Ghastly Japanese woodcuts arrive just in time for Halloween
Just in time for Halloween, Asia Society of Texas has put together a remarkable exhibition of Japanese woodcuts that celebrate the uncanny and ghastly.
“Yokai: Scenes of the Supernatural in Japanese Woodblock Prints” comes to Houston courtesy of the Scripps College in Claremont, Calif. Each of the five rooms tackles a different facet of Japanese myth and legend and is dominated by a large projection of a garish woodcut. Rather than the blank walls, the projections are shown against sheer cloth, adding to the eeriness of the material.
Many of the subjects will be instantly familiar to fans of manga and video games, which is not surprising considering that some of the work on display is actually from the precursors to manga in the
19th century. Woodblock art prints, thanks to the illustrations, were an easy way to spread information and stories to illiterate populations. In doing so, they created a cultural art form that was both widely popular and culturally significant. That the pictures incorporated visual aspects of Kabuki and Noh theater further melded them into a kind of image-based zeitgeist.
Some of the most striking pictures on display are collections of ghost (yurei) stories, which are rendered in a macabre brilliance that make a “Hellraiser” comic look subdued.
A single panel woodblock print that stands out is Utagawa Kunisada’s 1850 depiction of Okiku. Legend has it she was a beautiful young maid at Himeji Castle who was relentlessly pursued by one of her lord’s retainers. The lecher tried to extort her by saying he would accuse her of stealing a dish. When she still refused, he beat her and dropped her in the castle well to die. Afterward, she appeared on the grounds and could be heard counting plates. When she found one missing, she would let out a bloodcurdling scream.
Kunisada’s art is a fairly typical example of the time, but the way he captures Okiku’s torment is absolutely haunting. Her body disappears into gray tail that reaches up past the border of the picture, almost as if it can’t be contained in the rest of the scene. While undeniably cartoonish, there is still an overwhelming sense of dread in the depiction.
Like any good set of spooky stories, the pictures and their history reveal a lot of things about the culture that produced them. The slightly comical but still powerful tsukumogami are household objects that have become spirits, thanks to years of neglect. They often look like anthropomorphized items seen in 1930s Disney shorts, but they were known to be deadly trickster who would take revenge on the masters who neglected them. While a good ghost story, it also carries with it a moral to treasure possessions and not leave the old behind for the new without regard. A series of tsukumogami are displayed in the exhibit as collectible cards, almost like an ancestor of Pokémon.
Gods and monster, demons and helpful spirits, the “Yokai” exhibit is a fascinating collection of the Japanese otherworlds, where things beyond human understanding live. Visiting it is a chance to see the roots of so many popular creatures seen in mass media today, which would likely give the original artists a sense of pride to know how they have reached across time and language to share these stories with us.