Henry D. Smith II
 

Early printing in Kyoto concentrated on
older works of literature, both in Chinese and

in classical Japanese, with few illustrations.
With the growth of a popular print culture,
however, and its spread to neighboring Osaka,
the pictorial emphasis became greater, partic-
ularl)' for the emerging townsman literalin-e
of the time. Still, as one discovers in the no\'els
of Ihara Saikaku, the illustrations occupied
separate pages apart from the text, much in
the manner of the traditional scroll paint¬
ing, in which text and image were regularly
alternated.

It was rather in the shogunal capital of Edo
(now Tokyo) to the north, where the con¬
straints of tradition were fewer, that the inte¬
gration of text and image on die same page
was systematically developed. The process
began with simple books of folk tales and
legends aimed at a readership—perhaps more
accurately, a viewership—that was not wholh'
literate, providing only occasional patches of
simple narrative text within the pictures.
These small pamphlets came to be known as
kusazoshi, or "grass pamphlets"—perhaps be¬
cause of the cursive "grass" phonetic script,
perhaps because the cheap paper was kusai
(smelly). They emerged in the late seven¬
teenth century, and flourished in Edo in the
middle decades of the eighteenth century,
distinguished by the colors of their covers, var¬
iously red, blue, or black.

The kusazoshi format was turned in a radi-
callv new direction in the vear 1775, when a
 

Fig, 1. Cover of first section of Nuretsubame negura no
karakasa (Nest-Umbrella for a Drenched Swallow),
1814; design by Utagawa Toyokimi.

samurai writer who called himself Koikawa
Harumachi ("Loveriver Springtown") used it
for a parody of an old Chinese storv, a witty tale
of a country bumpkin who dreamed he had
visited the Edo pleasure quarters and become
a true rake.^ This was the first of the kibyoshi
(yellow covers), which lasted for some two
decades as a critical genre in the remarkable
parodic culture of Edo that was spearheaded
by a creative alliance of urbane samurai and
sophisticated townsmen. The kibyoshi were
illustrated by such leading ukiyo-e artists as
Kiyonaga and Utamaro, and achieved a level of
wit and sophistication that belied their appear¬
ance as chapbooks for the semiliterate. It was
the increasingly frequent tone of political
satire that finally brought this particular stage
of kusazoshi to an abrupt end in the shogtmal
 

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