Masayuki Miyata

Masayuki Miyata (1926-1997) was a Japanese artist who specialised in woodblocks, serigraphs and, most particularly, kiri-e. Kiri-e is an artform that uses paper, scalpels and fine motor control to produce intricate pictures. Complicated shapes are cut out and layered to produce the final image, making full use of the textures of the paper to produce various effects.



Masayuki is deservedly well known in both Japan and China, but rather less so in the West. However, Japanese-English publishers Kodansha have made available four works of classic Japanese literature heavily illustrated with Masayuki's work. They are beautiful books (though it has to be said that the covers have way too much text on them, distracting from the kiri-e images).

The first is Love Songs from the Man'yōshū. The Man'yōshū is the oldest surviving collection of Japanese poetry, perhaps 1250 years old. This bilingual selection of the love poetry shows Masayuki at full strength. (For all images below, click for much bigger, readable versions.)







Next is The Narrow Road to Oku, a hybrid travelogue and haiku collection by Matsuo Bashō, the great Seventeenth-Century poet, whose On Love and Barley collection is a masterpiece.






The great Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata produced a version of an old legend, The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, which was also illustrated by Masayuki.






Finally, we have Lady Murasaki's The Take of Genji (and if you haven't read Murasaki's diaries, they're fascinating too). This book does not contain the text of the great early novel--instead, it has a summary of each chapter, with Masayuki illustrating each. It's a shame nobody has yet brought together the novel's full text and these illustrations in one edition. Kodansha, see to it!







There is a website dedicated to Masayuki Miyata here, full of (admittedly small) scans of his other artwork. It's almost entirely in Japanese, but pretty easy to navigate.