Utagawa School (artist )

Urashima Tarō [浦島太郎], the Dragon King's palace (龍宮城), and seven ama (海女 or あま) female divers and an octopus

Print

---

Date:1850s
Dimensions:9 in x 7 in (Overall dimensions) Medium:Japanese woodblock print
Links Description:The myth of Urashima Tarō is well known in many versions in Japan. A humble fisherman who saves a sea creature - which can talk to him. For this act of kindness (or persuasion, depending on which myth you are following), Tarō is allowed to visit the palace of the Dragon King at the bottom of the sea. In time, Tarō becomes homesick and wants to return to his village. His wish is granted, but what for him seemed like a short period away is actually decades if not longer. A Japanese version of Rip van Winkle. When Tarō returns no one knows him, his home and family are long gone and somewhere in here lies one or more morals.

In this two page book illustration you can see Tarō with his fishing pole, a shell fish which has opened up to reveal the image of he Dragon King's palace in the upper left, an old woman with pendulous breast - perhaps an indication of the time he spends away from home, and a cast of 6 young, bare-breasted, female divers surrounding a rather quizzical octopus.

We would love to see the other illustrations from this book and will post some if we are ever able to locate them.

****

Something which might surprise you

In the mid-1850s a crowd pleasing exhibition opened in the Asakusa district of Edo, now Tokyo, where life-sized carved, animatronic dolls, were displayed for the price of an entrance fee. The crowds must have ooohed and aaahed a lot with a child-like awe and been bug-eyed most of the time.

This illustration of seven ama divers surrounding a large octopus was one such display. While the element of fantasy infuses this image it is based on an actual scene of life-sized carvings of articulated naked women, with flexible hips and limbs, in grass skirts and what clearly was a giant octopus which surely had moving arms. It must have been quite a sight.

****

Laurence Oliphant wrote in Narrative of the Earl of Elgin’s Mission to China and Japan in the Years 1857, ’58, ’59, vol. 2, published by Blackwood and Sons, pages 215-216, that their visit to the awe-inspiring exhibition at Asakusa, was almost like a mid-20th century visit to some of the rides at Disneyland. "Immediately on entering, a gorgeously decorated junk, almost the size of nature, gaily freighted with a pleasure-party, was sailing over an ocean so violently agitated that only one result could be anticipated in real life: but the junk was merely a sort of scene to conceal the exhibition behind it. This consisted of a series of groups of figures carved in wood the size of life, and as cleverly coloured as Madame Tussaud’s wax-works.... No. 5 was a group of women bathing in the sea; one of them had been caught in the folds of a cuttleish [actually an octopus], the others, in alarm, were escaping, leaving their companion to her fate. The cuttle-ish was represented on a huge scale, its eyes, eyelids, and mouth being made to move simultaneously by a man inside the head."
Related entities picture book (ehon - 絵本) (genre)

---