there flowers?

i was in the large waiting room shared by two teams of doctors and a testing lab, reading in a ten year old issue of natural history magazine an article entitled 'why are there flowers?'; the answer, which the magazine clearly thought would shock its readers, was quite obviously sex.

as it is, perhaps, for us humans as well. is it any wonder that we all, men and women alike, admire being, and/or seeing, the flowers? and when the hormones are flooding, we women often feel it of ourselves too: the lightness of purpose and the dance of life.

but most of us women know, or learn sooner or later, that that's not it; gender falls away in the face of substance. we are all quite more, men and women again alike, than the pursuit of the sum of our parts. (i remember suddenly realizing, at the age of three, that all the songs on the radio were love songs. how absurd! i thought.)

that's why when i come across an image of a woman who is not being portrayed for her loveliness first and foremost, it catches my attention. images of women who are thinking of something, who are complex, who have more knowledge than they are expected to have, sadly, often fall into the categories of dejection or exhaustion. but wait -- is there a glimmer more?

Each cell has a life. There is enough here to please a nation. It is enough that the populace own these goods. Any person, any commonwealth would say of it, “It is good this year that we may plant again and think forward to a harvest. A blight had been forecast and has been cast out.”

Many women are singing together of this: one is in a shoe factory cursing the machine, one is at the aquarium tending a seal, one is dull at the wheel of her Ford, one is at the toll gate collecting, one is tying the cord of a calf in Arizona, one is straddling a cello in Russia,

one is shifting pots on the stove in Egypt, one is painting her bedroom walls moon color, one is dying but remembering a breakfast, one is stretching on her mat in Thailand, one is wiping the ass of her child, one is staring out the window of a train

in the middle of Wyoming and one is anywhere and some are everywhere and all seem to be singing, although some can not sing a note.

Anne Sexton from “In Celebration of My Uterus” from The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981). Copyright © 1981

all that jazz

PUTTIN' ON THE RITZ

Have you seen the well-to-do
Up and down Park Avenue
On that famous thoroughfare
With their noses in the air

High hats and narrow collars
White spats and lots of dollars
Spending every dime
For a wonderful time

Now, if you're blue
And you don't know
where to go to
Why don't you go
where fashion sits

Puttin' on the Ritz
Different types who wear a daycoat
Pants with stripes and cutaway coat
Perfect fits
Puttin' on the Ritz

Dressed up like a million dollar trooper
Trying hard to look like Gary Cooper
Super-duper

Come, let's mix where Rockefellers
Walk with sticks or "umberellas"
In their mitts
Puttin' on the Ritz

Tips his hat just like an English chappie
To a lady with a wealthy pappy
Very snappy

You'll declare it's simply topping
To be there and hear them swapping
Smart tidbits

Puttin' on the Ritz

1929 Irving Berlin

all this by way of saying congratulations and warm wishes to john textile blog hopper for his new carpet index blog!

beware the email of april

hotmail was hijacked today. oddly, it's apparently not the first time because as i poke around the net looking for info i find identical reports from other months. i ask you--does microsoft not have the sense to fix this? it happened to many other people today too.

what happened was that every single contact i had listed in that email account got mailed a piece of spam touting cheap electronics equiptment. the emails looked exactly like they were from me.

on top of this, hot- mail has only allowed me to alert 1/3 of my list of what happened, saying i had exceeded my daily outgoing limit!

all this to let you know that if you got some very strange mail that looked like it was from me.... it wasn't.

glass menagerie

LAURA: Little articles of [glass], they’re ornaments mostly! Most of them are little animals made out of glass, the tiniest little animals in the world. Mother calls them a glass menagerie! Here’s an example of one, if you’d like to see it! . . . Oh, be careful—if you breathe, it breaks! . . . You see how the light shines through him?

JIM: It sure does shine!
LAURA: I shouldn’t be partial, but he is my favorite one.
JIM: What kind of a thing is this one supposed to be?
LAURA: Haven’t you noticed the single horn on his forehead?

JIM: A unicorn, huh? —aren’t they extinct in the modern world?
LAURA: I know!
JIM: Poor little fellow, he must feel sort of lonesome.
•

(TOM) I descended the steps of this fire escape for a last time and followed, from then on, in my father’s footsteps, attempting to find in motion what was lost in space. . . . I would have stopped, but I was pursued by something. . . .

I pass the lighted window of a shop where perfume is sold. The window is filled with pieces of colored glass, tiny transparent bottles in delicate colors, like bits of a shattered rainbow. Then all at once my sister touches my shoulder. I turn around and look into her eyes. Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful
than I intended to be!

Tennessee Williams

this wondrous art is attributed to almeric walter, and only occasionally henri berge, the designer, as well. it's very interesting to me. as in the case of tiffany, many of the designs did not originate with the artist whose name appears on the work. what make the artist, in these cases, is what they learned how to do with glass (pate-de-verre, in this case). for both, the process was arduous. tiffany sued over his. walter was more open source, under contract with galle of nancy. the colors he managed astonish me.

tee hee hee party

The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes -- and ships -- and sealing-wax --
Of cabbages -- and kings --
And why the sea is boiling hot --
And whether pigs have wings."

"But wait a bit," the Oysters cried,
"Before we have our chat;
For some of us are out of breath,
And all of us are fat!"
"No hurry!" said the Carpenter.
They thanked him much for that.

"A loaf of bread," the Walrus said,
"Is what we chiefly need:
Pepper and vinegar besides
Are very good indeed--
Now if you're ready, Oysters dear,
We can begin to feed."

"But not on us!" the Oysters cried,
Turning a little blue.
"After such kindness, that would be
A dismal thing to do!"
"The night is fine," the Walrus said.
"Do you admire the view?

"It was so kind
of you to come!
And you are very nice!"
The Carpenter said nothing but
"Cut us another slice:
I wish you were not quite so deaf--
I've had to ask you twice!"

"It seems a shame," the Walrus said,
"To play them
such a trick,
After we've brought them out so far,
And made them trot so quick!"
The Carpenter said nothing but
"The butter's spread too thick!"

"I weep for you," the Walrus said:
"I deeply sympathize."
With sobs and tears he sorted out
Those of the largest size,
Holding his pocket-handkerchief
Before his streaming eyes.

"O Oysters," said the Carpenter,
"You've had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?'
But answer came there none--
And this was scarcely odd, because
They'd eaten every one.

Lewis Carroll
Through the Looking Glass

eggs