Lot Essay
A decorative theme of flowing water on the box exterior is enhanced with a design of plovers and mist bands on the interior. The design has a literary allusion.
The title Natorigawa is inscribed on the lid of the container for this box. Natorigawa is a kyogen play about an absent-minded monk on Mount Hiei, northeast of Kyoto, who, because he could never remember his own name, wrote it in ink on his robes. One day, when he was crossing the Natori ("name-taking") River (gawa), the inscription was washed away. Again unable to recall his own name, the monk tried to recover it by scooping the water from the flowing river. The comedy is literally a play on the name of the Natori River, located in what is now Miyagi Prefecture. The river was often cited in Japanese literature; it figures in an episode in the thirteenth-century Tale of the Heike, and several classical poems include puns on its name.
For a stationery box by Shibata Zeshin titled Natorigawa see Julia Meech, Lacquerware from the Weston Collection, A Selection of Inro and Boxes (New York: Christie's, Inc., 1995), no. 44.
The title Natorigawa is inscribed on the lid of the container for this box. Natorigawa is a kyogen play about an absent-minded monk on Mount Hiei, northeast of Kyoto, who, because he could never remember his own name, wrote it in ink on his robes. One day, when he was crossing the Natori ("name-taking") River (gawa), the inscription was washed away. Again unable to recall his own name, the monk tried to recover it by scooping the water from the flowing river. The comedy is literally a play on the name of the Natori River, located in what is now Miyagi Prefecture. The river was often cited in Japanese literature; it figures in an episode in the thirteenth-century Tale of the Heike, and several classical poems include puns on its name.
For a stationery box by Shibata Zeshin titled Natorigawa see Julia Meech, Lacquerware from the Weston Collection, A Selection of Inro and Boxes (New York: Christie's, Inc., 1995), no. 44.