The traditional image of the beauty or bijin-zu or bijin-ga as we say in Japanese, was something that become very popular from about the 17th century into the 18th century, was successful, commercially, we see hundreds and hundreds of images of imagined beauties in ukiyo-e or floating art, floating world art in the 18th and 19th century. We see that the production of images of beauties doesn't stop right at the end of the Edo period, but is carried on into the modern era, into the 1870s, into the 1880s, but is not a static form. We see the image of women, young women, appearing in various new style of expression. For example, the newer forms of fiction, which we see emerging in the 1880s and the 1890s. The image that I want to introduce today in our lesson is from a collection of ghost stories, the Demonic Tales from a Nocturnal Window, which was written and published, the first edition of it, in 1889. It was written by a man named Ishikawa Kōsai, who was a a Sinitic scholar and literary person active in Tokyo in the Meiji era, and it was written entirely in classical Chinese. When we translate it into modern Japanese or English, it reads like a modern novel. But in fact, the whole text was written in classical Chinese. Lafcadio Hearn, by the way who was living in Japan at the time, was an avid reader. He really, really liked this story a lot, and used some of the short stories in it to translate and to re-adapt into English in his famous Kuaidan, or Ghost Stories, book. But anyway, the image that we have right here is the illustration of a short story, which was titled Beauty in the Painting. We can see the title here right above me right here. It says ga-bijin which means "painting beauty," It's kind of hard to translate it. It's sort of a term on its own. It refers to beautiful women as paintings. In other words, beauties who never existed but exist as paintings. I translate it here as beauty in the painting. We can see a hanging scroll in this very, very sort of old-style Japanese room. We know that it's old style because the young man who's sitting here leaning against his desk has an old sort of feudal-style sort of hairdo, so we know that it's from the Edo period. Anyway, he has a tokonoma area here in the room in order to display flowers and beautiful pottery and also hanging scrolls. And he has one scroll that's hanging there and it's white. There's nothing written on it at all. We can see that this is a sort of smoky tale here. Excuse me, there's a smoky trail here. And it leads into the sort of full blown picture of this woman, who is descending, literally, from the scroll into the room. We can see that she's moving out of the tokonoma towards him, and he's kind of taken aback, and sort of moving back here. This is one of the scenes from the story. So let me give you a summary of this story itself. This young man lives in a manor in Edo. This is towards the end of the Edo period, perhaps in the 1830s or the 1840s. He's recovering from an illness. He's very, very, bookish, so he's happy to be at home. And during his recovery, an uncle of his, who is a samurai for the bakufu government, traveled west to Nagasaki. And when he came back from business, he brought, as a souvenir from Nagasaki, a painting, a hanging scroll which he had bought there. Of course, Nagasaki was, in the Edo period, the single open port to trade with China. And there are a lot of things that you could buy in Nagasaki, which had just come off the ship, literally, from China. So he bought this scroll, hanging scroll, in which was depicted a very, very, beautiful young woman. He thought that his nephew, who was not feeling well, would really enjoy it. And it might, sort of encourage him, to get up, and walk around, and recover more quickly. So anyway, he's given this lovely scroll by his uncle, and he hangs it in his room. And as he's reading, he sort of wanders off in his thoughts and he dozes, he sort of has a daydream. Right before he has his daydream, though, he writes a poem, a quatrain, in classical Chinese, as he's looking at the portrait, he finds a fascinating, very, very attractive, very, very beautiful woman. He's attracted to her, and he writes a poem, which, he says, is to be inscribed on the painting. In other words, he dedicates his words to the woman who's portrayed in the picture itself. As we've seen before, these images of young women and young men who write poems dedicated to them, but one step further, were conceived to be inscribed onto the so-called body of the painting themselves. These were very, very popular, very common on this period, so he's writing this quatrain there, so dedicating and devoting it to this beauty whom he knows he will never meet. Anyway, he wanders off into his dreams, and then this young woman appears in front of him. We can see already this is a very, very classical sort of ghost story. And she tells him her story. For some reason, she's fluent in Japanese, although it's a Chinese figure, and she's come from China. She describes to him how she came to be portrayed in this picture. This young woman was alive in the 1840s, the daughter of a very prominent, very, very wealthy merchant family in Nanjing. The period was 1850, maybe 1851 or so, right at the beginning of the Taiping Rebellion. So the forces of the Taiping Rebellion, these who would usurp and form this sort of coup d'etat. And take over Nanjing, making it their own capital, drove out all of the old capitalist merchant families and so forth. Many of them escaped, and this is historically accurate, escaped south to Shanghai. So she escaped to Shanghai from the rebellion in her home town. But in Shanghai, she ended up being separated from her parents and sold into a brothel as a prostitute in Shanghai. This obviously shocked her very, very much, made her very, very depressed, and she was terrified by the experience. In Shanghai at this time, many brothel owners would have portraits drawn of their most beautiful and well-selling, so to speak, prostitutes, in order to show prospective customers and so forth. And she had her portrait drawn. Right after she had the portrait drawn, which was what this work of art is, she passed away. She became very, very sad, became ill and wasn't able to recover, so she died at a very, very young age. So her spirit, her very, very frustrated, very, very sad, unrequited soul remained in this portrait itself, and was fixed in it, in other words, and then removed from Shanghai by someone who bought it. Moved it, actually carried it into Japan and she was delivered to his house. She realized that he was someone that would understand her. All of her travails and hardship that she had, and her own sort of essence by the quatrain, the poem that he wrote for her. So in other words, the ghost, which she is, emerged from the painting in response to the words, to the force of the words that he wrote in order to inscribe on the painting itself. The whole story, I'm not going to give away the end of it here, though is about the relationship which grows, from this moment between someone who is a sort of extraterrestrial, or on the other side of mortal life. This ghost who has come back across the ocean to meet this young samurai, perhaps in the 1850s or so.
