'ART & SOUL
Greetings with elegance

Blending images and poetry, surimono were produced using the finest papers and pigments and the most skilled craftsmen worked upon them, writes B. N. Goswamy

THEY come in all forms and shapes and sizes: on paper or silk, even papyrus; as photographs; as recorded, sometimes musically recorded, messages; lately, via the internet and e-mail. I speak of course of greeting cards, today a billion dollar business across the world. Most of them leave me cold, but what interested me greatly, when I read about it in conjunction with a splendid show, was the wonderful world that the Japanese created for themselves some 200 years ago when they ‘invented’ surimono. Meaning, literally, ‘printed things’, these were privately published, limited edition prints that the elite in Japan used once for conveying greetings or announcements. To them belonged an air of great refinement; upon them lingers still the fragrance of an elegant, bygone age.

Many people, one imagines, know something about ukiyo-e, Japanese woodblock prints: ‘pictures of the floating world’ they were called, for often they drew upon the ordinary life for their themes. But even when some of the most famous artists of Japan became involved in making them, they were essentially reflections of the non-aristocratic Japanese lifestyle, looked upon with some disdain. Surimono, on the other hand, were different: highly sophisticated in content and technique, they, as the finest flower of the ukiyo-e tradition, circulated among the upper crust that included artists and poets, celebrated actors and geishas, intellectuals and entertainers. To mark a clear distinction: the usual ukiyo-e prints were produced with the intention of being distributed as widely as possible, surimono, on the other hand, were privately published, and were almost never sold to the general public. There was about them an air of intimacy, almost of private thoughts shared. Blending image and poetry — often complex verbal-visual exchanges — they, unlike the usual pictures of the floating world, were produced using the finest papers and pigments; the most skilled craftsmen — engravers and printers — worked upon them; and celebrated poets wrote for them.

To get the flavour of surimono prints, it is necessary perhaps to try and reconstruct the cultural milieu in which they came into being, and flourished. Very often, the poems, which were such an integral part of the prints, were created by ‘circles’: groups of men and women who gathered in cultural groups or salons in order to converse, drink wine, and compose poetry. They would meet regularly in order to mark certain occasions in the life of the group, such as New Year celebrations, weddings, tea ceremonies, name changes, anniversaries, and the like.

Poems would be written, or chosen, for the occasion; artists were commissioned to create images that matched the poems, picking up the season, the mood, reflected in them; and craftsmen asked to turn out a small, sometimes very small, edition of what one would today call deluxe prints. The work finished, it was time to share it with friends for everyone to savour it — at leisure, alone or in intimate company — every word examined, every stroke taken in. Allusions were sought to be understood, secret messages decoded. The seduction in an image of a lovely geisha might lie thus as much in her lithe figure as in the at-first-unnoticed calligraphed invitation printed on her kimono; a crow perched on a bamboo fence and gazing at the sun in the distance might contain a reference to a special moment spent in the countryside with a loved one; the writing desk with reed pens resting on it and an open book lying at the side could be reminders of a literary evening spent with a cherished friend. In these prints sat nestling a quiet little world of subtle hints, nuanced memories.

For those not admitted into the inner circle, as it were, not everything portrayed or written on a surimono print would have been easy to understand. A superbly designed print by the artist Kunisada made in 1820 thus shows a celebrated Kabuki actor standing in front of a rectangular whetstone, wearing a traditional butterfly robe, and holding a painting of the Seven Gods of Good Fortune. What the whetstone stands for remains obscured from view — perhaps an allusion to a celebrated theatrical piece associated with the actor — and it is only with effort that one decodes the dragon prow of the boat in which the gods are sailing to be a reference to the Year of the Dragon, which must then have just been ushered. Traditionally, one needs to remember, the Good Fortune painting was placed underneath a person’s pillow on the first night of the New Year, who would then hope to dream of riches that night. If he or she was successful, then the result would be prosperity throughout the year. The exquisite design apart, it is all these allusions, and the poetic references, that would turn the print into an object to treasure, among friends.

In surimono prints, what often added delight to the image was the poetry calligraphed next to it. It could be a series of short poems that were recited in the circle some days before with the winning poem preceded by a discreetly placed circle. Or it could be one of those ‘mad poems’ as they were called — kyoka — with their 31-syllable structure that made extensive use of wordplay and often parodied courtly verse through double-entendre and other devices. Kyoka poetry, one needs to remind oneself, had become a craze in 19th century Japan, often sending a whole generation into a spin of light-heartedness.

One speaks of all this — the refinement, the elevation, the aesthetics — with some kind of an ache, however. For in our day, come the New Year, or something similar, one knows that one is going to be buried again under mass-produced greetings in banal verses and counterfeit emotion. Something like, say,

Or:

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