Ties that Bind: Semantic and Social Relationships in Inscribed Paintings of the “First Skipjack Tuna of the Season”

Abstract

This dissertation is an exercise in comprehending the history and range of a single poetic topic/visual subject matter in inscribed paintings made in the context of early modern Japanese comic poetry circles. In doing so, it attempts to capture the full semantic reverberation of meaning evoked by these works. The first four chapters of the dissertation traces one subject matter, the skipjack tuna (katsuo, Katsuwonus pelamis), throughout poetry and art in the Edo period (1603–1868), beginning with its development as a new seasonal poetic topic in haikai comic linked verse in the mid-to late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The poetic topic was later transformed into a visual motif of the skipjack tuna paired with bamboo grass. The iconography first developed in inscribed paintings in the “mad verse” (kyōka) community as a way to visually convey the essence of kyōka around the turn of the nineteenth century. It circulated in this community for about thirty to forty years before being introduced to the wider public in ukiyo-e prints. The skipjack-tuna-on-bamboo-grass motif is a unique example of a painting subject deriving entirely from contemporary Japanese comic poetry. Unlike other piscine subjects in Japanese art, it lies outside the bird-and-flower (C: huaniaohua J: kachōga) painting tradition, which is a significant and important painting category in East Asia. Nor does the iconography stem from earlier poetic precedents in classic waka poetry, which were visualized and standardized in later artwork. The skipjack-tuna-on-bamboo grass iconography therefore provides an important window into understanding the deep and resounding influence of haikai and kyōka poetry. Tracking the development of the theme of the skipjack tuna, the dissertation sheds light on the sophisticated ways in which the new poetic and seasonal topics in the early to mid-Edo period were inherited and ingested, spanning generations, genres, and modalities. By taking a diachronic and subject-based approach, this investigation offers a new strategy for tackling the inherent difficulties of understanding highly intertextual and “trans-textual” works such as inscribed paintings. The fifth and final chapter of the dissertation examines how meaning is built over time in inscribed paintings in a case study of three nearly identical works by the artist and poet Kubo Shunman (1757–1820). The pieces depict the skipjack tuna on bamboo grass; each have seven poetic inscriptions written around the painted motifs. Meaning is evoked through complex interactions between the poetic inscriptions and visual subject matter. The internal semantic frameworks of the paintings are determined both by the deliberate selection of poems to maximize the array of referents, and the poems’ relative position on the paintings, which forms a set reading sequence. The paintings’ inscriptions “activate” the visual motifs’ latent meanings, filling in the context left open by the unfilled substrate of the paintings. Readers’ understandings of the meaning of the painted motifs change as they read each poem in the sequence over the course of their interpretive experience. To map out the semantic networks formed by interactions between the different parts of the inscribed paintings, I employ a data visualization system I invented called the Polar Relational Data Graph (PRDG), which is rooted in concepts from data science, basic graph theory, and Japanese poetic practices. Employing the concept of the “motif” from musical semiology, I show how referents develop through repetition throughout the poem sequence into overarching themes. By showing how poetry is the fundamental determinative aspect of the paintings both historically and semantically, my dissertation challenges common assumptions about where the value of an artwork lies. In doing so, it forges a new path for conducting text-image analysis.