Paper short abstract:

Samurai painter Kōriki Tanenobu (1756-1831), as known as Enkō'an, produced nearly one hundred works about early modern Nagoya. This paper will examine his strategies for visualizing urban spaces and reporting on religious festivals, dance performances and other public spectacles.

Paper long abstract:

In a career spanning five decades, samurai painter Kōriki Tanenobu 高力種信 (1756-1831), commonly known by his handle Enkō’an 猿猴庵, produced nearly one hundred works about early modern Nagoya. A careful observer of religious festivals, dance performances and other public spectacles, Enkō’an was known to walk the castle town with his sketch books and brushes in hand, prepared to capture every fleeting detail and visualize it for prosperity. His illustrations typically oscillate between two modes—cartographic views of natural and urban landscapes from distant viewpoints, and closer, more intimate views that focus on scenes of people at prayer and play. In addition to the key role that Enkō’an’s works played in the visualization of Nagoya’s urban spaces, they were also important for how they circulated knowledge about events that were by their very nature intangible and ephemeral. Supplementing his own observations with painstaking research into historical, scriptural, and literary sources, Enkō’an produced work that was as remarkable for its scholastic rigor as it was for its arresting aesthetic effects.

This study examines several key issues in the production and reception of Enkō’an’s work, which, despite being in high demand among local readers, circulated almost exclusively through lending libraries in manuscript form. With due consideration of the tactics available to writers who worked in publicly circulated manuscripts, rather than printed books, we will examine three separate accounts of an exhibition of sacred relics held at Jinmokuji Temple in Bunka 2 (1805), demonstrating how genre conventions and distinctions between public and private manuscripts shaped his account from one work to the next.