Customer Reviews

The Prints of Isoda Koryusai: Floating World Culture and Its Consumers in Eighteenth-Century Japan

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I found the book to be very useful in understanding ukiyoe prints from novel perspectives--especially consumer patterns and, more importantly, in terms of how artists were influenced by one another. Koryusai has long been overlooked and this book helps set the record straight. I've read most of the books in English on woodblock prints and this one gives us a refreshingly new approach. I like the way the author deals with culture, the circulation of images, women (I'm a woman and I detect no misogyny--as another reviewer suggests...), sex, and popular culture. It has loads of useful information for all levels of reader. I might never use the appendices, but they should be welcomed by scholars in the area of Edo art and culture. I highly recommend this book ! I only wish that there were more color illustrations, but for that I'll just have to go to the many OTHER Japanese print books and museum catalogues that illustrate Koryusai in color--but say nothing new or very useful about him!

I was really looking forward to reading this book when I heard it was coming out - Koryusai's never received the kind of attention he really deserves. What I wasn't expecting was that the first part of the book would be focused entirely on a detailed description of what is in the books written by everyone else who's ever written about Koryusai before Hockley (I can read those books if I want to know what's in them), and how every single one of them was wrong. The book description says that "Five appendixes catalog all of the artist's known print designs". They "list" the prints, but that's all. There are titles like "Courtesan parading with her kamuro" - no date, no publisher's mark, no description - so, how would I know the print if I saw it? Using the lists requires an awful lot of work. The index is awful - spanning only two pages, there's next to nothing in it. This book represents a missed opportunity, definitely falls way short of "groundbreaking", and at 60 dollars this petite volume with its handful of tiny illustrations is overpriced.

Not worth $60. Most of the black & white illustrations look smudgy, and the appendix is pretty incoherent. You really have to work hard for some of the information.

The review by "a reader from New York" would have more credibility if it were not anonymous -- why is it not signed? I've talked to a dozen scholars in the field, all have welcomed the book and emphasized its usefulness. Both as raw scholarly material and in its analysis, the book brings an artist and his delightful works out from under a shadow. The 100-page Appendix is an extraordinarily complete compendium of Koryusai's oeuvre -- Hockley's research has pushed the number of known works from about 500 to over 2500. The diacritical problem appears to be limited to a single (repeated) example. Though highly biased, I am not alone in considering the book attractively presented.

Hockley rightly returns to consider the place of the consumer in the market for popular prints, and it would have been beneficial if the argument had been further developed. It should have considerable impact on the field, but it is overall not as groundbreaking as has been claimed.

Isoda Koryusai produced thousands of designs between 1769 and 1781, a crucial period in the Japanese print tradition era, and though he was honored in Japan for his works, he's been largely neglected by western art scholars. Allen Hockley's The Prints Of Isoda Koryusai deftly analyzes over 2,000 of Koryusai's designs, surveying his influence as a minor Edo-period artist and arguing that Koryusai excelled in his output and his creation of popular commodities. The Prints Of Isoda Koryusai is essential reading for any student of Japanese printmaking history and artists.

The argument, rather contrived, does not reflect great intellectual maturity. Elementary Japanese diacritical marks are occasionally mishandled in a way that ought to embarrass the author, and a whiff of misogyny hovers over two passages where the author makes a distinction between courtesans and "legitimate" women, and over the author's naive projections of what is perhaps a personal inclination toward voyeurism (in the sections on Shunga). All in all, probably useful for those who want to know more about the subject, but the book hasn't earned the groundbreaking status to which its author seems so eager to stake his claim.