KAWAKAMI (Sumio).
Yokohama dontaku [Yokohama day off]
Yokohama's cast of colourful characters
Kawakami’s upbeat book on the theme of a Yokohama dontaku ‘a day off in Yokohama’. Unusually this book is printed in colour, rather than in a single black layer with hand-colouring as is more usual for Kawakami’s works.
The present title is one of a number of books Kawakami printed on the theme of Yokohama, the bustling port city where he grew up. Yokohama has a long history of foreign interactions and trade, which also fascinated Kawakami as an advocate for cross-cultural collaboration. The present book is a song narrating the colourful characters, Japanese and Western, who are in Yokohama on a day off. Dontaku is an unusual, non-Japanese word which is derived from the Dutch word for Sunday, zondag. The word was also interpreted as ‘holiday’ or ‘day off’. Yokohama Dontaku was later made the name for an annual port festival that started in the 1980s. The present book predates the festival, and simply describes a rest day in Yokohama.
The colophon notes this title as the 4th instalment of Kawakami’s annual kogacho ‘small picture book’ series. Interestingly, the bookseller ticket pasted to the dust jacket flap notes that it was sold at an art books sale in Kanda, Tokyo by the arts division of the Inoue bookshop.
Very rare. No copies in OCLC.
