- Women in Edo Japan: Contemporary Cinematic Representations
Keiichi Hara’s Miss Hokusai and Masato Harada’s Kakekomi Onna to Kakedashi Otoko are both set in Japan in the later part of its early modern Edo period (1603–1868).1 Under the reign of the Tokugawa shogunate, the flourishing of print culture enabled ordinary people to come into contact with the arts and knowledge that had been previously exclusive to wealthy people of high rank. This dissemination of print culture is one of the subjects dealt with in both films.
The animation film Miss Hokusai provides a feminist perspective on the history of early modern Japan. The heroine is a twenty-three-year-old ukiyo-e (woodblock print) artist, Katsushika O-Ei (Ōi, c.1800–57), whom recent scholarship has rediscovered as not only an essential contributor to the later works of her eccentric but celebrated father, Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), but also a groundbreaking artist in her own right, notable for the contrast in her works of light and darkness. Her works have been featured in a number of recent exhibitions,2 while the first collected edition of O-Ei’s paintings was published in 2015,3 exemplifying efforts in Japan to reevaluate women artists active before [End Page 135] the twentieth century.4 Further examples include two linked exhibitions held in Tokyo from May to June 2015: “Uemura Shoen and Splendid Japanese Women Artists” at the Yamatane Museum of Art, and “Splendid Japanese Women Artists in the Edo Period” at the Kosetsu Memorial Museum on the campus of Jissen Women’s University in Shibuya (see review by Tomi Suzuki in this issue). The former exhibition included Tamako Kataoka’s painting Oei, Hokusai’s Daughter (1982), which emphasized O-Ei’s striking eyes, indicating that O-Ei had captured this contemporary female artist’s imagination.
The director Hara, together with the scriptwriter Miho Maruo, adapted Sarusuberi (Crape Myrtle, 1983–88), the manga short stories of Edo expert Hinako Sugiura (1958–2005), one of the first works in which O-Ei is featured.5 Sugiura vividly described the everyday life of the young O-Ei who lives with Hokusai and fellow artist Zenjiro (Keisai Eisen, 1790–1848) in her thirty short stories that deftly depict Edo customs and the world of ukiyo-e.
Miss Hokusai constitutes a year in the life of O-Ei. She spends each day not only assisting her father as a ghost painter, but also seeking out her own idiom as an independent artist, experiencing her first love for fellow painter Hatsugoro (Totoya Hokkei, 1780–1850) as well as her grief over the illness of her sister, O-Nao. In contrast to Katherine Govier’s novel, The Ghost Brush (2010), which provides an account of her entire life, in Hara’s film version, O-Ei always assumes that she will never attain the same level of accomplishment as Hokusai, to whom she owes her career.6 While she watches her younger sister playing in the snow, O-Ei remembers that Hokusai encouraged her to paint when she was the same age as O-Nao by providing her with a pen and a sheet of paper. At the same time, in the episode in which she undertakes a commission to paint a vision of Hell, [End Page 136] the publisher Manjido visits O-Ei and Hokusai to inform them that the painting’s realism is tormenting the lady of the house with frightful illusions, which have made her ill. She recovers only after Hokusai adds a Buddha elect to the painting. Despite this acknowledgment of her almost supernatural artistic talent, the film begins and ends with O-Ei’s monologue about her great father.
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In Miss Hokusai, O-Ei’s only visible achievement is a fictional portrait of O-Nao, which O-Ei draws at the end of the film, although her...