Kunisada's Tale of Genji

This album of Japanese wood cut prints by Kunisada II (Utagawa Kunisada II) illustrate "The Tale of Genji" - one of the most important works of Japanese fiction. "The Tale of Genji" is an 11th-century portrait of life in the medieval Japanese court written by Lady Murasaki Shikibu. Murasaki herself was the daughter of a provincial governor, and belonged to the second rank of the court aristocracy. Her work has been described as the world's first novel, but was actually written in instalments. Each of the illustrations depicts one of the 54 chapters. The book describes the life of a son of a Japanese emperor, known as Hikaru Genji, or Shining Genji. For political reasons, Genji loses his royal status and begins a career as an imperial officer. The tale focuses on his relationships with various women and life in the aristocratic society of the time.

These images all have shells depicted on them with contain symbols known as genji-mon, which are emblems relating to each of the 54 chapters. "The Tale of Genji" was a very popular subject for ukiyo-e prints, of which this is an example. Ukiyo-e Japanese woodblock prints were produced from the 17th to the 20th centuries and were an affordable form of mass-produced art made for townsmen. The term Ukiyo-e itself means "pictures of the floating world" which refers to the rising urban merchant class who were unbound by traditional Japanese laws and hence were "floating".

Find out more about the Tales of Genji

The Kunisada images are part of a larger collection of Japanese material owned by Dr. Henry Dyer LLD one time principal of the Imperial College of Engineering, Tokyo. The Dyer family donated these to Edinburgh City Libraries and Information Services in the 1940's and 50's. As well as the Kunisada images, also gifted were photographs by Baron Raimund von Stillfried, an Austrian photographer practising in Japan in the 1870's, and Japanese prints, consisting of 8 albums, 9 kakaemonos or hanging pictures, 3 makimonos or rolling pictures, and many original watercolour sketches and woodcuts. Artists represented are Hiroshige (1798-1858), one of the foremost landscape artists; Sadahide (c.1840), a pupil of Kunisada; and Kuniyoshi (1798-1861), a member of the Toyokuni school.