Let's take a look at the next one, this is from after the Meiji Restoration, 1877. Again, On a Picture of a Beauty as She Reads, the poet here, Kikuchi Sankei, has nothing to do with the poet whose work we just looked at. This is a coincidence as far as influence go. I don't think they accessed each other's work and so forth. But writing poems on the picture was very popular at this time. And as we've seen, images of beauties reading were also very, very popular. So it's not a great coincidence, I believe, that the title of the two poems, the two quatrains, are the same. Let's take a look at this one which occurs, which is written after the Meiji Restoration. "The clock ticks late in the afternoon; quietly, shadows of her hairpins are cast along the wall. A fragrance of blossoms fills the window, too much for her to bear. Wicked thoughts: she fears the red parrot's tongue. Silently, she recites a few lines from the Romance of the Western Chambers. Again, in the final verse, the poet refers to a classical Chinese work of literature. This time the Yuan Dynasty the romantic libretto, or play, the Romance of the Western Chambers. A clock is ticking, this brings us into the modern era. If this was during the Edo period, we wouldn't have a clock in the room in the first place. Late in the afternoon, the shadows of her hairpin are becoming cast along the wall, perhaps the sliding screen behind her, which means that the sun is probably coming down lower, raising up the shadow of her hairpins, which were sticking out from her hairdo probably. A fragrance of blossoms, this could be the autumn, or it could be the spring, we're not really sure. But this very, very sort of sensuous sort of room, space that she occupies, is full of shadows, wonderful sweet fragrances of blossoms and so forth. And it's much too hurt for her to bear. She's alone, it's a private scene, but she's the fragrance, the time of day, her mood, lead her off into imagining all kinds of different things. And it's for her, a very, very extremely sort of personal, very, very private moment in her day. And she's having wicked thoughts, she fears the red parrot's tongue. The poet has placed a red parrot, her pet, somewhere near her in the room. Of course, it's a parrot, so if she's talking aloud, the parrot will repeat what she says, perhaps learn, and learn to recite what she's talking about. So she has to be very careful when and she is and what she is reading. In the last line we see that she's reciting a few lines from the Romance. This romance full of very, very juicy, very, very racy passages occurring between the young man and the young woman, who are the protagonists, the heroes, of the story and so forth. It's a very, very witty quatrain here. We imagine her thinking, reminding herself, not to read out loud, because if she reads out loud, the parrot will remember, will learn the lines, and perhaps recite them to her husband, to her children, to her boss. Some other adult, probably male, who's going to come into the room or reenter the house later on that day or perhaps the next day. So it's this very sort of disingenuous, sort of, again, chiding, of the object of the picture here. Trying to show that she's reading something that a young women who is obviously free to read, but would only read in the privacy of her own boudoir. But exposing it, opening it, baring the scene itself, and referring to her not as a woman who's actually in the room in front of him, but a woman who is painted. This is, again, something that's very, very important to remember here, the women who appear in these poems are painted images, they're not presented as representations of women who are actually alive and active in society. Finally, one more poem. We're going to move back before the Meiji Restoration to a poem, again, a Chinese quatrain by a very, very active political intellectual from the Fukui fiefdom, or domain, towards the west of Japan. His name is Hashimoto Sanai, a very, very popular historical figure here. He was a very important political activist, as well as being an intellectual. But most Japanese people living today don't know that he was also a very, very skilled poet in the Chinese style. And that a lot of his poetry, having been written by a young man in his early 20s during these years, was also very, very sentient, sensual, perhaps, in a lot of ways as well. I'm going to read one quatrain that he left before his death in a couple of years after writing this. Inscribed on an American Erotic Image. This is very, very startling title. It's an erotic image, apparently, which had been brought in from America into Japan through one of the open ports, perhaps Kobe or Nagasaki or Yokohama. And he had seen it, he had access to it. It might have been a lithograph, could have been a photograph, we're not sure what the image itself was. But he writes a classical Chinese quatrain on it. "Throbbing desires, tender, but for whom? She undresses, silently, in a scene of passion gone mad. Then suddenly a shock: what on earth has occurred? Beyond the window stands a man, peering in on her." Again, this is a representation of an image that he's seen, which represents the sexual act. In this case, a work of pornography, typical 19th century pornography, whereby the protagonists are being viewed by a window. Usually there's a wall behind the woman who is being portrayed either in a photograph or a lithograph or sometimes a painting. And with a man looking in, a viewer sort of invading her privacy, and representing the viewer in a sense, who would be looking at the image itself. This poem, I would imagine, is based on his experience of actually looking at a piece of 19th-century erotica, because it's set up, the scene that he describes, is very, very typical of erotic images from this period. And again, it's rather humorous, very, very light, comical. He stresses the instant of the shock when the woman who has undressed has basically sort of lost herself in the moment notices that there's a man standing at the window. We don't know the image, we can't fix or pinpoint the image that this poem was written for, but we see from the title that he intended it to be inscribed upon the image itself. He probably didn't have a chance to do that, but the form itself of the poem, required him, brought him, to imagining himself or imagining this poem as one that would actually be written on to, brushed on to, the image itself. This is something we'll come again to see in actual works in the next lesson.
