Paper short abstract:

By examining two under-researched picture-books published by the Edo-based Urokogataya in the second half of the eighteenth-century, this paper studies how _Ise monogatari_ and the seventeenth-century _Ikkyū banashi_ acquired new meanings thanks to their re-packaging in different visual layouts.

Paper long abstract:

Commercial publishing throughout the Edo period fostered the production of illustrated books, with the flexible medium of the woodblock allowing an array of verbal-visual combinations on the printed page. Scholarship evaluating the relationship between text and image in early-modern Japan is grounded in the division between _eiri hanpon_ (illustrated books) and _ehon_ (picture-books). The former is conceptualized as a type of book in which illustrations are interpreted as 'decorative' accents, whilst the latter is believed to offer a complementary relation between words and pictures. This paper challenges the received view by examining two early-modern books whose story-line was first packaged in _eiri hanpon_ and subsequently repackaged in _ehon_ format (namely _kusazōshi_) by the prolific publisher Urokogataya.

After centuries of illustrated manuscripts, _Ise monogatari_ was printed at the beginning of the seventeenth century in an elegant movable-type edition that embedded woodblock illustrations. Amidst the complex textual lineage of subsequent editions and rewritings, the majority of which were illustrated, the picture-book _Ise fūryū Utagaruta no hajimari_ (Edo: Urokogataya, 1766) offered a version of the Heian-period tale deemed suitable for children. Similarly, the publication of _Ikkyū banashi_ in 1668 inspired the production of innumerable texts that kept the figure of the monk Ikkyū alive, up until modern-times Japanese _ehon_ and anime. Urokogataya yet again used the illustrated edition of 1668 to publish in 1775 a picture-book version entitled _Ikkyū oshō Satori no kunenbō_ (Edo: Urokogataya, 1775). In both cases the challenge for the illustrators of the Torii artists' studio, was not to 'invent' images for these stories but rather to 're-imagine' established iconography. How did this process of re-imagining work in these two texts? How does the choice of discrete (ancillary) pictures kept separate from the verbal text versus that of pictures that visually melt with the verbal text (substantive images) affect our engagement with the text? What role do images play in the overall economy of the text (following the theoretical stance of Nikolajeva and Scott 2001)? This paper address these questions with a view to discuss to what extend pictures play active role in the creation of a narrative.