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Tōshūsai Sharaku
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No one could write about the artist whose work is the subject of this monograph without making his opening sentence an appreciation of the zealous and meticulous scholarship of Dr. Fritz Rumpf, the learned director of the Japaninstitut of Berlin. His Sharaku published in 1932, ranks as by far the most important book on the subject in any language, and as present conditions make a third edition impossible now, Herr Rumpf very graciously has given the compilers of this catalogue a complete list of the revisions he would desire to make. The Committee has also had the benefit of special researches into the history of the Japanese theatre during the final decade of the eighteenth century which have been made for us by Dr. Toshiro Ihara, the foremost authority in Japan, and his able assistant Mr. Sutezo Kimura. In Tokyo as in Berlin there is a considerable amount of original source material, some of which is unique and much of which is not duplicated in America. We are fortunate here, however, because the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has in its own archives a considerable collection of similar documents some of which are not known to exist elsewhere; and these have been of invaluable assistance, sometimes in deciding doubtful points on which there was disagreement, and occasionally in providing entirely new facts or sidelights with which no one was acquainted. It is the bringing together of the results of researches in Berlin, Tokyo and Boston that has enabled us to resolve doubts regarding the stage scenes depicted in many of Sharaku’s prints, and for the same reason the subjects of others that hitherto have been wholly undetermined can now be identified with assurance.
In these ways the present catalogue should mark an advance in the scholarship of the subject; but the central mystery enfolding Sharaku himself has become more impenetrable, more incredible than it has seemed before, because the new facts brought to light have more than confirmed the statements of his contemporaries regarding the duration of that amazingly short period in which he was said by them to have designed all his prints. Occidentals have argued that he must have worked from three to six years; the original Japanese sources gave him a working time of “a year or so” and “about half a year,” and as a result of our present researches, we have apparently conclusive evidence for believing that the period of his productivity comprised only the last ten months of
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