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Canberra Today 17°/20° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Arts / Print and be enthralled

Eisen Tomioka’s (1864-1905) woodblock print “Tsuma no kokoro” (A wife’s heart).

IT wasn’t all cherry blossoms and Madama Butterfly during the short-lived “Restoration” period from 1867 to 1912 when Emperor Meiji reigned in Japan, as the National Library of Australia’s newest exhibition shows.

“Melodrama in Meiji Japan”, featuring more than 20 artists, was made possible by a donation from the late landscape architect Richard Clough of hundreds of literary frontispieces known as “kuchi-e” (literally “opening picture”). These were coloured woodblock illustrations for the equally colourful novels and stories that were all the rage among women who often rented the publications during an era of increasing literacy and western-influenced industrialisation.

As well as the age-old stories of winsome women and their drunken warrior-boyfriends, the books showed women taking on professional roles such as nursing and, in a whole genre of “bloke-lit”, country boys coming to the big city to live.

There are real-life stories of political intrigue and executions, stories about women’s rights and one even propagating the virtues of drinking milk. Tales about social-class warfare abound and in one, “The Operating Room” from 1895, a countess falls in love with her anaesthetist.

This is a rare opportunity for the library to show off works equally remarkable for their art and their words.

Closely related to the more famous Ukiyo-e (“floating world”) Japanese woodblock artworks collected by French impressionists such as Monet and executed by master printmakers during the preceding Edo period in Japan, the works at the NLA were invariably produced by artists, not artisans, the exhibition’s curator Gary Hickey tells “CityNews”.

An expert on Ukiyo-e exponents and Hokusai (“The Great Wave”) and Hiroshige (“36 views of Mount Fuji”), Hickey has increasing respect for the kuchi-e artists. Their pictures, he believes, featured more flowing lines and more subtle colouring than that of their predecessors, but they gave them over to deluxe woodblock printmakers who, competing with photo-mechanical printing, used exclusive techniques such as mica or embossing.

Under a fellowship at the National Library, he has been supported by Mayumi Shinozaki, senior librarian in the library’s Japanese unit. She’s been helping find captions for the more than 450 possible items for display, while also preparing guides who are naturally fascinated by the connection between Japanese art of the era and the European Impressionists.

Shinozaki is drawn to the “sad images” in time she says, a short period “where emotions were free to be drawn on”. Both before the Meiji and afterwards, when women were sent back home to become mothers of the nation, the kind of free expression seen in the love stories and the images that go with them was unique.

She tells “CityNews” that there were several different genres of novels – ideas novels based on social issues, chivalrous stories and domestic drama stories and men’s stories. Novelist Murakami Namiroku, who wrote fiction featuring chivalric gangsters, urged proper payment for this popular fiction and won.

Art lovers will be especially intrigued to spot western motifs in the kuchi-e prints but Hickey says, looking from the other perspective, Raphael was all the rage in Meiji Japan and he sees the to-ing and fro-ing between Japanese and European artists as “reverse Japonism”.

“Melodrama in Meiji Japan”, National Library of Australia, until August 27. Free, no booking required.

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Helen Musa

Helen Musa

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