SKIN DEEP MAGAZINE • 27one hundred candles and take turns to
tell a tale, blowing out a candle after
each tale, so that they’re eventually left
in total darkness. The image featured
in the British Museum’s exhibition was
“Kohada Koheiji” and it’s perhaps one
of Hokusai’s most striking woodblocks. Telling the tale of
a vengeful spirit, haunting the couple who murdered him,
here he is shown grinning over the top of the mosquito
net that surrounds the bed where his killers lie sleeping.
It’s dramatic, it’s narrative, and it’s pure manga.
Kawanabe Kyōsai, born in 1831, is often thought of as
the inheritor of Hokusai’s tradition. Part scroll-painter,
part story-teller, this is a man who was larger than life
and produced art to match.
It was in June 1840, that Kyōsai produced his master-
piece. The day was just warming up as the artist—work-
ing in a room above a photography studio— spread out
a piece of 4 x 17 metre cloth on the floor. Heating some
bottles of sake, he grabbed a hemp-palm broom, soaked
it in a bucket of ink and, stepping onto the plain cloth,
started to paint. Clambering over the huge canvas, some-
times on his hands and knees—bare feet leaving prints in
the still wet ink—with every brush stroke, the figures of
actors tumbling out of costume boxes, began to emerge.
Alongside these well-known faces came a riot of theatre-
demons, laughing and leering, long tongues lolling from
their exaggerated mouths. There, in the corners, fantasti-
cal animals peer from the shadows, and a small spright—
wielding a paint brush and sake bottle—laughs through
it all. Working through four bottles of sake and for four
hours straight, Kyosa produced a tumult of bodies danc-
ing across the canvas which, when the theatre curtain fi-
nally made its debut, wowed audiences. Today, the work
continues to amaze and inspire manga artists.Moving On
As “Professor Munakata Case Book” artist Hoshino Yuk-
inobu comments “Manga embodies the genetic heritage
of many pictorial narrative forms, from ancient illus-
trated scrolls to Edo period woodblocks.” And these early
pioneers laid the ground work for an art form which has
now spread far beyond the confines of the printed page.