Posted by John Fiorillo on January 04, 1999 at 21:56:09:
In Reply to: Re:Sanjûrokkasen posted by Hans Olof Johansson on January 04, 1999 at 18:14:26:
Hi, Hans Olof,
In response to your:
" … Titles like Sanjûrokkassen ("36 battles" - Kuniyoshi), Sanjûrokkaisen ("36 ghosts" - Yoshitoshi), and even Sanjûrokkaiseki ("36 restaurants" - Kuniyoshi) were more or less apparent allusions to Sanjûrokkasen. In my opinion, they were certainly not coincidental, as you seem to suggest. Similarly, I doubt that the double appearance of the numbers 100 and 36 in sets of poets, ghosts and views of Fuji is coincidental."
Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough in my earlier responses, and I hope this comment doesn’t make things worse. It is not that the numerologies associated with the numbers 36 and 100 were unrelated, nor that various series by Hokusai, Kuniyoshi, Kunisada, Yoshitoshi, and others were not intentional puns on the 36 Poets. Rather, it’s making the connection the other way round that has not been proven in this case. The argument seems anachronistic to me. In other words, I know of no works or publications that established before Kunisada’s series any standardized association in the Edo public’s imagination between the number 36 and ghost stories (as it did with the number 36 and the immortal poets). Yes, certainly, other artists punned on the 36 poets while providing views of restaurants, famous landscape sites, battles and ghosts, but can you turn it around and say that therefore Kunisada was punning on 36 ghosts when all you have so far is a series by Yoshitoshi appearing 37 years later? So to say Kunisada was punning on 36 Ghosts seems to me to be putting the cart before the horse. Also, the fact that so far the few prints identified on Theo’s website happen to be mostly prints about ghosts does not in itself prove that the series title was punning on "36 ghosts."