Capitalscapes: Folding Screens and Political Imagination in Late Medieval Kyoto (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Capitalscapes: Folding Screens and Political Imagination in Late Medieval Kyoto Timon Screech (bio) Capitalscapes: Folding Screens and Political Imagination in Late Medieval Kyoto. By Matthew Philip McKelway. University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu, 2006. xii, 280 pages. $56.00. The genre known as rakuchū rakugai zu, literally, "scenes in and around raku" (a poetic name for "the capital"), is one of the most instantly appealing in Japanese art. These paintings, generally on paired six-fold screens, were produced in very large numbers from the early sixteenth century, and well over 100 sets survive today. Matthew McKelway is the first person to publish a full assessment in English. He prefers to introduce the screens as "capitalscapes," a nice term, but not used other than in the title and not explained. Mostly he calls them "Kyoto screens" (p. 2). His intention is perhaps to emphasize that the rakuchū rakugai label is not a period one (though it looks like one) but a nineteenth-century imposition. [End Page 180] It is easy to get lost in the minutiae of such screens, to thrill over the close depictions of temples and palaces, shops and festivals, and the tiny figures going about their business. This is not an inappropriate response to such scintillating paintings and was one aspect of the reaction that makers were striving for. But art appreciation does not constitute argument. Mc-Kelway has succeeded in celebrating the quality and inventiveness of these depictions while also setting the screens firmly in the society and politics of the age. Yes, these are beautiful screens showing a fine city. But the city was in ruins for most of the sixteenth century. It was therefore imagined in paint by and for somebody. McKelway uses the term "Kyoto" throughout his book. This tends to essentialize the place. Many of his readers will have been there and walked through the spaces shown in the screens. But the city of today is not the city of times past. Just as one would not call Edo "Tokyo," or Byzantium "Istan-bul," I would have argued for using the old label for "Kyoto." The matter is contestable, for "Kyōto," which began as an informal name in medieval times, became more or less official, by the Edo period, but it was infrequently used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The first written references to paintings of the city—to "capitalscapes"—and indeed most late-medieval and early-modern references to the city itself generally give just the single character "Kyō." This may have been pronounced so or may have been read "Miyako." For Europeans in Japan at the time, "Kyoto" was only ever "Miyako"—we even have the Latin adjective miacensis—except a few Edo-period Westerners who used Kwau (Kyō). In fact, there is precisely one building left in the city from the time of the first "capitalscapes," namely, the Sanjūsangen-dō or Hall of Thirty-three Bays at the Rengeō-in (in a rare lapse McKelway has it that the Kiyomizu-dera also survives, but the building there today is a reconstruction from the 1630s). Some distancing would have helped. As McKelway correctly shows, the manifold glories and the splendid sights of the capital were owned and controlled by someone. This imagined city of the screens was imagined in a certain way and for a certain purpose. In other words, a volition controlled the disposition of the places shown across the screens. Some sites are placed above others, placed more prominently than others, or valorized by juxtaposition and association. Arrangements are fluid and all space is topologically malleable, as in a subway map. Other sites are removed from view, by clouds or by simple deletion. As McKelway has said elsewhere in a nice pun, screens are for screening out—the drafts most fundamentally. But as a painting support, screens both reveal and deny. Someone sat before them and someone else behind them. Screen surfaces depict some things but relegate others. In the absence of clear documents, untangling the knot of whose volition lurks behind extant works is a daunting task. There would have been plural minds at work—the principal [End Page 181] artist and...