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The exhibition is really about how the tale of Genji was read and interpreted over the past 1000 years. A great number of objects in the exhibition came from Japan. We have two national treasures that have never been exhibited outside of Japan before. That is, we have a Han period Lotus Sutra, gorgeously decorated, related to the reception, the Buddhist reception, of the tale; and behind me are a pair of screens by the Edo period artist Sotatsu.
Sotatsu was famous for presenting a landscape in a simplified, abbreviated, bold, graphic form. It's a flattened perspective. And all of these became trademarks of the school.
We also have a tremendous number of artworks by female artists, writers, and illustrators. In this paired-down mode of Genji painting, which is done entirely in ink on paper, it is a very playful format. The mode is called ink line painting. Here you're looking at a small scroll. Actually, it's a set of six small scrolls from the New York Public Library. They've been attributed to a young woman and they date to 1554. These represent the women of the Akashi Clan, and this painting really shows their triumph. So it really emphasizes the role of female characters in a way that a lot of the other Genji paintings do not. One of the essential parts of this exhibition is the focus on marital unions between powerful families.
These gorgeous lacquer objects—a palanquin—was used to transport a princess to her new home. So the beautiful decoration on the outside consists of the crest of the Tokugawa family and the family crest of the Komei. The family crest represents the marriage between the two families and a political union. Inside is decorated with very, very fine paintings. The paintings are actually from the tale of Genji. The bride read the tale of Genji to prepare for their married life, and they learned about music, poetry, incense culture, also games. One of the most popular ways to play with the tale of Genji and its 54 chapters was the so-called Genji. This deck actually contains 180 cards. Each deck had fifty-four cards representing the fifty-four chapters of the tale. The first card has a very detailed painting that represents the content of the scene, and the second card, again, only with calligraphy. The game was about matching the two cards because the cards contain two lines of the poem. And this set of cards was also part of somebody's wedding dowry in the 18th century.
When we look at the history of Genji imagery, we see hand-scrolled paintings or album paintings done in a very miniature fashion. Sometimes the fan paintings, as we see on the screens that are also featured in the exhibition, but one of the great breakthroughs is in the 16th and 17th century when we started to see Genji paintings done in the large format of screens. In Japanese, such screens are called byobu. And byobu literally means wind screens. They blocked the drafts from coming across a room. Painted screens played a larger role in Japanese art than ever occurred in China or Korea.
Incense was used in many, many ways in the Han period. It was part of the Buddhist cult. You could offer incense to the deities. It also was used to scent the hair of the women, the kimonos, and also the rooms. This game here is the so-called Genji incense game. So, it has fifty-two combinations of five types of incense words. As you can see, the tools for the incense game were kept in a beautiful lacquer box. The small utensils are very functional to handle the hot charcoal and the ash. This represents the influence of the incense culture that was getting more and more prominent from the beginning of the 17th century.
So, over the course of history, there were many adaptations of the tale of Genji. One of the most remarkable ones was done by the manga artist Yamato Waki. She created a full translation of the tale of Genji into comic form between the years of 1979 and 1993. During the course of creating her black and white manga, she created these beautiful paintings as frontispieces for each volume. So these original paintings by the female artist Yamato Waki are shown in this gallery.
When we were planning the exhibition, one thing that was very special is to emphasize this Buddhist context for the understanding of the tale, but also for the Buddhist veneration of Murasaki Shikibu. So we've done something very special in this exhibition to make it accessible to an international audience. We want the tale of Genji exhibition to be a way that people can approach Japanese art, even if they're coming here for the first time and aren't familiar with the tale.