![A SUZURIBAKO [WRITING-BOX]](https://www.christies.com/img/LotImages/1999/CKS/1999_CKS_06215_0014_000(120645).jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
The image on the lid of this famous writing-box shows a woman writing in a most astonishing manner, a spectacle that weaves together themes from woodblock prints and kabuki theatre. The lacquer craftsman took his inspiration directly from a design in volume II of the woodblock-printed illustrated book by Kyoto ukiyo-e artist Nishikawa Sukenobu (1671-1751), the Ehon tamakazura, first published in 1717 and reprinted in 1736 [see fig. 1]. Sukenobu's double page image shows a slightly more complex scene in the garden of a brothel. The lavish designs on the outer robes worn by the courtesans are the same as those on the box, but instead of a bench there is a veranda. There is also a second standing courtesan and the garden is enlivened by a willow and a flowering bush.
A courtesan writes the two words shinobu koi [secret love] onto a garden wall without using her hands. She appears to be spitting out this erotic graffiti in a black jet of ink, yet there is no spray, which one would expect when spitting out liquid. Could she be writing the words with her tongue, a truly erotic act? Or is she actually holding a brush in her mouth, a brush here abstracted as a straight line? Her attendant holds a small ceramic tea bowl on a lacquer stand, a container for the dark liquid, which might be tea. The liquid might be a tooth-blackening mixture, a hypothesis first suggested by Edward F. Strange in 1924, although there is no sign of a make-up box. It may also be ink, the medium usually associated with a writing-box.
The young woman bends from the waist in a slightly hunched manner. Her posture and action are in fact a playful mitate [parody] of a climactic moment in the popular kabuki play Kuzunoha. The text, originally composed in 1713 for the bunraku puppet theatre, was based on the legend Shinoda no tsuma [The Shinoda Wife], the story of a fox-woman. A white fox lived in the Shinoda forest in Izumi Province, south of Osaka. To help a man in trouble the fox took the form of a beautiful woman and bore him a child but was forced to return to the forest when the man saw her manifested as a fox. The theme gained lasting fame in a 1734 play first performed in Osaka at the Takemoto theatre. In this version the fortune teller Abe no Yasuna saved the fox's life and the fox, to thank him, took the human form of a beautiful woman, his lost love Kuzunoha, and bore him a child. When the real woman reappeared, the fox-woman turned back into a fox. Before her transformation was complete she wrote a verse on the shoji which expressed her love and the sorrow of parting from her child:
Koishikuba tazune kite miyo
Izumi naru Shinoda no mori no urami Kuzunoha.
If love draws you, look for a kuzu leaf, now so bitter,
In the heart of the forest of Shinoda in Izumi Province.
(Translated by John Carpenter)
Lacking fingers, she was forced to write with the brush in her mouth.
This play was enormously popular in the 18th and 19th centuries and the climactic moment was a frequent print subject. Utagawa Toyokuni (1769-1825), for example, depicted the actor Segawa Roko in the Kuzunoha fox-woman role in both the narrow hosoban and standard oban print formats. In these prints the writing brush is clearly visible in the fox-woman's mouth. She cradles her baby in her arms and holds an open writing-box, having written the characters Koishikuba Izumi onto the shoji.
The design on the lid of the Greenfield box is repeated in simplified form on the lid of a writing-box in the Victoria and Albert Museum bearing the signature Shunsho; the seated courtesan-voyeur is eliminated in the museum's box. An incense box formerly in the collection of Michael Tomkinson may also have had this design1. The interior of the Greenfield lid has a more poetic scene of two ukiyo-e beauties seated on a bench in a garden on a late summer evening enjoying the sight of fireflies hovering over bush clover. Andrew Pekarik has speculated that this may be an allusion to the Tale of Genji, specifically to the two ladies, daughters of an Imperial prince, who live in neglected loneliness by the Uji River where they are discovered and courted in secret by two noblemen from the capital. The interior of the box has a design of the Uji River and waterwheel. Perhaps this imagery is associated with the courtesan's words, shinobu koi [secret love].
Apart from its roots in legend and theatre, the image of a woman writing with her mouth must have appealed to the Edo-period love of curiosities and prodigies. Oddities such as this (a woman practising archery with her feet, for example, or a seven-year-old prodigy able to write with a brush strapped to his head) were highly prized in the misemono, the 'shows' or 'exhibits' that were part of Edo popular culture.
The character yo in the signature Kan'yosai suggests a line of artistic descent from Hara Yoyusai (1772-1845/6), implying a late Edo- or Meiji-period date. If so, this box is an eloquent reminder of the inventiveness and technical quality of the best work of that period.
1 Edward F. Strange, Catalogue of Japanese Lacquer [in the Victoria and Albert Museum] (London, 1924), vol. 1, cat. no. 53, pl.XV and Joe Earle, 'What Shall We Do About Japanese Lacquer? A Selection of Edo Period Lacquers in the Victoria and Albert Museum', Orientations (Dec. 1986), p. 57.
A courtesan writes the two words shinobu koi [secret love] onto a garden wall without using her hands. She appears to be spitting out this erotic graffiti in a black jet of ink, yet there is no spray, which one would expect when spitting out liquid. Could she be writing the words with her tongue, a truly erotic act? Or is she actually holding a brush in her mouth, a brush here abstracted as a straight line? Her attendant holds a small ceramic tea bowl on a lacquer stand, a container for the dark liquid, which might be tea. The liquid might be a tooth-blackening mixture, a hypothesis first suggested by Edward F. Strange in 1924, although there is no sign of a make-up box. It may also be ink, the medium usually associated with a writing-box.
The young woman bends from the waist in a slightly hunched manner. Her posture and action are in fact a playful mitate [parody] of a climactic moment in the popular kabuki play Kuzunoha. The text, originally composed in 1713 for the bunraku puppet theatre, was based on the legend Shinoda no tsuma [The Shinoda Wife], the story of a fox-woman. A white fox lived in the Shinoda forest in Izumi Province, south of Osaka. To help a man in trouble the fox took the form of a beautiful woman and bore him a child but was forced to return to the forest when the man saw her manifested as a fox. The theme gained lasting fame in a 1734 play first performed in Osaka at the Takemoto theatre. In this version the fortune teller Abe no Yasuna saved the fox's life and the fox, to thank him, took the human form of a beautiful woman, his lost love Kuzunoha, and bore him a child. When the real woman reappeared, the fox-woman turned back into a fox. Before her transformation was complete she wrote a verse on the shoji which expressed her love and the sorrow of parting from her child:
Koishikuba tazune kite miyo
Izumi naru Shinoda no mori no urami Kuzunoha.
If love draws you, look for a kuzu leaf, now so bitter,
In the heart of the forest of Shinoda in Izumi Province.
(Translated by John Carpenter)
Lacking fingers, she was forced to write with the brush in her mouth.
This play was enormously popular in the 18th and 19th centuries and the climactic moment was a frequent print subject. Utagawa Toyokuni (1769-1825), for example, depicted the actor Segawa Roko in the Kuzunoha fox-woman role in both the narrow hosoban and standard oban print formats. In these prints the writing brush is clearly visible in the fox-woman's mouth. She cradles her baby in her arms and holds an open writing-box, having written the characters Koishikuba Izumi onto the shoji.
The design on the lid of the Greenfield box is repeated in simplified form on the lid of a writing-box in the Victoria and Albert Museum bearing the signature Shunsho; the seated courtesan-voyeur is eliminated in the museum's box. An incense box formerly in the collection of Michael Tomkinson may also have had this design
Apart from its roots in legend and theatre, the image of a woman writing with her mouth must have appealed to the Edo-period love of curiosities and prodigies. Oddities such as this (a woman practising archery with her feet, for example, or a seven-year-old prodigy able to write with a brush strapped to his head) were highly prized in the misemono, the 'shows' or 'exhibits' that were part of Edo popular culture.
The character yo in the signature Kan'yosai suggests a line of artistic descent from Hara Yoyusai (1772-1845/6), implying a late Edo- or Meiji-period date. If so, this box is an eloquent reminder of the inventiveness and technical quality of the best work of that period.