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Lot Essay
The poet Ono no Komachi served in an unknown capacity at the imperial court in Kyoto during the mid-ninth century. Her surviving work consists of eighteen attributed waka poems honored for their candor, introspection and unforced complexity.
Legend was quick to make a sketch of the person behind the intense words. Designated one of the six poet immortals of antiquity (Rokkasen) by Ki no Tsurayuki (872–945) and one of the thirty-six masters of poetry (Sanjurokkasen) by Fujiwara no Kinto (966–1041), she was already a literary icon. By the eleventh century, the Komachi image was in place as a woman of matchless beauty and wit who was proud of her passions and disdainful of her many lovers. Five medieval plays for the Noh theater chart her triumphs and eventual fall into decrepitude, penury and madness. In Five Modern Noh Plays, Yukio Mishima set her in a 1950s Tokyo park as a hag scavenging for cigarette butts who magically summons her former self to seduce a young poet––an experience so profound that it causes his death.
The five Noh plays and two other anecdotes constitute the Seven Komachi Episodes (Nana Komachi) that were revitalized for Edo-period (1615–1868) audiences in numerous adaptations for ukiyo-e. In the painting here, Hokusai represents Komachi Invoking Rain (Amagoi Komachi); the Noh play of the same title no longer is performed. The story begins with a time of extreme drought during the reign of the emperor Junna (r. 823–33), who, historically, was on the throne when Komachi presumably was born. In the legend, he summons her to compose a poem to Zennyo Ryuo, the dragon deity presiding over rain. The narrative borrows from rain ceremonies Junna ordered from the monks Kukai and Shubin to end a three-month dry spell. After performing observances at a temple on an island in the pond of the emperor’s Shinsen-en garden, Komachi recites her poem and flings the poem slip on which she has written it into the water. Three days of deluge follow.
Hokusai styles Komachi in elaborate Heian-period (794–1185) court attire, twelve layered robes, or junihitoe, of different patterns, suggested here rather than drawn one on one. She raises her arms under her long sleeves to proffer her poem slip and inclines her head in supplication. The figure is reminiscent of classical renditions of Komachi that show her seated––normally in a light outerrobe dotted with flowers, as here––with a closed or open fan. The flowers painted on the robe allude to one of Komachi’s most famous poems, in which she uses the fading flower as a metaphor for the cooling heart of a lover, as well as her own bloom and decline.
The overall impression of the painting is formal and delicate, implying that the person who commissioned this painting from Hokusai had a particular treatment in mind, specifically one that was not, like most Nana Komachi imagery of the Edo period, substituting a courtesan for the poet in fashionable contemporary dress. Hokusai does manage to insert a bit of his customary personalizing in the flip of the hemline and central swathe of voluptuous red. It is not necessary to intrude the poem associated with the scene in the background of the painting or on the poem paper for the owner and his sophisticated guests could recite Komachi’s composition themselves:
kotowari ya It is fair to say
hi no moto nareba that this is the land that rests
teri mo sen underneath the sun,
saritote wa mata yet it also lies
ame ga shita to wa below the liquid heavens.
Hi no moto in the second line means the land of the rising sun, Japan. Ame ga shita in the last line, meaning the whole of the country “under the heavens,” is also a homophone for “below the rain.”
Hokusai changed his art names as frequently as his residences to signal new phases in his work. On this painting he uses the name Taito, an abbreviation of Taihokuto, one of the Seven Polar Stars, to which the artist was a fervent devotee. The pseudonym accords with his work between 1810 and 1820, a period of fruitful painting commissions for Hokusai, then in his fifties. The seal on the painting, Musashi Shimofusa, is more rare. It appears on a hanging scroll with the same Taito signature by Hokusai in the National Museum of Asian Art, Washington, DC of a young woman holding a letter behind her back (Freer1904.185). In his Hokusai nikuhitsuga taisei (Compendium of Hokusai paintings; Tokyo: Shogakukan, 2000), Nagata Seiji remarks that around ten works attributed to Hokusai share this seal and either the art name Taito or Gakyorojin manji. He cites as major works with this seal the present Komachi Invoking Rain, the Freer woman with letter and a handscroll of the four seasons in the Nara Prefectural Museum.
Komachi Invoking Rain comes from the distinguished collection of the Sakai family, who were successful merchants in Matsumoto in the mountains of Nagano Prefecture, about 170 kilometers (105 miles) northwest of central Tokyo. Sakai Yoshitaka (1810–1869), the seventh generation of the family, cultivated relationships with Hokusai, Hiroshige and their contemporaries. With his brothers Teisuke and Senzaburo, Sakai Tokichi (1915–1993) founded a private museum on the outskirts of the city in 1982. With holdings of over 100,000 Edo-period woodblock prints, paintings, screens and books the Japan Ukiyo-e Museum is the largest single collection devoted to the genre. While the museum was intended as a study center for ukiyo-e, it holds rotating exhibitions, including modern and contemporary Japanese prints that have entered the collection since the postwar era. The Sakai collection came to international attention in exhibitions in 1960 and 1966 at the Japanese Art Museum of Haifa, Israel; the Musée Guimet, Paris, 1961; the New York Public Library and Japan Club, New York, 1962; The Legion of Honor, San Francisco, 1963; the New York World’s Fair, 1964; and in more than sixty exhibitions outside Japan since.
Legend was quick to make a sketch of the person behind the intense words. Designated one of the six poet immortals of antiquity (Rokkasen) by Ki no Tsurayuki (872–945) and one of the thirty-six masters of poetry (Sanjurokkasen) by Fujiwara no Kinto (966–1041), she was already a literary icon. By the eleventh century, the Komachi image was in place as a woman of matchless beauty and wit who was proud of her passions and disdainful of her many lovers. Five medieval plays for the Noh theater chart her triumphs and eventual fall into decrepitude, penury and madness. In Five Modern Noh Plays, Yukio Mishima set her in a 1950s Tokyo park as a hag scavenging for cigarette butts who magically summons her former self to seduce a young poet––an experience so profound that it causes his death.
The five Noh plays and two other anecdotes constitute the Seven Komachi Episodes (Nana Komachi) that were revitalized for Edo-period (1615–1868) audiences in numerous adaptations for ukiyo-e. In the painting here, Hokusai represents Komachi Invoking Rain (Amagoi Komachi); the Noh play of the same title no longer is performed. The story begins with a time of extreme drought during the reign of the emperor Junna (r. 823–33), who, historically, was on the throne when Komachi presumably was born. In the legend, he summons her to compose a poem to Zennyo Ryuo, the dragon deity presiding over rain. The narrative borrows from rain ceremonies Junna ordered from the monks Kukai and Shubin to end a three-month dry spell. After performing observances at a temple on an island in the pond of the emperor’s Shinsen-en garden, Komachi recites her poem and flings the poem slip on which she has written it into the water. Three days of deluge follow.
Hokusai styles Komachi in elaborate Heian-period (794–1185) court attire, twelve layered robes, or junihitoe, of different patterns, suggested here rather than drawn one on one. She raises her arms under her long sleeves to proffer her poem slip and inclines her head in supplication. The figure is reminiscent of classical renditions of Komachi that show her seated––normally in a light outerrobe dotted with flowers, as here––with a closed or open fan. The flowers painted on the robe allude to one of Komachi’s most famous poems, in which she uses the fading flower as a metaphor for the cooling heart of a lover, as well as her own bloom and decline.
The overall impression of the painting is formal and delicate, implying that the person who commissioned this painting from Hokusai had a particular treatment in mind, specifically one that was not, like most Nana Komachi imagery of the Edo period, substituting a courtesan for the poet in fashionable contemporary dress. Hokusai does manage to insert a bit of his customary personalizing in the flip of the hemline and central swathe of voluptuous red. It is not necessary to intrude the poem associated with the scene in the background of the painting or on the poem paper for the owner and his sophisticated guests could recite Komachi’s composition themselves:
kotowari ya It is fair to say
hi no moto nareba that this is the land that rests
teri mo sen underneath the sun,
saritote wa mata yet it also lies
ame ga shita to wa below the liquid heavens.
Hi no moto in the second line means the land of the rising sun, Japan. Ame ga shita in the last line, meaning the whole of the country “under the heavens,” is also a homophone for “below the rain.”
Hokusai changed his art names as frequently as his residences to signal new phases in his work. On this painting he uses the name Taito, an abbreviation of Taihokuto, one of the Seven Polar Stars, to which the artist was a fervent devotee. The pseudonym accords with his work between 1810 and 1820, a period of fruitful painting commissions for Hokusai, then in his fifties. The seal on the painting, Musashi Shimofusa, is more rare. It appears on a hanging scroll with the same Taito signature by Hokusai in the National Museum of Asian Art, Washington, DC of a young woman holding a letter behind her back (Freer1904.185). In his Hokusai nikuhitsuga taisei (Compendium of Hokusai paintings; Tokyo: Shogakukan, 2000), Nagata Seiji remarks that around ten works attributed to Hokusai share this seal and either the art name Taito or Gakyorojin manji. He cites as major works with this seal the present Komachi Invoking Rain, the Freer woman with letter and a handscroll of the four seasons in the Nara Prefectural Museum.
Komachi Invoking Rain comes from the distinguished collection of the Sakai family, who were successful merchants in Matsumoto in the mountains of Nagano Prefecture, about 170 kilometers (105 miles) northwest of central Tokyo. Sakai Yoshitaka (1810–1869), the seventh generation of the family, cultivated relationships with Hokusai, Hiroshige and their contemporaries. With his brothers Teisuke and Senzaburo, Sakai Tokichi (1915–1993) founded a private museum on the outskirts of the city in 1982. With holdings of over 100,000 Edo-period woodblock prints, paintings, screens and books the Japan Ukiyo-e Museum is the largest single collection devoted to the genre. While the museum was intended as a study center for ukiyo-e, it holds rotating exhibitions, including modern and contemporary Japanese prints that have entered the collection since the postwar era. The Sakai collection came to international attention in exhibitions in 1960 and 1966 at the Japanese Art Museum of Haifa, Israel; the Musée Guimet, Paris, 1961; the New York Public Library and Japan Club, New York, 1962; The Legion of Honor, San Francisco, 1963; the New York World’s Fair, 1964; and in more than sixty exhibitions outside Japan since.