One Hundred Aspects of the Moon

 
 

One Hundred Aspects of the Moon

art by Yoshitoshi

edited by Bas Verberk

Walther Konig

1885-1895, reprinted 2022

 

 

The two most famous Japanese woodcut artists, Hokusai and Hiroshige lived during the Edo period - roughly coinciding with the early modern period in Europe. They made prints depicting contemporary city life. In fact, the Japanese name for these images, ukiyo-e, isn't based on the medium, but the content. The -e suffix means 'pictures of' and ukiyo is 'the Floating World,' the name for the demimonde, the urban lifestyle of art, leisure, theater, and legal prostitution that arose in Tokyo and other cities at that time. So ukiyo-e are literally 'pictures of the Floating World,' but they're also all woodblock prints.

 

Yoshitoshi lived at the end of Edo and the start of the Meiji period - around the same time as the Industrial Revolution. He is apparently considered the third master of ukiyo-e after Hiroshige and Hokusai. Rather than representing the world he lived in though, Yoshitoshi's prints mostly depict Japanese history, legends, and folktales. One Hundred Views of the Moon is Yoshitoshi's most famous series of prints. The specific collection of that series I read was collected by the Museum of East Asian Art in Cologne, Germany, and edited by their curator of Japanese art, Bas Verberk. The quality of the photos the book is based on (and the quality of the book itself I guess) is high enough that you can actually see the wood grain of the printing block in many of the prints, whenever there's a wide enough expanse of a single color. Alongside each print is a page-length museum label where Verberk explains what the image depicts.

 

The Meiji period was a time when Japan was forcibly re-opened to commerce and diplomacy with Europe after something like 200 years of isolation. I don't know exactly what Yoshitoshi's intellectual or artistic agenda was, but I think it's fairly common in periods of great change and disruption for people to hearken back to stories from the past to try to reconstruct a new way forward. On a much smaller and less significant scale, I think you see the same thing in American superhero comics in the 2000s. Lots of independent creators have series that self-consciously recreate the style of the Silver Age comics of the 1960s, like Black Hammer and Astro City, as their creators try to figure out how to get from 'there' to 'here,' where here is hopefully a new way of writing superheroes that makes sense for the 21st century. Anyway, as I said, I don't know if that was Yoshitoshi's goal, and Verberk doesn't say either, but I imagine that the reason he picked such a wide array of old stories as his subject matter was that he was trying to figure out a new vision for Japanese culture, maybe even a new way to still be Japanese, while navigating a newly expanded world of European interference.

 

A lot of Yoshitoshi's prints, possibly even a majority in this collection, depict samurai and generals and other figures from the long Warring States period between the peace of the Heien and Edo, when there was no one central government, and the leaders of the regional governments competed for territory and control. As the title of the series suggests, the moon is present in nearly every image, and the few where you can't see it are understood to be taking place under the moonlight. Other pictures show scenes from the Buddhist tradition, characters from the Tale of Genji and especially the Tale of Heike, folktales and legends about people who traveled to the moon, animals with supernatural powers associated with the moon, and scenes from noh theater, which predates Edo-era kabuki. Yoshitoshi had several different name stamps for signing his work, and seems to have kind of used different stamped signatures for different themes within the series.

 

My favorite was 'Mount Yoshino Midnight Moon,' which shows a woman meeting a supernatural creature beneath either a new moon or lunar eclipse. I think if I seek out more ukiyo-e art, I might try to find someone who depicted the changes Japan was going through during the Meiji period. Or perhaps I might go backward myself, and actually look through a complete series of Hokusai or Hiroshige's prints, because I think I've only seen a few of their images, out of order and out of context. 

 

'Mount Yoshino Midnight Moon'
image source