Читать книгу Fables in Ivory - Adrienne Barbanson - Страница 11

NETSUKE AND JAPANESE LEGENDS:

Many of Japan's ancient myths and legends are of foreign inspiration. They stem chiefly from India and China, and occasionally from Tibet, Burma, or Korea. Little by little, they were transformed and finally made Japanese.

As for legends of purely Japanese origin, they are of two kinds: those which go back to the beginnings of the Shinto religion—the most ancient of Japanese religions, which already existed twelve centuries before the introduction of Buddhism into Japan in the sixth century a.d.—and those more recent, dating from the Middle Ages of Japan.

The latter were inspired by the epic poems and high exploits of celebrated warriors, or again by the adventures of Buddhist monks or of exalted persons of the imperial court. A considerable number of books, illustrated manuscripts, and commentaries relate their doings down to the last detail.

The oldest collections, the Nihon Shoki and the Kojiki, were compiled in the eighth century a.d. and describe the creation of the heavens and the earth, the existence of the gods, and events of remotest times in Japan. The Taketori Monogatari, which is the oldest specimen of Japanese romantic literature, describes mainly the customs of the court at Kyoto. Later, in the seventeenth century, there were the ehon, or illustrated books, which became more and more refined. It was in these that the first woodblock prints appeared. At the beginning of the eighteenth century a Japanese painter, Tachibana no Morikuni, illustrated more than one hundred works—inspired as he was by the legends and the history of Japan. Finally, one of the best known of Japanese artists, Hokusai (17601849), created a masterpiece, the Hokusai Manga, a rich collection of miscellaneous sketches which have served as an inspiration to a great number of artists.

The native dances and the drama—both the classical Noh, which appeared in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the popular theater of the Kabuki, when it began to develop in the sixteenth century—drew their inspiration from legends and folk tales and are still performed in Japan as they were at the time of their origin: in the purest of traditions.

First literature and then the dance and the theater have therefore been an inexhaustible source for all Japanese artists: painters, designers, sculptors, engravers, ceramists, and artisans. They have found in this source myriads of subjects to serve as themes for the decoration of innumerable screens, prints, kakemono, lacquer ware, snuffboxes, and charming inro (medicine boxes), as well as fine fabrics and numbers of trinkets. The finely carved sword-guards (tsuba) often portray the crests of noble Japanese families or have been inspired by such insignia. All of these objects, among them many of great artistic worth, are in general decorated with depictions of the most poetic deeds of history and legend.

But there exists still another artistic form for presenting the legends—a form often humorous and at the same time thoroughly and typically Japanese. This is the great family of the netsuke.

What is a netsuke? In Japanese the word is made up of ne, meaning root, and tsuke, meaning attach. It is pronounced "nets'ke" with the "u" suppressed and is often written this way in foreign languages. In the beginning (the first known netsuke date from the fifteenth century) the netsuke was nothing more than a simple piece of root or bone pierced by two holes through which the ancient Japanese passed a cord from which they suspended knives, purses, or other small objects at their waists. On the whole, netsuke began by being purely utilitarian. It is said that the introduction of tobacco into Japan by the Portuguese in 1542 gave considerable impetus to the creation of more and more netsuke, since they came into demand for use with tobacco pouches and pipes.

In effect, the netsuke, fastened by a cord to the snuffbox or tobacco pouch and serving as a counterweight or toggle, prevented it from slipping through the sash of the wearer. It served the same purpose for all sorts of objects suspended from the sash: little boxes containing one's personal seal (ban) and its red ink pad, purses, portable writing sets, perfume flacons, tinder-boxes, and tobacco pipes with their containers. Women attached netsuke to their inro, tiny medicine boxes exquisitely decorated.

In the sixteenth century, as the artistic sense developed, the netsuke, which had been primitively a piece of bone or wood, now became a circle or a disc (manju) and was next decorated with an engraving or a bas-relief sculpture. Finally it came to carry representations of one or more persons, animals, flowers, fruits, or small masks.

Although the size of a netsuke normally varies only between two and six centimeters in height and between two and three centimeters in thickness, it sometimes represents a complete house or a boat filled with innumerable persons, animals, utensils, and so forth. There are some veritable masterpieces of the miniature among these tiny treasures, and one often needs a magnifying glass to distinguish all the details.

The oldest netsuke are frequently quite rudimentary and clumsy in their carving and are never signed. Those of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are sometimes signed and are fairly stylized. They have such a grace and such an epitomization of spirit that it is almost impossible to confuse them with the more florid netsuke of the nineteenth century. The latter are characterized by a much more detailed sculpture. Some of them are virtual masterpieces of realism, but they have lost their vigor in becoming trinkets that no longer have any relation to the usefulness of genuine netsuke.

In the seventeenth century, the netsuke carver reproduced a human figure or an animal in which nothing but the essential appeared—hence the extreme stylization. It was a principle of the carver that such figures must spring forth spontaneously from the material employed and in accordance with the form of that material. This period corresponded with that of the total isolation in which Japan lived: the period that resulted in the creation by her artists of works purely Japanese and with scarcely any outside influence.

Plate 2. Inro and Netsuke. Lacquer, with decoration in relief and ivory inlay. Unsigned. Late 18th century. Collection of the author.

The inro, to which the netsuke was attached to form a counterweight or toggle, was an exquisitely fashioned lacquer box for medicine and cosmetics. It was divided into sections which fitted together with such smoothness and precision that only the finest of lines showed where they met. The cord which joined the netsuke to the inro served also as a kind of drawstring to hold the sections of the inro in place. For this purpose it was furnished with an ojime, a pierced bead through which the two halves of the cord passed. The ojime might be of coral, jade, or some other semiprecious material.

The inro pictured here is of gold lacquer handsomely decorated in relief and ivory inlay with a tableau representing a group of Japan's classic poets. The netsuke, also in lacquer, portrays Daruma, the legendary prince of India who reputedly introduced the doctrines of Zen Buddhism into Japan (see Plate 48).

Later, chiefly in the nineteenth century, the netsuke artist sculptured, often by a customer's direction, a person or an animal in the most beautiful material possible—the heart of ivory, for example—without taking inspiration from the original form of the material. And it is thus that one finds among the works of that period an influence less typically Japanese and sometimes Occidental.

The oldest known sculptor of netsuke appears to have been Honami Koetsu (1556—1637), an artist who lived in Kyoto. Subsequently, there were numbers of netsuke carvers, and some of them created actual schools, where both masters and pupils often indiscriminately signed their works without indicating which was which. Up to the present, some 2,700 different signatures have been enumerated. The best known of netsuke sculptors, none of whose works was ever signed, is Yoshimura Shuzan, who lived in the seventeenth century. His sculptures, which are almost always in colored wood and very light, have been sold in Japan for as much as five to six hundred pounds sterling. He had numerous successors who in their turn had pupils, and these signed almost all of their works.

The basic materials used for the creation of netsuke were of the most various kinds: wood (some six hundred varieties, it appears), ivory (elephant or walrus), teeth or horns of animals (deer, antelope, cattle), bone (fish, mammals, birds), nutshells, mother-of-pearl, tortoise shell, coral, amber, jade, onyx, rock crystal, porcelain, sandstone, metals, ceramics, lacquer, beaks of birds, pressed and lacquered sawdust, papier mâché. Some netsuke have even been carved from cherry stones. Of all these various materials it is wood that most collectors consider the netsuke medium, both because it is native to Japan and because the Japanese carvers knew so well how to reveal the inherent beauty of its many different varieties. Ivory, with its beautiful color and texture, was perhaps more highly prized in Japan because it was a rare, imported stuff on which the carvers took special pains, and it still runs wood a close second as the collector's favorite; this, plus the fact that ivory is much more "photogenic" than wood, accounts for the preponderance of ivory netsuke chosen for reproduction here.

There are netsuke of every possible shape. The older ones are often in the form of gourds, while later ones appear in triangular or round-button shapes called manju. Some are discs circled with metal or ivory and encrusted with gold (kagami-buta). Others are of colored wood, and still others, called obi-hasami, are in the shape of a C, so that they hook over the top of the sash. In this book, I illustrate only the more usual forms, but there are many others.

It is important to understand that it sometimes takes many months of work to perfect a netsuke. It is necessary first to choose the subject and the material, then to carve it, or sometimes to engrave it through several processes of which the results are often unbelievably delicate. Certain parts of a human figure or an animal—the eyes, for example—may be inlaid with precious metals, gems, coral, or mother-of-pearl. Some netsuke, once carved, were colored or painted by one or more of numerous processes. Finally, one finds large numbers of netsuke that have been covered with almost innumerable coats of lacquer—sometimes as many as eighty—and then once again deeply carved or inlaid.

In summary, it can be said that the most beautiful netsuke were all carved between 1600 and the end of the nineteenth century. They were particularly in style around 1688, in the Genroku era, but they reached their apogee around 1800. After the outset of the Meiji period, in 1868, the Japanese, taking more and more to European styles of dress and beginning to smoke almost nothing besides cigarettes, ceased to use netsuke. It was around that time that the export of netsuke to the United States and Europe began. Later the trade became so flourishing that a comparatively large number of netsuke were carved with only that purpose in view. These pseudo-netsuke, however, are immediately recognizable by an expert and even by an amateur who has become acquainted with the genuine objects.

Aside from certain private collections which are still to be found in Japan and which it is very difficult to view, it can be said that the most beautiful netsuke are now in private collections or museums in Europe and the United States. In Paris alone, the Musée d'Ennery has about three thousand of them, and some of these have, for connoisseurs, a universal renown. In the Netherlands, at the museums of Leyden and Amsterdam, and in London, at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum, there are equally beautiful ones.

The Diving Girl and the Jewel:

It was long, long ago that an emperor of China, desiring to make a gift of three magnificent jewels to the emperor of Japan, sent them to him by special emissary. But, in the course of the voyage, one of the jewels—the most beautiful of the three—was stolen by Ryujin, the Dragon King of the Sea. In desperation, the messenger arrived at the imperial court in Kyoto and reported the theft.

The emperor of Japan, eager to retrieve the jewel at any cost, dispatched his prime minister to Shido, a place on the Japanese coast not far from where the theft had occurred. The prime minister, having arrived at Shido, thought for a long time about ways to get back the jewel. He asked the fishermen about the habits of the Dragon King of the Sea. What he learned was not very reassuring, but his anxiety was somewhat allayed when he became acquainted with a young and beautiful ama or diving girl who fished for pearls. He took her to live with him in Shido, and after a year she gave birth to a handsome baby boy. The ama begged him to make the boy his sole heir. The prime minister, not daring to return to Kyoto without the jewel, ended by promising to do as she desired, but only on the condition that she go back to her occupation of diving and succeed in wresting the gem from the Dragon King's grasp. It was a frightening assignment, but the ama agreed to the condition and returned to her arduous work.

Again and again she plunged into the sea, going deeper and deeper every time, but her diving seemed to be in vain. One day, finally, at the very bottom of the sea, she found herself before the entrance of the Dragon King's palace. It was guarded by monsters the like of which she had never seen before. But she mastered her terror, and as she approached cautiously she discovered that all the inhabitants of the palace appeared to be asleep. Swimming as quickly as she could, she arrived at the foot of the Dragon King's throne, and there she saw the marvelous jewel gleaming in the cold undersea light. Without hesitating, she seized it and turned toward the guarded doorway to begin her long journey upward to the boat that awaited her on the surface of the sea.

But she was not fast enough. The Dragon King suddenly awoke and instantly started in pursuit of her. He was an even better swimmer than the ama, and she knew that he would overtake her long before she reached the safety of the boat. Then, as she was almost within his grasp, she remembered that there was one thing he could not bear: the blood of human beings. Since there was no other choice, she drew her knife from the band at her waist and cut a deep gash in her breast. Into this she slid the precious jewel as her blood flowed out to stain the water around her. When she looked back, she saw the outraged face of the Dragon King vanishing in a red cloud of blood. Mortally bleeding and altogether exhausted, she reached the surface of the sea and was lifted into the boat by the waiting rowers. She had enough time to point to the place where she had hidden the jewel, but her effort to speak was too great, and she quickly died.

The prime minister kept his word. He took their son with him when he returned to Kyoto to deliver the jewel to the emperor, and there he made the boy his only heir. In memory of the beautiful and loyal ama, he ordered the building of a monument that can still be seen at the temple called Shido-ji.

Plate 3

Diving Girl

Ivory

Unsigned

17th century

Collection of the author

Ryu, the Dragon:

The dragon of Oriental mythology originated in China and is the only purely supernatural creature in the Oriental zodiac. Innumerable legends have made of him the most fabulous of animals, imbuing him with symbolism and surrounding him with superstition. In China he became the emblem of imperial rule and was claimed to be the ancestor of the emperors. He represented the powers of the air, and his appearance before men, either in reality or in dreams, was the prologue to auspicious events, or sometimes a portent of death. In Japan, he is usually regarded as a benevolent monster and is often associated with aspects of water.

The dragon is portrayed in a variety of ways. Sometimes he is shown with feathered wings and with feet bearing three, four, or five talons; sometimes he appears as an enormous serpent covered with scales and having a flat head adorned with horns and whiskers. He is also of various colors, according to his symbolism.