Utagawa Kuniyoshi (歌川国芳) (artist 11/15/1797 – 03/05/1861)
Third Princess (Nyosan no miya) from The Tale of Genji playing with her cat
ca 1830
9.75 in x 28.5 in (Overall dimensions) Japanese woodblock print
Signed: Chōōrō Kuniyoshi ga
朝櫻楼国芳画
Publisher: Maruya Jinpachi (Marks 294 - seal 08-088)
Art Institute of Chicago - Buncho print of this same theme
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston - Harunobu example A beauty in fabulous kimono pushes aside heavy drapery as she dangles a fluffy ball for a cat wearing a kerchief-collar.
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David Waterhouse wrote: "Nyosan-no-miya (or Onna San-no-miya, Lady of the Third Palace') was the third daughter of Retired Emperor Suzuka. In the novel she became the wife of Prince Genji; but meanwhile carried on an affair with Kashiwagi, the son of Genji's friend Tō no Chūjō, and by him gave birth to a boy, Kaoru. Ch. 34 is mainly about her; and at the end of it Kashiwagi, who cannot let it be known that he is Kaoru's father, and cannot visit Nyosan-no-miya, seeks consolation by obtaining and fondling her pet cat instead."
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"A pivotal moment in Tale of Genji... occurs when he young courtier Kashiwagi accidentally glimpses the Third Princess (Niyosan no Miya), Prince Genji's wife, and instantly falls passionately in love with her. The scene occurs in chapter 34, "New Herbs: Part One" (Wakana no Jō, at Prince Genji's mansion. Young courtiers, led by Kashiwagi and Yūgiri, are playing a kind of football (kemari) under blossoming cherry trees, while Genji watches from the verandah. Suddenly there is a commotion: a pet cat on a lead, chased by a larger cat, runs out onto the verandah, with ladies-in-waiting in pursuit. The cat's lead catches in one of the hanging blinds, pulling the blind aside just long enough for Kashiwagi to catch sight of the Third Princess standing inside the room. For such a high-ranking woman to allow herself to be seen by a man was a grave lapse of propriety, made even worse by the fact that she was standing rather than seated."
Quoted from: The Actor's Image: Print Makers of the Katsukawa School, #18, p. 84.
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The Third Princess has blackened her teeth and is wearing artificial eyebrows toward the top of her forehead after shaving off her real ones. This was referred to as okimayu (置眉) and was also practiced by some men of high rank at the Heian court. Tooth blackening is known as ohaguro (お歯黒).
Or, as U.A. Casal wrote in an article, 'Japanese Cosmetics and Teeth-blackening', in volume 9 of 'The Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan' in 1966, on page 16: "There were times, it would seem, as was done in China, plucked out their brows completely and replaced them with finely arched painted substitutes. At other times, the substitutes were rather broad "patches" painted high on the forehead, called motomayu (literally "base of the hair eyebrows"), which may be seen clearly on the masks for women in nō plays. These were painted with a black preparation called haizumi ("ash ink" ?), made by mixing soot of burning rapeseed oil with a glue, probably funori, a miniscule seaweed. This facial "improvement" was not by women outside the upper classes and thus was a token of social superiority."
How to blacken your teeth, in case you were wondering
Casal, as per the title of his article, gives a detailed description on page 24 of what it takes to blacken one's teeth. "The backening [sic] generally was done with a preparation based on iron acetate and therefore known as tesshō ("iron juice") or dashigane ("extracted metal"). Among commoners, it was simply called o-kane ("the honorable metal") or o-haguro ("the honorable tooth-black"). One way of making it was to place iron filing in a small pot with saké and juice of the snake gourd (hechima, Luffa petola) and let the mixture simmer near the hearth or expose it to the sun in summer. Another was to plunge a glowing-red piece of iron into a small portion of saké diluted with water and after five or six days to skim off the scum and keep it in a cup near a fire until warm before adding powdered gallnuts (fushi) and iron filings for further heating."
"The resulting dye was applied to the teeth with a brush of soft hair or feathers. According to some accounts, the liquid had to be warmed to give the best results, and the wet brush was dipped into powdered gallnuts. When blackening was being done, "the face of the woman should look south" - always the most propitious attitude. For a beginner, two or three days was necessary before the effect was really satisfactory, and afterward it was recommended that before repainting the previous coating be rubbed off, though pristine whiteness was neither possible nor necessary, with finely powdered charcoal or red cuttlefish bones on the frayed end of a stick of soft wood."
In footnote 47 on page 25 Casal quoted a passage from Satow's A Diplomat in China in reference to singing and dancing girls in Osaka in 1867: "Some of them were certainly pretty, others decidedly ugly, but we thought their looks ruined in any case by the blackened teeth and white-lead-powdered faces. In later times I became more accustomed to the shining black teeth which were then a distinctive mark of a married woman, as well as every 'artiste' old enough to have an admirer, so much so that when the empress set the fashion by discontinuing the practice, it was long before I, in common with most Japanese, could reconcile myself to the new style."
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Note that there are numerous prints in the Lyon Collection where it appears that the teeth of the figures have been intentionally presented as blackened. Of course, this is mostly of women, considering the age they were thought to live in and their role in society's hierarchies. In many cases, to see these examples, you may have to enlarge individual images. And, if you too are a collector of traditional ukiyo-e, then you may want to reexamine the prints you own, armed with this new information.
Maruya Jinpachi (丸屋甚八) (publisher)
Kakemono-e - 掛物絵 (genre)
beautiful woman picture (bijin-ga - 美人画) (genre)
Genji related prints (Genji-e - 源氏絵) (genre)