Ehon

Reviewed by: Ehon: The Artist and the Book in Japan P. F. Kornicki (bio) Ehon: The Artist and the Book in Japan. By Roger S. Keyes. The New York Public Library in association with the University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2006. 320 pages. $50.00. This splendid book celebrating the artistic tastes and printing skills that went into the production of Japanese illustrated books, known as ehon, is itself beautifully produced. Such, however, are the dictates of global capitalism that it was printed neither in Japan nor in the United States, where it is published, but in China. The irony is all the greater in that, although Michela Bussotti has done much in her Les gravures de Hui. Étude du livre illustre de la fin du XVIe siècle a la première moitié du XVIIe siècle (Ecole française d'extrême orient, 2001) to refine our understanding of the levels reached by the arts of the printed book in China, there is no room for doubting that it was in Japan that the artistic possibilities of woodblock printing were explored to the fullest. Similarly, the Japanese illustrated book depended upon incomparably higher standards of color printing by the late eighteenth century than were practiced elsewhere, as demonstrated spectacularly in this book. Keyes is, of course, well known for his extensive scholarship on Japanese illustrated books, and this volume was published to coincide with the very successful exhibition held at the New York Public Library in 2006–7. The exhibition, and thus the book, were based upon the riches of the Spencer Collection, which includes donations made by C. H. Mitchell and Donald Keene as well as purchases made from the Ko ̄bunso ̄, the antiquarian bookseller founded by Sorimachi Shigeo, who published a catalogue of the Spencer Collection in 1978. Thanks to Keyes's scholarly oversight, this is much more than a catalogue: not only do each of the full entries, each amply illustrated, include kanji, but the volume concludes with detailed bibliographic descriptions of all the books, including provenance and references, and with an inventory of all the books in the Spencer Collection, not all of which, naturally, could be included in the exhibition or the catalogue. [End Page 196] Keyes's introductory essay is valuable for three reasons in particular. First, there is the argument for continuity. He considers that illustrated books constitute the key representatives of a tradition that has lasted for 1,230 years from the age of manuscripts to the age of photography, a tradition characterized by the "sensuous, beautiful, and intelligent" (p. 16) ehon. This explains why the reader of this catalogue travels from the woodcut of Manjusri at the head of a copy of the Daihannya haramittakyo ̄ printed at Nara in 1279, via the sumptuous editions of no ̄ libretti and the Ise monogatari printed at Saga in the early seventeenth century and ehon produced by Hokusai and other artists of the Edo period, to Kawada Kikuji's book Chizu (1965), a photographic ehon described by Keyes as "the most brilliantly designed Japanese book of its century" (p. 256), and other twentieth-century examples. One can perhaps quibble with the 1,230 years, for his first item, a dharani printed in the years 764–70, is neither illustrated nor particularly artistic, but had the Spencer Collection possessed one of the Nara-period sutras written in gold ink on indigo paper his claim would have carried more weight. Second, there is Keyes's appreciation of the materiality of books. He furnishes the reader with an anatomy of ehon showing how important their physical properties are, such as the paper, form of binding, and so on. This extends, of course, to the text, for few ehon come completely without text; sometimes it finds its place in the white spaces within the plane of the illustrations, sometimes it is to be found in short columns at the top of the page, and sometimes it occupies separate pages. These texts may, he points out, pose calligraphic difficulties for the reader as "dialects or idiolects of visual languages" (p. 31), but they are not necessarily related to the illustrations and sometimes, he claims, are not

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