Page from an Illustrated Book

A page from one of Kyōden's illustrated books, where blocks of printed text surround carefully reproduced objects, here the paper slips that pilgrims once pasted at temples along the western Kannon circuit. In his later years Kyōden turned antiquarian, writing and illustrating studies of old customs, dress, and printed ephemera, and setting his drawings directly among his prose. The result is a hybrid page: you read the text and examine the pictured artifacts at once, each explaining the other. This is the working method of the whole tradition, image and word cut into the same block and printed on the same sheet. It is popular scholarship built as a picture-book, the format doing the explaining as much as the words.