Two Dancers Performing a “Shakkyōmono” Kabuki Dance, from Spring Rain Surimono Album (Harusame surimono-jō), vol. 3

Two Dancers Performing a “Shakkyōmono” Kabuki Dance, from Spring Rain Surimono Album (Harusame surimono-jō), vol. 3

Kubo Shunman

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Surimono are privately published woodblock prints, usually commissioned by poets or poetry groups as a form of New Year’s greeting card. The poems, most commonly kyōka (witty thirty-one syllable verse), inscribed on the prints usually include felicitous imagery connected with spring, which in the lunar calendar begins on the first day of the first month. Themes of surimono are often erudite, frequently alluding to Japanese literary classics in both texts and images. This album belongs to a set of three compiled by Hayashi Tadamasa, the great Parisian dealer of Japanese art. Hayashi arranged the more than four hundred prints in the set on facing leaves according to themes, or in a way that created an attractive arrangement of designs, complementary in both color and shape. The pigments, printing techniques, and paper used for surimono often were of the highest quality, and represent the epitome of late Edo-period woodblock printing. This image derives from the Noh play Shakkyō in which the bodhisattva Monju’s lion mount dances with peonies to celebrate an aged monk’s arrival in the bodhisattva’s Pure Land via a treacherously narrow stone bridge.

Asian Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Two Dancers Performing a “Shakkyōmono” Kabuki Dance, from Spring Rain Surimono Album (Harusame surimono-jō), vol. 3Two Dancers Performing a “Shakkyōmono” Kabuki Dance, from Spring Rain Surimono Album (Harusame surimono-jō), vol. 3Two Dancers Performing a “Shakkyōmono” Kabuki Dance, from Spring Rain Surimono Album (Harusame surimono-jō), vol. 3Two Dancers Performing a “Shakkyōmono” Kabuki Dance, from Spring Rain Surimono Album (Harusame surimono-jō), vol. 3Two Dancers Performing a “Shakkyōmono” Kabuki Dance, from Spring Rain Surimono Album (Harusame surimono-jō), vol. 3

The Met's collection of Asian art—more than 35,000 objects, ranging in date from the third millennium B.C. to the twenty-first century—is one of the largest and most comprehensive in the world. Each of the many civilizations of Asia is represented by outstanding works, providing an unrivaled experience of the artistic traditions of nearly half the world.