Kitao Masanobu

Kitao Masanobu (1761-1816), born Iwase Samuru and best known to literary history as Santō Kyōden, occupies an unusual dual perch in late-Edo culture: he was at once one of the most celebrated bijin-ga designers of his generation and one of the most widely read popular novelists of his age. His career as an ukiyo-e artist was concentrated in roughly fifteen years, from the mid-1770s through the late 1780s, yet within that compressed window he produced some of the most opulent and influential designs of late Edo printmaking, above all the canonical Yoshiwara album Seirō Meikun Jihitsu-shū. By the 1790s he had largely set aside the brush in favor of the writing desk, becoming the period's leading author of kibyōshi and sharebon — comic illustrated novellas and witty studies of the pleasure quarters — under his literary name Santō Kyōden. The two halves of his career, image and text, are inseparable: his prints think like fiction, and his fiction sees like a printmaker.

Iwase Samuru was born in 1761 in Edo, the eldest son of a pawnbroker family with strong ties to the urban commoner culture of the shogunal capital. He entered the studio of Kitao Shigemasa (1739-1820), the founder of the Kitao school and one of the dominant bijin-ga masters of the An'ei and Tenmei eras. Under Shigemasa he received the standard ukiyo-e training in figure drawing, calligraphy, and the disciplined observation of contemporary fashion that defined the Kitao style: elongated, dignified women rendered with a calligraphic line that flatters rather than caricatures. He took the studio name Kitao Masanobu and began signing prints in the mid-1770s, while still in his teens.

Masanobu's early prints reveal a young artist working through the major formats of the day. He produced hosoban actor portraits — including memorable images of the kabuki star Ichikawa Monnosuke II in the role of Hayano Kanpei, drawn from the perennially popular vendetta play Kanadehon Chūshingura — and a series of hashira-e (pillar prints) showing courtesans and lovers under cherry trees, beneath umbrellas, and at wayside tea stalls. He also designed several elegant chūban landscape-and-figure series, including Tōto Hana Meisho (Famous Places for Flowers in the Eastern Capital), set at the cherry-viewing sites of Goten-yama and elsewhere, and Tōsei Ryōgoku Hakkei (Eight Contemporary Views of Ryōgoku), which transposed the classical Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang onto the riverside teahouses and fireworks of Edo's most popular pleasure district. A parallel series, Jochū Tedōgu Hakkei (Eight Views of Maids' Utensils), applied the same Eight Views conceit to the everyday objects of a young woman's life — hairpins, fans, bamboo knives — a witty mitate that prefigures the urbane humor of his later fiction.

The decisive event of Masanobu's print career was his collaboration with the publisher Tsutaya Jūzaburō (1750-1797), the visionary impresario who would also build the careers of Utamaro, Sharaku, and Bakin. Tsutaya, headquartered just outside the Yoshiwara's Ōmon gate, specialized in the literature and imagery of the licensed quarter, and Masanobu — already known for his elegant courtesan designs — became one of his star artists. Their joint masterpiece, published by Tsutaya in 1784, was Seirō Meikun Jihitsu-shū, also called Shin Bijin Awase Jihitsu Kagami (A New Mirror Comparing the Calligraphy of Beauties, sometimes translated Comparing New Beauties of the Yoshiwara — A Mirror of Their Own Writings). An oversized album of seven double-page color prints, it pairs the leading courtesans of the Yoshiwara — Utagawa and Nanasato of the Yotsumeya, Hanaōgi of the Ōgiya, Somenosuke of the Matsuba-ya, and others — in candid, conversational arrangements, each beauty accompanied by reproductions of her own handwriting and poems. The album represents one of the most ambitious deluxe productions of the late eighteenth century: it is brilliantly designed, lavishly printed, and conceptually sophisticated, framing the courtesans not merely as objects of desire but as literate, named individuals with distinctive hands. It remains the single most celebrated work of Masanobu's career and a touchstone of Edo bijin-ga.