能画大鑑 Nōga Taikan  

Nōga Taikan (A Great Collection of Prints of Noh Plays) was published in Tokyo between 1925 and 1930. The original designs for Volumes 2 through 5 were drawn by Kōgyo, but the drawings for twenty-four of the prints in Volume 1 were created after Kōgyo’s death by Matsuno Sōfū, Kōgyo’s very talented protégé. The University of Pittsburgh Library System owns a complete set of these five volumes, two-hundred prints in all, gifted to them by Professors Emeriti Richard and Mae Smethurst. These prints were not published by Matsuki Heikichi and his Daikokuya publishing company, but by another company, Seibi Shoin, also of Tokyo.  

The five volumes of two hundred prints (forty in each volume) are covered in beige silk twill and the prints are tied into the bindings by silk cords, brads, and internal stitching. In fact, the University of Pittsburgh Library System bought a revised edition of Nōga Taikan published in 1936, one in which the prints were bounded as one volume, so that it was easy to unbind it for the digital photocopying without damaging the prints or the beautiful bindings of the Smethurst volumes. (Originally bought by the Smethursts at Takayama Shoten in Jinbōchō, Tokyo.) 

The original volumes are currently in the Archives & Special Collections of the Hillman Library. Each print is a scene from the noh play represented, similar to the same scene as it appeared on stage. Of Kōgyo’s three sets of noh prints, the Nōga Taikan prints seem to show the plays more accurately than either Nōgaku zue or Nōgaku hyakuban. In fact, if he sketched plays in the noh theater using brush and black ink, as his daughter Gyokusei said he did, he must have made notes to himself somewhere about what colors and designs to use on the costumes and stage props. The prints are very simple: the main actors at an important moment in the play, the artist’s signature, and the artist’s seal. The prints reveal at most few parts of the stage and its backdrop, and when so, only faintly. The focus is on the actors qua actors The prints do not reveal the name of the plays represented, but each print in all five volumes is preceded by a piece of translucent paper on which the title of the play, the actors by type (shite, waki, tsure, kyōgen, kokata) and name of character in his role appear in Japanese. These supplemental data were printed using modern, movable type, not by carving on woodblocks. In other words, Nōga Taikan seems to be a combination of the older and newer technologies in producing texts, artist’s name and seal by carved block, explanatory material by typesetting and printing. Unlike Nōgaku hyakuban, produced and marketed by another publishing house also in the 1920s, there is no English on either print or translucent paper. It would appear that the publisher at Seibi Shoin had only a Japanese audience in mind.

Who was that Japanese audience? As we have written elsewhere, noh was transformed after the fall of the last shogunal regime (1867) from a theater form popular among the samurai elite to a theater form that also appealed to the new bourgeois elite, which grew up as rich merchant houses strove to turn Japan into an advanced industrial state—the large and beautiful collection of noh masks and robes in the Mitsui Museum in Nihonbashi, Tokyo is demonstrative of this. But in the 1920s, as Japan moved into the modern, entrepreneurial world, noh became popular with the new, urban middle class, the new haute bourgeoisie. Members of this group began (and still do today) to take lessons in noh performance. Could it be members of this group who bought prints or volume of prints from Nōga Taikan? 

Richard Smethurst - Emeritus Professor - University of Pittsburgh
Debra Taylor Cashion - Associate Professor, Digital Humanities Librarian - Saint Louis University