Explaining Pictures: Buddhist Propaganda and Etoki Storytelling in Japan (review)

The term etoki (picture explication) refers to a venerable storytelling tradition employing narrative paintings that illustrate didactic tales, sutra passages, biographies, military escapades, and legends concerning holy sites. In the 1980s the subject attracted gifted Japanese scholars who scoured museums, libraries, temples, and private collections for information and produced reams of groundbreaking studies. The pioneering etoki scholars Victor Mair and Barbara Ruch introduced picture narration to English readers, but there has not been an English-language overview of the broad historical contours of Japanese etoki until now, with the publication of Ikumi Kaminishi's Explaining Pictures: Buddhist Propaganda and Etoki Storytelling in Japan.

Kaminishi narrows her focus to etoki incorporating Pure Land themes or utilized by Pure Land sects, but that still leaves an immense amount of material within her purview. The book's eight chapters span the late tenth through the nineteenth centuries in four sections. The first traces the footsteps of Japanese scholars through early documentary evidence of Buddhist painting narration in Japan, including a handful of diary entries written by witnesses of etoki performance between the tenth and fifteenth centuries. Kaminishi then reviews previous efforts to connect narrative dots in eleventh-century paintings of the biography of Shōtoku Taishi, presents her own analysis of the paintings' complicated compositional logic, and argues that such nonlinear images require oral or textual decoding. She enlivens her historical material with a modern etoki of Shōtoku Taishi's biography in the Jōdo Shinshū tradition.

Part 2 introduces Pure Land thought and imagery with a discussion of the Taima mandara. Its etoki, Kaminishi writes, "propagandizes the fundamental Buddhist didactic of meditation," as the Kanmuryōjukyō upon which it is based "indoctrinates visualization as an alternative method of meditation" (p. 60). She then moves to the thirteenth-century Taima mandara engi emaki, which contains an early illustration of etoki performance, albeit a miraculous one, and to Pure Land advocates who went beyond Buddhist institutional precincts to offer salvation directly to commoners, registering the names of believers and collecting alms. Kaminishi attempts an original reading of famous twelfth-century diary passages mentioning Izumo Shōnin, known for advocating hyakumanben (one million times) nenbutsu practice, speculating that he was one of the first monks to perform etoki of Pure Land themes in conjunction with promotion of the nenbutsu. This section concludes with the observations that images displayed during mushiboshi airings and degaichō traveling exhibitions were regarded as sacred icons and that similar traditions are alive today in the Yūzū Nenbutsu sect, where an image of Amida circulates among parishes to be used in rituals involving physical contact with the painting.

Part 3 treats itinerant performers of etoki in light of economic and social changes in the medieval period, showing how narrators were portrayed in the late thirteenth-century Ippen shōnin eden, the fifteenth-century Sanjūniban shokunin utaawase, and other works. Itinerants raised money for temples and moved freely through the land among people of different classes. Kaminishi contends that etoki narrators "shared living space" with other people on the margins of society where they exchanged stories and skills (pp. 110-11). The fourth section discusses images and ideas preached by itinerant Kumano bikuni and lay priests from Tateyama. The paintings they used eclectically absorbed iconography from continental and other traditions, and Kaminishi explores the possibility, first noted by Japanese scholars, that European iconography brought to Japan by missionaries to surmount language barriers to religious teaching may have influenced Kumano kanjin jikkai zu. She also looks at how the Kumano and Tateyama cults specifically appealed to female audiences.

Explaining Pictures thus gallops through the centuries, introducing images that have spawned cascades of Japanese scholarship. The interdisciplinary methodologies crucial to researching etoki are daunting. Scarcity of documentation of this hybrid art form has compelled researchers to explore peripheral images and practices with common iconographical, literary, historical, or religious themes. The most prolific etoki scholars have solid backgrounds in literature, essential training for reading...