絵巻物

The tradition & historical record

Emakimono (絵巻物, lit. 'picture scroll'; also emaki-mono) or emaki (絵巻) is an illustrated horizontal narration system of painted handscrolls that dates back to Nara-period (710–794 CE) Japan. Initially copying their much older Chinese counterparts in style, during the succeeding Heian (794–1185) and Kamakura periods (1185–1333), Japanese emakimono developed their own distinct style. The term therefore refers only to Japanese painted narrative scrolls. As in the Chinese and Korean scrolls, emakimono combine calligraphy and illustrations and are painted, drawn or stamped on long rolls of paper or silk sometimes measuring several metres. The reader unwinds each scroll little by little, revealing the story as seen fit. Emakimono are therefore a narrative genre similar to the book, developing romantic or epic stories, or illustrating religious texts and legends. Fully anchored in the yamato-e style, these Japanese works are above all an everyday art, centered on the human being and the sensations conveyed by the artist. Although the very first 8th-century emakimono were copies of Chinese works, emakimono of Japanese taste appeared from the 10th century in the Heian imperial court, especially among aristocratic ladies with refined and reclusive lives, who devoted themselves to the arts, poetry, painting, calligraphy and literature. ¹

The term emakimono or e-makimono, often abbreviated as emaki, is made up of the kanji e (絵, "painting"), maki (巻, "scroll" or "book") and mono (物, "thing"). The term refers to long scrolls of painted paper or silk, which range in length from under a metre to several metres long; some are reported as measuring up to 12 metres (40 ft) in length. The scrolls tell a story or a succession of anecdotes (such as literary chronicles or Buddhist parables), combining pictorial and narrative elements, the combination of which characterises the dominant art movements in Japan between the 12th and 14th centuries. An emakimono is read, according to the traditional method, sitting on a mat with the scroll placed on a low table or on the floor. The reader then unwinds with one hand while rewinding it with the other hand, from right to left (according to the writing direction of Japanese). In this way, only part of the story can be seen – about 60 centimetres (24 in), though more can be unrolled – and the artist creates a succession of images to construct the story. Once the emakimono has been read, the reader must rewind the scroll again in its original reading direction. The emakimono is kept closed by a cord and stored alone or with other rolls in a box intended for this purpose, and which is sometimes decorated with elaborate patterns. An emakimono can consist of several successive scrolls as required of the story – the Hōnen Shōnin Eden was made up of 48 scrolls, although the standard number typically falls between one and three. An emakimono is made up of two elements: the sections of calligraphic text known as kotoba-gaki, and the sections of paintings referred to as e; their size, arrangement and number vary greatly, depending on the period and the artist. ¹

Handscrolls originated in ancient Chinese documents originally being made of bamboo and wooden slips before evolving into paper and silk handscrolls during the Han dynasty. Handscrolls were introduced to Japan centuries later through the spread of Buddhism. The earliest extant Japanese handscroll was created in the 8th century and focuses on the life of the Buddha. This work dates from the 8th century to the Nara period: the Illustrated Sutra of Cause and Effect, which traces the life of the Gautama Buddha, founder of the Buddhist religion, until his Illumination. Still naive in style (Six Dynasties and early Tang dynasty) with the paintings arranged in friezes above the text, it is very likely a copy of an older Chinese model, several versions of which have been identified, though no such originals survive in China today. Although subsequent classical emakimono feature a very different style from that of this work, it foreshadows the golden age of the movement that came four centuries later, from the 12th century CE onwards. ¹

The Heian period appears today as a peak of Japanese civilization via the culture of the emperor's court, although intrigue and disinterest in things of the state resulted in the Genpei War. This perception arises from the aesthetics and the codified and refined art of living that developed at the Heian court, as well as a certain restraint and melancholy born from the feeling of the impermanence of things (a state of mind referred to as mono no aware in Japanese). Furthermore, the rupture of relations with China until the 9th century, due to disorders related to the collapse of the glorious Tang dynasty, promoted what Miyeko Murase has described as the "emergence of national taste" as a truly Japanese culture departed for the first time from Chinese influence since the early Kofun period. This development was first observed in the literature of the Heian women: unlike the men, who studied Chinese writing from a young age, the women adopted a new syllabary, hiragana, which was simpler and more consistent with the phonetics of Japanese. Heian period novels (monogatari) and diaries (nikki) recorded intimate details about life, love affairs and intrigues at court as they developed; the best known of these is the radical Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu, lady-in-waiting of the 10th century Imperial Court. ¹

The beginnings of the Japanese-inspired Heian period painting technique, retrospectively named yamato-e, can be found initially in some aspects of Buddhist painting of the new esoteric Tendai and Shingon sects, then more strongly in Pure Land Buddhism (Jodō); after a phase when Chinese techniques were copied, the art of the Japanese archipelago became progressively more delicate, lyrical, decorative with less powerful but more colorful compositions. ¹

If almost all emakimono belong to the genre of yamato-e, several sub-genres stand out within this style, including in the Heian period onna-e ("women's painting") and otoko-e ("men's painting"). Several classic scrolls of each genre perfectly represent these pictorial movements. ¹

First, the Genji Monogatari Emaki (designed between around 1120 and 1140), illustrating the famous eponymous novel, narrates the political and amorous intrigues of Prince Hikaru Genji; the rich and opaque colors affixed over the entire surface of the paper (tsukuri-e method), the intimacy and melancholy of the composition and finally the illustration of the emotional peaks of the novel taking place only inside the Imperial Palace are characteristics of the onna-e subgenre of yamato-e, reserved for court narratives usually written by aristocratic ladies. ¹

The era covering the end of the Heian period and much of the Kamakura period, or the 12th and 13th centuries, is commonly described by art historians as "the golden age" of the art of emakimono. ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Emakimono”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

emakimono is Japanese narrative handscroll, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²

The source record links this tradition to 9 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. ²