Nihon eitai-gura (Japan's Treasury for the Ages)

Yoshida Hambei's illustrations for Ihara Saikaku's Nippon eitaigura (Japan's Treasury for the Ages), published in the first month of Jōkyō 5 (1688), are among the foundational visual documents of the seventeenth-century Kamigata commercial revolution. Saikaku's text - thirty short stories in six volumes - chronicles the rise and fall of merchant families in Kyoto, Osaka, and Edo, presenting in vivid narrative form the new social class whose economic ascent had begun to reshape Tokugawa Japan in the decades following the Meireki fire of 1657. The book became one of the most-read works of the chōnin (townsman) literary movement and is regarded today as a key document of early-modern Japanese economic and social history. Hambei's monochrome sumi-zuri-e illustrations - cut by Kyoto block-carvers and printed in the workshops of the publishers Sawada and Mori - place the reader inside the merchant houses and street scenes Saikaku describes: shopkeepers haggling over abacuses, women weaving textiles, families counting their account books, beggars and itinerant peddlers passing in the background. The illustrations supplied seventeenth-century readers with their first sustained visual portrait of the new urban merchant world, and they remain the primary pictorial source for that culture's material life - dress, interior arrangement, business implements, and social hierarchy. The British Museum holds this copy from a multi-volume set, accession number 1979-0305-0-45-1; the Smithsonian's Freer Study Collection holds another complete copy. The composition is typical of Hambei's mature style: a flexible springy contour line, an interest in textile pattern and surface ornament, and a dense pictorial field in which the protagonists share space with subsidiary figures observing the scene.