The Development of a Mass Culture

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Saikaku also turned to tales of merchant life. The message of works like The Japanese Family Storehouse and Some Final Words of Advice is the importance of money, and the difculty succeeding generations seem to have in keeping the resources the founders of family fortunes have accumulated. It would be possible to take his message as a documentation of the (much more serious) advice that Mitsui Takafusa offered his successors in Some Observations on Merchants. The foibles of rich mens sons made inviting topics for many who came after Saikaku. Ejima Kiseki (1667 1736), whose lifetime saw the center of the publishing world begin to shift from the Kyoto-Osaka area to Edo, spent his career working with, then competing with, and nally cooperating again with his publisher. His characters, Howard Hibbett writes, are shaped by satirical and descriptive tendencies . . . Kiseki was not a portrait-painter: his forte was the intimate scene, of the kind familiar in ukiyo-e. In his sketches of the oating world, he preferred to group his rakes, actors, courtesans, and ordinary townsmen in casual tableaux of the sort one nds in the picture-books of [the printmakers] Moronobu and Sukenobu.22 An additional measure of the times was the development of the Tokugawa shi were usually illustrated, frequently masters of the wood block. The kana zo by men whose names have not come down. In the course of the seventeenth century an ex-samurai artist, Iwasa Matabei, developed a novel style of paint schools to record the ing, employing elements of both the Tosa and the Kano life of the licensed quarters and also ordinary folk going about their daily tasks. These became known as ukiyo-e, or pictures of the oating world. Later artists, among them Moronobu, mentioned above, found a new outlet for their art in book illustration. Soon a market developed for pictures that could be hung up for display, like the more dignied hanging scrolls (kakemono), or pasted to screens; artists were now liberated from the limitations of book illustration. Broadsheets began to be produced for the urbanites who wanted decorations for their homes. Scenes depicted could be of many sorts; a striking print usually attributed to Moronobu, for instance, shows Korean horsemen (who were part of a 1682 embassy) performing for their ambassadors and Japanese ofcials. Wood-block artisans provided decorations for poetry and classical tales, but their preference (and largest market) was for the denizens of the licensed quarter and theater. By the latter half of the eighteenth century they were producing work of an elegance and perfection that has seldom been equaled and never surpassed. The ukiyo-e delighted townsmen in Edo days and inspired collectors in the nineteenth-century West. Impressionist painters were fascinated by their clarity and color, as were Western art historianssomewhat to the surprise of