Paper: Fujiwara no Sadaie (Kami: Teika), from the series "The Four Friends of the Writing Table for the Ichiyo Circle (Ichiyoren bunbo shiyu)"

Paper: Fujiwara no Sadaie (Kami: Teika), a 1822 surimono by Yashima Gakutei in the Art Institute of Chicago, is another sheet from the series The Four Friends of the Writing Table for the Ichiyo Circle (Ichiyoren bunbo shiyu). Fujiwara no Sadaie, better known as Teika, was the early thirteenth-century court poet, anthologist, and critic whose Hyakunin isshu compilation became the central canon of classical Japanese verse for later generations. To assign paper - the surface on which poems were written and preserved - to Teika is to make him the patron of the written word itself, the figure through whom Japanese poetic tradition reached the kyoka writers of nineteenth-century Edo. The Ichiyo circle, for whom Gakutei designed the series, would have grasped the genealogy immediately: their own poetry stood in a long line that ran back through Teika to the Heian classics. Working within the Hokusai school under Katsushika Hokusai, Yashima Gakutei composes Teika with the dignified, slightly archaic line proper to a classical poet, dressing him in court costume and reserving generous white space for the printed kyoka verses. The deluxe surimono techniques that define the genre at its peak - mineral pigments, karazuri embossing, and burnished metallic powders - register the cultural weight of the subject. As a Yashima Gakutei kyoka-e in the Hokusai school manner, Paper: Fujiwara no Sadaie is a small meditation on poetic inheritance.