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.

Something in the Sea?

To be honest, Iris Murdoch is not a writer I rate very highly. She has a great reputation as a thinker and philosopher, and that's probably fair enough. As a novelist, however, she has severe failings. This is not something you'd necessarily know from the near-sanctification of her that has taken place over the past few years, spearheaded by her husband's various memoirs.

One of these was turned into Iris the movie, which I enjoyed (with all its steely Judi Dench-ness and rampant Kate Winslet nudity), but which also hid the fact that, despite all their claims to great love, Murdoch and her hsuband were both rampantly unfaithful, and tended to use the third parties they were bonking to attack one another psychologically.

Looking at her vast back catalogue, and the number of them which have fallen out of print, I would have suspected that Murdoch does not in fact still sell very well. However, a 2004 story in The Guardian noted that her Booker Prize winner from 1978, The Sea, The Sea, sells some 7600 copies a year. And fair enough: if people want clunky characters, unrealistic dialogue and shoehorned-in philosophy then she's your writer of choice.

The point of this little rant, though, is to draw attention to the new Vintage Classics edition of The Sea, The Sea, which has a really lovely cover (designer unknown to me, as I've lost the bit of paper I wrote it down on in the bookshop). [UPDATE: I find that the designer is actually Jo Walker, who also did the Perec cover discussed above!]



I didn't even notice the sinister tentacle the first time I looked at this, but it's very clever. I also like the three-dimensional, layered-paper effect on this cover (though I suspect that effect was computer-generated with drop shadows rather than photographic, it still works well). It has a somewhat Japanese feel, like a wave-painting by Katsushika Hokusai crossed with the complex layered-paper work of Masayuki Miyata.

To see what I mean, here's Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa, and an illustration Masayuki did for The Tale of Genji.




By the way, the title of this post came from a thriller I read recently by Yves Bonavero. It's no masterpiece, but it's a lot of murky fun.