Chinese Characters in Various Scripts and Waka Poems

Across the expanse of a six-panel folding screen, dynamically brushed kanji (Chinese characters) with auspicious and literary connotations have been dynamically brushed, each on a separate large sheet of paper that has been pasted to a panel. Surrounding or below each large character is a related waka (Japanese court poem) rendered in highly refined, attenuated, and flowing Japanese script, mostly kana (phonetic) writing. The poems are written according to the “scattered writing” (chirashigaki) convention, in which the columns of characters are arbitrarily divided and arranged—requiring the viewer to puzzle over the right sequence for reading or reciting the poems. All the Chinese characters in various scripts—archaic seal (insho), cursive (sōsho), and running (gyōsho)—and the kana were written by the same calligrapher, Horie Yorinao, a samurai retainer and scholar who lived in Kyoto and who had access to the palace.

The screens demonstrate how by the mid-seventeenth century the study of archaic Chinese and Japanese script types was enjoying a revival, a trend that would culminate in the eighteenth century with the emergence of the Literati (bunjin) school of painter-calligraphers. The six characters read, right to left:

暁 Daybreak (kyō or akatsuki)
松 Pine tree (shō or matsu)
竹 Bamboo (chiku or take)
鶴 Crane (kaku or tsuru)
老人 Old person (rōjin or toshiyori)
祝 Felicitations (shuku or iwai)