In the Japanese folktale “Chin Chin Kobakama,” toothpicks strewn about a floor spring to life in the form of little, peg-legged samurai. The tiny warriors torment a young woman with mockery of her subpar housekeeping.
“She tried to catch some of them, but they jumped about so quickly that she could not,” the story goes. “Then she tried to drive them away, but they would not go, and they never stopped singing… or laughing at her. Then she knew they were little fairies and became so frightened that she could not even cry out.”
The moral of the story, of course, is to keep a clean house. This 1903 English translation of the tale is recounted in a Japanese chirimen, or crêpe-paper, book, by Lafcadio Hearn, a prominent Japanologist and translator who helped introduce Japanese literature and culture to the Western world in the early 20th century.
The book is displayed in “Textured Stories: The Chirimen Books of Modern Japan,” an exhibition at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, part of the Yale Library, on view through May 3.
Produced between the 1880s and 1950s and printed on textured, fabric-like paper, chirimen books were a popular medium for familiarizing Western readers with Japan. They contained vivid, colorful illustrations and covered a wide range of topics, including Japanese fairy tales, folklore, festivals, performing arts, and scenes from everyday life, in a variety of Western languages.
“The books were treated as souvenirs for Western people visiting Japan,” said Haruko Nakamura, librarian for Japanese studies at Yale, who curated the show with Yoshitaka Yamamoto, assistant professor of East Asian languages and literatures in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “They became a popular way to disseminate knowledge of Japan to the wider world.”
Hasegawa Takejiro, an innovative Japanese publisher, is credited with creating the genre. He developed a network of authors, translators, and illustrators to produce the books and formed partnerships with international publishers to distribute them.
The exhibition, which draws on multiple Yale Library collections and includes loans from the Yale Peabody Museum, Yale Center for British Art, and the Harvard-Yenching Library, explores the international collaborations that produced the books, the Japanese literary traditions that preceded them, and the work that goes into creating the crêpe-paper from which they are made.
Here are five things to know about “Textured Stories”:
1. Producing the books’ textured crêpe-paper pages required substantial effort.
A brief video provides visitors a quick tutorial on how to make the books’ signature wrinkled crêpe-paper. In the process, the illustrations are first printed onto washi, traditional Japanese paper, using woodblock printing. The text is added through Western-style typesetting. The printed pages are dampened and dried before being placed between sheets of specially prepared pattern paper that serve as a mold. The sheets are rolled up and inserted into a cylinder and placed on a wooden press known as a manriki. The cylinder is repeatedly compressed in different directions to produce vertical, horizontal, and diagonal creases in the paper. The compression process shrinks the pages by about 20%, which makes the illustrations brighter and more vivid.
Detail of an illustration from “The Ogres of Oyeyama,” translated by Kate James.
2. Women were prominent among the Western translators who helped produce chirimen books.
The translators included Western scholars, missionaries, and government officials. Some of the most prolific were women. Kate James, who focused on retelling Japanese classical stories, translated more chirimen titles into English than any other translator, according to the exhibit text.
“When you start studying crêpe-paper books, you find her name everywhere,” Yamamoto said, adding that James’ husband was stationed in Japan with the British Navy.
An example of James’ work on view is her translation of a story about two forgetful brothers from the Konjaku monogatarishu (“Anthology of Tales Old and New”), a collection of more than 1,000 stories from Japan’s late Heian period, 794 to 1185 C.E.
“That night he dreamed a dream, and to his dream the events of the next day were clearly revealed,” reads her translation. “And so every night in his vision it was shown to him what would happen, and in what manner he should act.”
The brightly colored illustration on the opposite page from the text shows the character sleeping. A wispy thought bubble traverses the pages and blends into an illustration of the sleeping character’s dream.
Lafcadio Hearn and British Japanologist Basil Hall Chamberlain praised the quality of James’ work, Nakamura said.
3. Chirimen books were collaborations between Japanese illustrators and Western translators.
The illustrators tended to be students of traditional Japanese-style painting, but were also interested in Western artistic techniques, Yamamoto said.
Exposure to Western stories and art gave them the ample opportunity to consider the directions that Japanese art could take, he said. Some of the artists were well known while others were obscure.
Kobayashi Eitaku, a renowned artist, was a leading illustrator of chirimen books, according to the exhibit label. An 1886 copy of “The Serpent with Eight Heads,” translated by Basil Hall Chamberlain, features Eitaku’s illustration of the titular beast, a scaly monster with a coiled tail. Its fearsome heads twist together in a nightmarish knot.
Illustrated cover of “The Serpent with Eight Heads.”
4. The exhibition explores East Asia’s tradition of woodblock printing.
Chirimen books combine Western-style moveable type with traditional East Asian woodblock printing, which originated in China in the 7th century C.E. and spread to Japan about a century later. A mid-19th century woodblock on display, which was used to print handheld fans and is housed at the Yale Peabody Museum, features a portrait of a kabuki actor playing a chivalrous outlaw. A modern recreation demonstrates how an image created with the woodblock might have looked. The display is adjacent to Yale’s copy of the Gutenberg Bible, the first significant book manufactured in the West using metal moveable type, which is on permanent display at the Beinecke Library.
5. Chirimen books, like today’s Japanese manga and anime, speak to the power of visual imagery.
Japanese comics (manga) and animation (anime) draw heavily from Western sources but are also influenced by traditional Japanese storytelling as expressed in chirimen books, Yamamoto said.
“We end [the exhibition] by looking into the future,” he said. “There is a long tradition of graphic storytelling in Japan and East Asia, and crêpe-paper books belong to that lineage. Manga and anime are an extension of that lineage.”
The presence of supernatural beings in stories demonstrates the continuity between manga and anime and traditional storytelling, he said, citing “No-Face,” the mysterious, faceless spirit that appears in Hayao Miyazaki’s 2001 animated fantasy film, “Spirited Away,” (a clip from the film is on view) and the toothpick warriors in Hearn’s translation of “Chin Chin Kobakama.”
