Utagawa Hiroshige, Views of Ōmi #3: Autumn Moon At Ishiyama Temple, 1834
Twenty years ago I wrote here about the tradition of 'Eight Views' in Chinese and Japanese art, stemming from the original Eight Views of the Hsiao and Hsiang Rivers. The adoption of this theme in Japan was helped by the fact that only two of the eight actually mention places in China. As Haruo Shirane writes in Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons (2012), this flexibility led 'artist, poet and audience to graft their own favourite domestic and local places onto them' - Edo, Kanazawa and most famously The Eight Views of Ōmi (Ōmi hakkei), which I listed in my earlier blog post. Here I'll be focusing on one of these, the Autumn Moon at Ishiyama, for which Hiroshige designed a lovely print in 1834, where the southern end of Lake Biwa shimmers behind the hillside.
Views of Ōmi became so well known that by the eighteenth century it was possible to parody them. Suzuki Harunobu's 1766 Zashiki Hakkei, Eight Parlour Views, were domestic versions of the eight landscapes, with the Autumn Moon at Ishiyama transformed into a Mirror Stand. The Art Institute of Chicago has a copy and you can see below how the shape of a crescent moon appears as a result of the way the mirror is held on its stand. Autumn is signified by the miscanthus grass blowing outside this lady's window. Shirane explains that this punning mitate technique 'creates a double vision, superimpopsing the exterior landscape ... onto the interior world of urban commoners in contemporary Edo'. The mirror reflects the beauty of the woman just as Lake Biwa reflects the light of the harvest moon.
This is all very tasteful, but Suzuki Harunobu also produced erotic prints for private consumption... Again there is a version of the Autumn Moon at Ishiyama, in these Fashionable Eight Parlour Views (1769), and again the landscape has been turned into a woman and a mirror, but she is half naked and the figure behind here is a man, grasping and fondling her. The plant outside is now a flowering pink - a nadeshiko, the word for which used to mean "the woman I love" in waka poetry. The mirror no longer resembles a crescent moon; instead it is the woman herself whos body is white as she emerges from her robes like parting clouds. Shirane explains a further pun in text that Harunobu included which refers to the pedestal unit, utena. This word can also mean 'calyx' and thus, metaphorically, female genitals. I don't normally refer readers to Wikipedia but if you are interested in all this it is well worth looking at their lengthy article on the Zashiki Hakkai, analysing each one and quoting Haruo Shirane.
