Intellimmersion · No. 1
On a name over a shop door in Edo, the man it belonged to, and who answers for what goes out of it
The story of the Edo print shop that published Utamaro and Sharaku, told in the order it happened and only from what the records show.
“… if my design is engraved by a good engraver, that encourages me to work …”Katsushika Hokusai, in a letter to his publishers, as reproduced in Edmond de Goncourt’s Hokusai (1896)
I The Sign
The page is small, about twenty centimetres by fifteen, and it shows a shop front in Edo, the city now called Tokyo. Katsushika Hokusai drew it for a book of comic verse that was printed in ink in 1799 and reissued in colour in 1802.
Over the entrance hangs a curtain with the shop’s name, Kōshodō, and an ivy leaf. At the door stands a signboard with a man’s name on it: Tsutaya Jūzaburō. Beside it, advertisements are set out for a book by the novelist Santō Kyōden and for collections of kyōka, the comic thirty-one-syllable verse then in fashion. Colour prints are laid out inside.
The man who made that name died in 1797, two years before Hokusai first drew the page, and the picture is thought to show the shop as it stands after his death. The firm has gone on without him, selling the kind of thing he built it on: Kyōden’s books, the verse, the prints. Edo calls it by his name. Tsutaya means the Ivy Shop.
The page asks the question the shop was built around. When a sheet goes out of this door, whose is it, and who answers for it? To see how the sign came to say what it says, go back to a gate.
II The Gate
The gate is the Ōmon, the great gate of the Yoshiwara, the licensed pleasure quarter on the edge of Edo, and the only way in or out. A moat runs round the quarter. Visitors come along an embankment, turn down a slope at a willow, and follow a road that bends so that the quarter cannot be seen from the embankment until they are almost there. Men leaving are said to stop at that willow and look back, and it is called the looking-back willow.
Tsutaya was born inside the gate in 1750. By twenty-four he is working from the front of a cousin’s teahouse at the entrance, in a small shop just outside the gate that rents and sells books.
What he sells first is information. Among his stock is the Yoshiwara saiken, a guide to the quarter’s houses and the women in them, published by Urokogataya. In 1774 he joins the publishers’ guild and buys the rights to print other kinds of guides to the quarter, and by Andreas Marks’s account he is soon bringing out the saiken together with Urokogataya. Among the first books he publishes is A Thousand at a Glance, which likens the women to flowers and plants, magnolias and wasabi among them. It is lavishly made, and the houses and their customers may have paid for it.
A guide is only as good as its latest names. After several years in business he has the sources to keep his up to date, among them his father, who works in the district. In 1783 he publishes a guide of his own, Five-Needled Pines, and from then on the guides are his alone.
In the same years the shop sells pictures of the quarter’s women as well as lists of them. One album of its leading courtesans sets a poem in each woman’s own hand above her portrait. It is drawn by a twenty-two-year-old who signs himself Kitao Masanobu. Edo will know him better as the novelist Santō Kyōden.
It is a trade learned at a gate. He sells people what they want to know just before they need to know it.
III The Ivy Shop
In the ninth month of 1783, at thirty-three, he moves to Tōriabura-chō in Nihonbashi, where the major publishers keep their shops. He buys the premises and storehouses of an old firm, Maruya Kohei. The business is called Kōshodō, and from then on, by Laurence Binyon’s account, an ivy leaf beneath a triple peak is printed on what he publishes.
The next year he is in a picture, and everyone else in it is in costume. Yoshiwara daitsūe, a comic book of 1784 written and drawn by Koikawa Harumachi, shows the kyōka poets meeting. Tsutaya is among them, because he is one: under the name Tsuta no Karamaru he writes the comic verse, and he publishes the collections of the men he writes beside. All the poets are dressed up. He is at the bottom left in an ordinary kimono, with writing tools and a book.
The shop lives on books: illustrated comic novels, albums of verse, the guides. The house fills with younger men. Binyon describes young men of talent who gather there and work for him alone, in return for food, clothing and lodging. He names Utamaro, who has been designing for him since the early 1780s, Kyōden and the poet Shokusanjin, and, later, the young novelist Bakin.
At New Year 1788 the shop issues Utamaro’s Picture Book of Selected Insects: two volumes of comic verse on insects and on love, with pages of flowers, vegetables and small creatures. A copy that once belonged to Joseph Banks is in the British Museum. Its catalogue says the production “was probably conceived and arranged by the publisher Tsutaya Juzaburo.”
That “probably” is as far as the records will go. They say what Tsutaya published. They seldom say what he proposed.
IV The Reforms
“Our sales, which have relied upon Kyōden’s books, were sure to plummet.”Foreword to Santō Kyōden’s Hakoiri musume menya ningyō, New Year 1791, signed with Tsutaya’s verse name, Tsuta no Karamaru, and written, by the Tokyo Metropolitan Library’s account, by Kyōden himself; translated by Matthew Meyer
By then the government has changed. From 1787 Matsudaira Sadanobu leads a programme of thrift and discipline known as the Kansei reforms, and the shop’s kind of book is soon in danger.
In 1789 the shop publishes a satire on the samurai. Its author is Koikawa Harumachi, the man who drew Tsutaya in plain clothes five years before. The authorities summon him. He dies soon after, possibly by his own hand.
In 1790 the rules tighten. From the fifth month no new book may be published without special permission, and an order of the eleventh month sends the drawings for prints to be approved before they are cut. From 1791 a small seal reading kiwame, “examined”, is cut into the key block, so that every impression carries it.
At New Year 1791 the shop issues a new book by Kyōden, Hakoiri musume menya ningyō. It opens with a foreword in the publisher’s voice, signed with his verse name and drawn with him on his knees beneath his own mark. Kyōden, it explains, has lost heart after public criticism; the shop’s sales are sure to plummet; and so the publisher has begged his old friend for one more book. It is a joke. Kyōden, fined in 1789 for illustrating a banned book, wrote the foreword himself.
Later that year the blow falls on the shop itself. It has published three books by Kyōden about life in the pleasure quarters. Kyōden is put in manacles for fifty days. The trade’s own examiners, who passed the books, are banished from Edo. Tsutaya, by most accounts, has half of what he owns seized.
The record does not say what the shop looks like the next morning. It does say who was punished. The officials of 1791 had a clear idea of who makes a book. They punished the man who wrote it, the men who passed it, and the man who decided it should exist. The accounts mention no carver and no printer.
Two years later he is still selling Kyōden. At New Year 1793 a collection of comic verse for the season, Dōre hyakunin isshu, carries a poem by Tsuta no Karamaru:
青本の春は来にけりひとはけに霞むあなたの山東より
Spring has come
for the blue-covered books,
hazing in at a stroke of the brush
from over there,
east of the mountain.
Santō, “east of the mountain”, is Kyōden’s pen name; the translation is ours. The foreword of 1791 was written for the publisher by his author. This poem is the publisher’s own, and he uses it to announce his author.
V Close-ups
“Thoughtfully drawn by Utamaro the physiognomist”The signature on Fujo ninsō juppon, the series of the print shown here, about 1792–93; translated by John Fiorillo
With books grown dangerous, the shop turns to prints. That is the account of Momoka Komatsu, writing for Keio University’s museum, and the dates bear her out.
About 1792 it begins to issue portraits of women by Utamaro in a format that is new for him: the figure shown half-length, the head large, the ground behind dusted with mica. Tsutaya, Komatsu writes, had recognised Utamaro’s talent in their books of comic verse. The series titles promise a study of women’s characters from their faces. The ivy leaf is printed after the signature, and the portraits make Utamaro famous.
Look at one. The Metropolitan Museum’s sheet is about thirty-nine centimetres by twenty-seven. A young woman fills it from the waist up, turning as she lifts a glass noisemaker, a popen, to her lips. Her kimono is a pink check scattered with small flowers. Behind her there is nothing but a pale ground. In a cartouche at the upper right the series title, Ten Classes of Women’s Physiognomy, stands beside the signature quoted above, and under the signature is the shop’s mark, the ivy leaf under Fuji. No name is given for her.
In 1793 the authorities forbid naming women other than courtesans on such prints. For a time the names are hinted at in picture-puzzles, until in 1796 the puzzles are banned too.
The format has worked. In the spring of 1794 the shop will try it on the stage.
VI The Commission
“… a keen sense of fashion and of the mood of the market …”Andreas Marks, on what a publisher needed, quoted by Martin Laflamme in the Asian Review of Books, October 27, 2026
Spring, 1794. The shop wants the same close-up for the stage. This is Komatsu’s account too: Tsutaya takes what has been worked out in Utamaro’s women and applies it to kabuki actors, half-length against mica, with no flattery. The designer is a name nobody knows.
What follows is the usual path of a print in these years, as the museums describe it. It is the trade’s practice, not a record of this one sheet. It begins with a decision, which the publisher has made: the market judged, the subject settled, the artist hired. The rest of the work follows from it.
The designer draws the whole composition in black ink on a thin sheet of paper. He may write notes and directions on it.
The drawing goes to a workshop. There it is pasted face down on a block of smooth cherrywood, sometimes with oil on the paper to make the lines show. The paper is pulled away. It is strong and fibrous, and a thin layer stays on the wood with the outlines showing through. The carver cuts away all the wood around the lines and leaves them standing.
The drawing is gone. It was normally destroyed in the carving of the key block. Detail too fine for a brush to settle, such as the separate hairs of a wig, is left to the carver’s judgment, and the great majority of prints do not name him.
A black-line proof comes off the block. The printers brush sumi ink onto the raised lines, lay a damp sheet on the block and rub the back hard with a baren, a pad of twisted cord in a bamboo sheath. One proof goes to the censor. Another goes back to the designer, who colours it by hand. From his coloured proof the carver cuts more blocks, one for each colour, each with registration marks so that every pass falls in place.
Here one account lets the designer go: “he was not involved in the printing process.” Another brings him back once more. When the blocks are ready, the publisher and the designer go to the printer’s for the trial printing. The colours go on one at a time, ten impressions or more for an ordinary colour print, the sheet fitted into the marks and rubbed again each time. The printer mixes the colours toward a result the three of them have agreed. When a trial sheet is right, it becomes the model for the run.
For these sheets there is one more pass, and it costs. A dark mica ground of this kind was, in the words of a Christie’s catalogue, “an exceptional feat of printing requiring a specialised studio and major financing.” David Bull, a printmaker in Tokyo who has reproduced a Sharaku, describes how it is done today. The ground goes down first as a flat colour. Then, on the same block, he brushes on thinned glue in place of pigment, lays the sheet down and rubs lightly, so that the glue stays on the surface. He masks the figure, taps mica powder over the sheet through a strainer, and sweeps off the loose powder with a very soft brush. Then he holds it up to the light. That is a modern hand at the bench, not a record of 1794, but it is how the glitter gets onto the paper.
About two hundred sheets, the usual edition of a design, can be printed in a day.
The sources here give no price for these sheets. A decade later, in 1805, a large sheet sold for twenty mon, by the Hoover Institution’s account, a little more than the sixteen it gives for a bowl of soba. Finely printed sheets, it adds, sold for several times as much.
In the fifth month of 1794, twenty-eight sheets go on sale. They show actors in that month’s plays at the city’s three leading theatres, each half-length against black mica, in a fine, exact line and few colours. All twenty-eight are in the large ōban size, which the Adachi print workshop in Tokyo calls “highly unusual for a newly emerging artist.” They do not flatter. Noses are large, and Segawa Kikunojō III, an actor of women’s roles, is shown heavy and middle-aged.
One that survives, in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, shows Ichikawa Omezō I as the servant Ippei: 378 by 253 millimetres, a dark mica ground, signed Tōshūsai Sharaku ga, with the seal, kiwame, that says it has been examined. Another, in the Metropolitan Museum, shows Ōtani Oniji III as Edobei, a servant and a robber in the same play, leaning in with his fingers spread. A sheet of these years usually carries three marks. The third is the publisher’s. On Sharaku’s sheets it is an ivy leaf beneath the three peaks of Mount Fuji.
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45VII Ten Months
“It is rhetoric, not the profound and tragic poetry of Sharaku, nor the subtle and decadent lyric strain of Utamaro.”Arthur Davison Ficke, on Toyokuni, Chats on Japanese Prints (1915)
Edo’s answer comes in pieces, and the pieces do not agree. By one account the public reacts poorly. Yet the first sheets exist in variant printings, which suggests that they went back to the blocks and sold fairly well.
The later sheets are different. In the seventh and eighth months come narrow sheets of full-length figures, mostly on yellowish grounds. By the eleventh month there are trees and stage scenery behind the actors, and the signature has shrunk to Sharaku. The last fifteen designs appear in the first month of 1795. Then nothing. More than a hundred and forty designs have come out in about ten months.
The records do not say why they stop. The Ukiyo-e ruikō, an early chronicle of print designers, says only that he drew the actors too truthfully, and that his career was short for it. One later theory points to his thinning access to the theatres and their actors.
Who he was has been argued over ever since. Fifty years on, in 1844, the Edo chronicler Saitō Gesshin writes that Sharaku had been a Noh actor named Saitō Jūrōbei, in the service of the lord of Awa. An actor of that name appears in a Noh programme of 1816, and some scholars now treat the identification as settled. Others are less sure. Among the theories that have been set aside is that Sharaku was Tsutaya himself.
In 1802, the year of Hokusai’s colour edition, the novelist Shikitei Sanba draws the print designers and their schools as a map. Sharaku is on it as an island, by himself, with no followers.
Whoever held the brush, this much is fixed. Every print attributed to Sharaku was published by one shop, in ten months, beginning in a format that shop had already tried.
VIII The Leaf
Tsutaya falls ill in 1796 and dies on the sixth day of the fifth month of 1797, the last day of May by our calendar. He is forty-seven, and the cause is probably beriberi. His gravestone, as Hisako Kobayashi reads it, says that his spirit was high and that he was generous and greatly respected. In 1834 the novelist Bakin, who once lodged with him, writes that he “was admired by many talented persons,” and that it was rare for anyone from the Yoshiwara to make a fortune.
The shop does not close, and the name does not die with him. His head clerk, Yūsuke, carries the firm on, by Binyon’s account while the heir is a minor, and by Andreas Marks’s he takes the name: he becomes the second Tsutaya Jūzaburō. The firm lasts, at a new address, into the middle of the next century, though Binyon says it sinks to a comparatively insignificant position.
So back to the small page of 1802: the sign, the advertisements for Kyōden and the verse, the prints laid out inside. A sheet from that shop makes three claims. The signature says who drew it, and in 1804 the man who signed would answer for it: Utamaro, by the usual account, spent fifty days in manacles over prints of the warlord Hideyoshi. The seal says it was examined. The leaf says who stands behind it, and in 1791 that had already been tested.
At Hokusai’s door the sign gives one name, and it is the publisher’s. The man is gone; the name still answers.
What the record does not say
What Tsutaya proposed, as against what he published.
What the shop looked like on the morning after the penalty of 1791.
The names of the men who carved and printed these sheets.
The drawings themselves, which the carving destroyed.
What a Sharaku sheet cost in 1794.
Why Sharaku stopped, and, beyond argument, who he was.
What Tsutaya thought of any of it, beyond one New Year poem and a foreword his author wrote for him.
Intellimmersion is Intellicurean’s series of documented stories, each told in the order it happened and closed with the sources it rests on. No scene in this one is invented. The present tense is a way of telling, not a claim to have seen anything, and where the sources are silent the text says so. Sources: Hokusai’s page, Tokyo Metropolitan Library and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Tsutaya’s life, the guides, his father, A Thousand at a Glance, Five-Needled Pines, the plain kimono and the Edobei, Nippon.com, with its Japanese series on the penalty of 1791, and Waraku web on the writing tools; Urokogataya and the succession, Wikipedia, citing Andreas Marks and Peter Kornicki; Laurence Binyon (Japanese Colour Prints) on the premises, the trademark, the lodgers, the heir and the firm’s decline, Hisako Kobayashi on the gravestone, and Bakin, all as quoted by the Lyon Collection; the album of courtesans, Princeton University Library’s Graphic Arts blog; Utamaro’s close-ups, the naming ban and the stage portraits, Momoka Komatsu at Keio University; the British Museum on the Insect Book and the Hideyoshi triptych; the Fitzwilliam sheet, Fitzwilliam Museum; the play shared by Ippei and Edobei, the Metropolitan Museum (Ippei, Edobei); the printing process, the Asian Art Museum, the Adachi Foundation and JAANUS; the mica ground today, David Bull’s Encyclopedia of Woodblock Printmaking; the cost of the mica ground, a Christie’s catalogue; the ōban format, the Adachi print workshop; the Ukiyo-e ruikō, Saitō Gesshin and the counts, John Fiorillo’s Viewing Japanese Prints; Sharaku by period, the variant printings, the large noses and Sanba’s map, Wikipedia; the gate, the moat, the embankment and the willow, the National Diet Library’s Landmarks of Japan; his birth in the quarter and the cousin’s teahouse, the Japan Times; the rules of 1790, the examiners’ exile, the ban of 1793 on names and the ban of 1796 on picture-puzzles, John Fiorillo’s notes on censorship; the kiwame seal, JAANUS; the poem of 1793, Waraku web, in Intellicurean’s translation; the date of his death in both calendars, Waraku web; the price of a sheet and of a bowl of soba, the Hoover Institution’s Fanning the Flames; Segawa Kikunojō III, John Fiorillo’s page on Sharaku; the site of the Nihonbashi shop, Waraku web; the sizes of the sheets, the holding museums, with the narrow Sharaku from the Art Institute of Chicago. Months are those of the Japanese calendar of the time, which ran about a month behind ours: Tsutaya died on the sixth day of the fifth month of 1797, which was May 31. Epigraphs: Katsushika Hokusai’s letter, as given at Japanese Arts from Goncourt’s Hokusai; the foreword to Hakoiri musume menya ningyō, in Matthew Meyer’s translation, with the Tokyo Metropolitan Library’s note on its authorship; John Fiorillo’s essay on Utamaro and physiognomy; Martin Laflamme’s review of Andreas Marks’s The Japanese Woodblock Prints Companion; Arthur Davison Ficke, Chats on Japanese Prints (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1915). Prints: The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Insect Book, Popen, Edobei, triptych), all Open Access; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the New York Public Library; the Tokyo Metropolitan Library; the Art Institute of Chicago. Music: Kishi no Yanagi, part 1, by Kineya Shōjirō III, from a 1934 practice record for shamisen alone by Kineya Gosaburō I and Kineya Gosō (Victor 52944), held by the National Diet Library and in the public domain; it was written decades after Tsutaya’s death and is looped here for reading. Drafted with Claude Fable 5.1 and revised with Claude Opus 5.5; literary editing by Claude Sonnet 5.5; cold read by Claude Fable 5.2; the interactive layers built with Claude Opus 5.5. Header image generated with Gemini Argon; the eight prints are reproduced from the collections named above. The map, the scale view, the shop’s mark and the separation of the Edobei into stages were drawn for this page.