Paper short abstract:

The paper looks at "Inserted Illustrations" (sashi-e), visual companions that complement the narrative in pictorial form. This paper discusses the retelling and remaking of a story through such illustrations by comparing the Met's "A Long Tale for an Autumn Night" with other painted variants.

Paper long abstract:

The paper examines the function of illustrations in pictorial scrolls through a comparison between the manuscript at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Eisei Bunko manuscript, which are among the different variants of "A Long Tale for an Autumn Night" (Aki no yo no naga monogatari). Illustrated stories often display greater degrees of difference than textual materials. Questioning how a story is illustrated is important for revealing how people interpreted it.

With this in mind, the paper compares illustrations from the variant at the Met with those from the Eisei Bunko Museum in Tokyo. The former is almost certainly a product of temple culture. On the other hand, the Eisei edition reflects "the classical taste and aristocratic disposition of the upper class." These two scrolls demonstrate the reception of Aki no yo in two different cultural spheres, and aims to show that an analysis of the illustrations can reveal different modes of reception, and how each manuscript came to be illustrated in its own unique way.

This paper demonstrates how the Eisei Bunko manuscript was pictorially influenced by illustrations from the manuscript of the Met. The paper then explains how some of the illustrations in the Eisei edition were redrawn based on new interpretations of the text, and that the choice of scenes in the illustrations is different from the one at the Met. In this manner, I argue the possibility that the Eisei Bunko version intentionally reshaped and refigured the illustrations of the Met version in order to retell the story with its own original reading.