Maggs Bros.

Wakayama Yasoji’s expressive book on the romantic life of kappa, a type of folkloric Japanese water creature. The total limitation for this title is 250, and the first 10 were special copies. The present book is no.1 of the special 10, with the hand-painted binding showing a kappa carrying another on its shoulders.

Born in rural Hokkaido, Wakayama Yasoji (1903-1983) was a Japanese artist who studied woodblock printing under the great Maekawa Senpan (1888-1960) and Onshi Koshiro (1891-1951) as well as Japanese and Western-style oil painting. Initially he had studied to become a lawyer, but followed his creative calling and turned his attention to artistic endeavours instead. He did so at a particularly exciting time, when Japanese artists started to move away from the printmaking traditions of ukiyo-e and began to experiment in sosaku-hanga. Put simply, the sosaku-hanga movement (loosely translated to ‘creative prints’) was the do-it-all-yourself version of woodblock printing; rather than divide the labour between the artist, block cutter and printer, artists began to do every part of the process by themselves. This was deemed to be a rebellious break away from ukiyo-e, and opened up new possibilities for artistic expression.

Within the cannon of sosaku-hanga, Wakayama was particularly experimental artist. He was fascinated by mimeograph and screen printing, and tested the possibilities of printing with these methods. The present book is Wakayama’s first self-published book, which he printed using a tabletop mimeograph printer. Using multiple layers of colour, the resulting images have a gentle softness to them. Later, from 1963, Wakayama started to experiment with ‘paper-clean printing’ which was a hybrid of stencil printing and mimeograph. He also produced prints printed from styrofoam, with an intaglio method.

Extremely rare. No copies in OCLC.