This page attempts to catalog all known prints in Yoshitoshi‘s series ‘Kōto kaiseki beppin kurabe (皇都 會席 別品 竸 – Specialties of Restaurants in the Imperial City)’. (The title is now usually written with the simplified character 競.)
The title is given a wide range of translations, depending on how literal – and discreet – the translator wishes to be; in the original Japanese it seems to have a number of potential double meanings which are difficult to capture in English. kaiseki means ‘meeting place’, ‘party’, ‘restaurant dinner’, etc.; beppin is a somewhat vulgar word meaning ‘beautiful woman’; and kurabe means ‘competition’ or ‘auction’. So one plausible translation is ‘Competition between beautiful women at restaurants’.
The characters for Kōto, ‘Imperial city’, in the title cartouche are written horizontally in small characters above the others; those words are therefore sometimes left out of the title given for this series.
Note that Japanese at that point in time was generally written in vertical columns, running from right to left; a horizontal arrangement was used only where the text had to fit into a limited space. In such horizontal writing, the characters ran from right to left, since it was a special case of the normal vertical writing, one in which each column contains only a single character. Only after World War II did the left-to-right horizontal form common in Western languages become widespread in Japan.
The title of each individual print are on the sides of the cartouche which holds the series title; the location is given at the bottom right, and the establishment at the bottom left.
The series dates from toward the end of Yoshitoshi’s career, when he was about thirty-nine. It thus dates from only about seven years before his well-known masterpieces such as his great series “One Hundred Aspects of the Moon” (1885-1892), and “New Forms of Thirty-Six Ghosts” (often called simply “Thirty-Six Ghosts”) (1889-1892).
The prints in this series are collaborations between Yoshitoshi and various of his students, including:
- Utagawa Toshimasa (fl. ca. mid-1890s)
- Yamazaki Toshinobu (1857-1886)
- Arai Toshiyuki (1863-1941)
Technical details
- Dates: 4/1878
- Size: Ōban
- Signed: Ōju Yoshitoshi
- Seals: Taiso
- Publishers: Kobayashi Tetsujirō
- Block carvers: Hori Koei
Previous cataloguings
The only known attempts to enumerate this series was in Keyes’ thesis:
Roger. S. Keyes, "Courage and Silence: A Study of the Life and Color Woodblock Prints of Tsukioka Yoshitoshi 1839-1892", Cinncinnati, 1982
where it appears as series #404.
Keyes listed nine prints in this series, but we have found an additional twelve prints, which we have numbered in the order in which they were discovered (approximately).
This page (and list) is not necessarily complete; the series is not well documented, and there may be yet other prints which have not yet come to our attention. If you know of any prints from this series which aren’t listed here, or have either i) information about any errors on the page, ii) better images than the ones below, iii) missing information about individual prints (e.g. publisher, exact date), please let us know.
