Paper short abstract:

The cherry blossom is a recurrent motif in the first half of the Met's illustrated scroll, “A Long Tale for an Autumn Night.” This paper investigates floral and seasonal descriptions of cherry trees to highlight the discrepancy between narrative calligraphic prefaces and their corresponding images.

Paper long abstract:

The pictorial scroll of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, titled, “A Long Tale for an Autumn Night” (Aki no yo no naga monogatari), is an illustrated adaptation of a medieval iteration of a tale created during the Nanbokuchō Period (1336-1392). The text of the story is divided into scenes, and each of those are accompanied by matching images. The question that drives this paper is how the narrative prefaces (kotobagaki) relate to images in such work. In this paper, I examine the text-to-image issue by paying attention to the depiction of cherry blossoms in painted scrolls.

The scroll at the Met features cherry blossoms repeatedly in the work’s illustrations, mainly in the first half. The most common depiction involves Umewaka or the protagonist chigo (monastic acolyte) and the cherry tree. Moreover, it often features the monk Keikai gazing at Umewaka in a way that is suggestive of romantic longing and desire on the part of the monk. These visual patterns reflect the image and gender of chigo, who in medieval temple society were the priests’ object of sexual desire. The two motifs of flowers (symbolizing Umewaka) and the moon appear repeatedly in imagery. At the opening lines, the bodhisattva's ideals of benefiting oneself (jiri) and benefitting others (rita) are aligned respectively with the lines “the spring flower rising to the tip of the tree” and “the autumn moon descending to the bottom of the water.” Thus, the flowers and the moon are used to symbolize the beauty, sanctity, and tragic fate of Umewaka, who was the boyish manifestation of the bodhisattva Kannon of the temple Ishiyama-dera.

However, there is a discrepancy between the expressions describing the flowers in the prefaces and the cherry blossoms depicted in the pictures, and there are some parts in which the images are not faithful pictorial representations of the text. In some of the illustrations there is no reference to flowers in the narrative prefaces that introduce subsequent pictorial scenes (kotobagaki), and at times, cherry blossoms appear arbitrarily regardless of the season indicated. This paper highlights the relationship between narrative prefaces and their corresponding images.