Turtle Island and Fujiyama

Turtle Island and Fujiyama is a surimono by Ryuryukyo Shinsai in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As a senior pupil of Katsushika Hokusai and a contributor to the Hokusai school, Shinsai created many surimono in which auspicious landscape motifs were brought together in a single emblematic composition. Here Mount Fuji, the iconic mountain whose perfect silhouette had long stood for longevity, purity, and Japan itself, is paired with the image of a tortoise-shaped island. The tortoise was a powerful symbol of long life in East Asian thought, often imagined as bearing the island of the immortals upon its back. Together, Fuji and the turtle island form a layered allusion to longevity, prosperity, and the cosmic stability cherished at the New Year. Shinsai composes the scene with the calm geometry characteristic of his master Hokusai, who himself made Fuji a central preoccupation, but he adapts it to the intimate surimono format. The sheet exploits the technical refinements typical of privately commissioned surimono, including soft color gradations across sea and sky, embossed blindprinting (karazuri) suggesting wave crests and the textured shell of the tortoise, and discreet metallic pigments. Distributed at gatherings of kyoka poets, the print would have invited verses on longevity, the mountain, and the changing of the year. Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/54518.