OKADA YOSHIO  岡田嘉夫  (1934–2021)

A Heian Court Lady with Unbound Hair

Original woodblock print · Shōwa 54 (1979) · Published by Yūyūdō

Condition Report

Impression & Colours

Superb. The carving is exceptionally fine and fully realised in this impression: individual hair strands hold separation across the entire upper two-thirds of the sheet, including where black hair crosses black hair against the grey ground. The black is dense and evenly laid, with a second grey block printed over it to give the sheen along the crown and the outer sweeps — visible as a distinct cool highlight rather than a wash. 

Paper

Excellent, and materially better than is usual for this design. The hand-made sheet is clean, supple and unbacked, with the original deckle intact on all four edges and the full lower-margin colophon present. Accompanied by its original paper folder.

⚠ Please examine all photographs closely. 

A Print Built Entirely Out of Hair

A woman lies with her eyes closed, her head fallen back and turned aside, the nape of her neck bared. Her face is Heian court: the natural brows shaved and replaced by two soft grey ovals set high on the forehead (hikimayu), the mouth a small stroke of coral. Around her, filling two-thirds of the sheet against a flat grey ground, her hair has come completely undone — not falling but travelling, in long looping currents that read as water as much as air. Beneath and behind, a mass of vermillion cloth folds and turns.

The whole design is a demonstration piece for one technique. In traditional woodblock work, the carving of hair — kewari — is the discipline by which a carver is judged: strands cut at a fraction of a millimetre, held separate over long curves, with the wood between them left standing. Edo publishers reserved it for a few square centimetres at the temple and the nape of a bijin, and it was the first thing to collapse in a late impression. Okada has taken that small, difficult, marginal technique and made it the entire subject, at a scale no ukiyo-e print ever attempted, then compounded the difficulty by running black hair across black hair and across a flat red field where any slip of registration would be obvious.

This is why the lower margin of this sheet carries what it does. Rather than a publisher’s mark alone, it names the three craftsmen in sequence: the carver Matsuda Torazō, the printer Endō Tadao, and — unusually — the papermaker Sasaki Hajime. Crediting the papermaker by name is a mark of deluxe production, and in this case a justified one: the sheet had to take deep embossing and a heavy flat red without cockling. Note also what the printer has done with the grey. The hair is not simply black; a second block lays cool grey over the black along the crown and the outer loops, which is what gives the mass its sheen and its sense of moving through the picture rather than sitting on it.

The Genji Commission — Five Years and Three Hundred Drawings

Between 1974 and 1978 the novelist Tanabe Seiko (1928–2019) serialised her modern retelling of the Genji Monogatari, Shin Genji Monogatari, in the weekly Shūkan Asahi — 169 instalments across five years. Okada Yoshio supplied the illustrations, some 340 drawings in all. It was the collaboration that defined both careers, and it ran on into books: Ezōshi Genji Monogatari appeared from Kadokawa Shoten in 1979, and further Tanabe–Okada volumes followed for another thirty years.

The Genji Emaki woodblock set of four, of which this is one, was produced out of that body of work — the drawings translated into mokuhanga by professional carver and printer rather than reproduced photomechanically. The sheet itself carries no title. Trade descriptions have variously called this design a “dream” image and associated it with the Matsukaze chapter; we would not assert either, since nothing on the print supports it. What is not in doubt is the register the image works in — the unbound hair of a Heian noblewoman is one of the oldest and most charged motifs in Japanese art, signalling privacy, abandonment, sleep, or possession, and Okada has left the reading deliberately open.

Okada Yoshio — “The Ukiyo-e Artist of Our Times”

Okada is sometimes described in the Western trade as an obscure or unrecorded figure. He is nothing of the sort. Born in Kobe in 1934, he studied under the painter Nakanishi Masaru from 1954, and from 1971 under Iwata Sentarō (1901–1974), the outstanding Japanese illustrator of the twentieth century — an apprenticeship that placed him directly in the line of descent from ukiyo-e bijin-ga into modern commercial illustration. His first solo exhibition, Okada Yoshio no Onna-e (“Okada Yoshio’s Pictures of Women”), opened at the Chūō Bijutsu Gallery in Ginza in 1971, followed by shows at Ginza Mitsukoshi, Ginza Matsuya and Shinjuku Odakyū through the 1970s. He received the Kōdansha Publication Culture Award in 1973.

Over five decades he illustrated for Tanabe Seiko, Hashimoto Osamu, Setouchi Jakuchō, Minagawa Hiroko and Asada Jirō, and in later years devoted himself to kabuki subjects. In Japan he is routinely called gendai no ukiyo-e-shi — the ukiyo-e artist of the present day — for exactly the qualities on show here: vivid colour, bold cropping, and a sensuous line. He died in 2021. He remains almost entirely unknown outside Japan, and his woodblock output is small; the disparity between his standing at home and his invisibility abroad is, for a collector, the opportunity.

Collector’s Note

This design appears on the Western market very seldom, and when it does the recurring problem is foxing — an established American specialist who handled one impression reported being told by a Tokyo source that every copy they had seen was badly foxed. 

Shipping: Shipped flat in its original folder, protected between acid-free tissue and rigid boards, by tracked and insured post. Ships from Germany. Combined shipping on multiple purchases.

Guarantee: An original hand-printed Japanese woodblock print, c. 1979, not a reproduction. Guaranteed as described; full refund if it is not.

Hanga Nomad · Japanese Woodblock Prints