Customer Reviews

Capitalscapes: Folding Screens and Political Imagination in Late Medieval Kyoto

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This was quite an informative book on the various cities of Japan especially Kyoto and Edo and the way contemporaries looked at them. It also helps located main attractions and landmarks as they appeared centuries ago. A magnificent testimony to the artists of the time.

Capitalscapes is an examination of the Japanese screen painting genre known as rakuchû rakugai zu. That's scenes of Kyoto to you and me, those large and fabulously detailed pictures with hundreds of buildings and thousands of people, all overlain by golden clouds. Most date from the 16th and 17th centuries.

McKelway outlines the characteristics of the genre before moving on to examine particular pairs of screens, specifically their history and content. His discussions of the artists' choices about what to include and what to exclude, and how to depict what was chosen for inclusion, draw on similar depictions from other genres and Japanese history to form conclusions on the purpose of each pair of screens. Essentially, he sees each the screens as art with a political message tied to specific individuals and purposes, rather than simply a gorgeous rendition of Kyoto at a single point in time, and he explores the development and gradual fading of the genre.

I'm no specialist in Japanese art, but I found this book very accessible and easy to read. McKelway does the reader the favour of stating what he is going to examine next and then going ahead and doing exactly that. It might be too dry and academic a style for some, but it suited me fine. The text is broken up into relatively short sections within each chapter, making it easier to absorb the unfamiliar. There are references to the work of other researchers and plenty of footnotes for specialists or those who want to follow up particular points. The material is really interesting and I finished the book feeling like I'd learned a lot.

Obviously, this type of study requires pictures, and there are plenty of pictures provided: two sections of colour plates and scores of black-and-white pictures within the text. The black-and-white pictures aren't always as sharp as I would have preferred them to be, and the size of the book means that the fine detail can't always be appreciated. On the other hand, a larger format and more colour plates would equate to higher costs. All the flipping back and forth to match the right picture to the right point in the text did become a little tedious, but it's unavoidable with this sort of book and I'm not sure the layout could have been improved.

I did find some of McKelway 's conclusions a little unsatisfying, which I guess really means that I found the subject interesting enough to want to know more. Yet the fine points of detail are for the specialists to thrash out and resolve - or agree to disagree on - and should in no way impair the lay reader's enjoyment of Capitalscapes.