Paper short abstract:

Through comparison of antiquarian costume studies texts with illustrated kimono pattern books, this paper will show how scholars and poets forged multiple meanings with apparently trivial images and words that circulated within the literary world of the late seventeenth century.

Paper long abstract:

In the late seventeenth century, two kinds of text on clothing circulated: one offered studies of costume in antiquity, the other models for kosode robes to be ordered and worn in the present. We may think them quite distinct, with antiquarian texts looking backward and pattern books aimed at the latest in fashion, yet these text types intersect in their links to literature, which inspired both. They are also similar in having didactic goals and incorporating images. A comparison of their multimodal word and image environments illuminates important features of meaning-making in both.

Tsuboi Yoshitomo (or Yoshichika, 1657-1735), one of the pioneer commoner scholars of yūsoku kojitsu (manners and practices of noble and warrior houses), published such commentaries as the expanded Genji nannyo shōzokushō (1696, Gleanings on male and female costume from [the Tale of] Genji, originally authored by Gessonsai Sōseki) and Makura no sōshi shōzokushō (Selections on costume from the Pillow Book). Tsuboi maintains a focus on text, providing illustrations only rarely; he assumes that his audience knows the classics. Tachiba Fukaku (1662-1753), a haikai poet with over a thousand followers, provided an elaborate preface with multiple literary allusions for Hiinagata matsu no tsuki (Pattern book of the moon through pines, 1688). Illustrations by Take Hiratsugi (or Bu Heiji) in the style of Sugimura Jihei have no text except for the occasional Chinese character embedded near the shoulder or hem of a robe. Still, such illustrations strongly invoke classical poetic sources, since the designs of kosode that a draper might copy pictorialize (kaigaka suru, to borrow the terminology of Joshua Mostow) famous waka poems for viewers to recognize. Hinagatabon model books are not considered literary works, nor art works, yet they were expected to do things that both do—to allude to literature, and to be aesthetically pleasing. Why did such active poets and scholars pursue these "trivial" aspects of clothing and decoration? This paper brings these apparently practical texts into conversation with the broader literary field, arguing that they were a vital part of it.