Kuchi-e Story Illustration (I)

A polychrome woodblock kuchi-e (frontispiece) by Yamamoto Eishun, datable to circa 1910 and held in the Robyn Buntin of Honolulu collection. The sheet is one of four Eishun frontispieces documented by Robyn Buntin and represents the artist working at the late phase of the kuchi-e tradition, when the genre's colour woodblock vocabulary was about to be displaced by lithographic and photographic frontispieces in mass-market publishing. The figure work follows the long-lined late-Meiji bijin manner Eishun absorbed from his teacher Migita Toshihide, with the controlled outline and modest gradated colour appropriate to a sheet that was originally folded three times and tipped into the front of a novel or literary magazine. As is common with Robyn Buntin's kuchi-e records, the specific narrative source has not been identified, but the format and printing convey the genre's quietly dramatic mode — a fragment of fiction translated into a colour-printed image meant to introduce the reader to a story's mood rather than to depict any single scene from it.