Kibi Daijin Nittō Emaki

• Illustration — Chariots of Chinese officials leading Kibi to the Imperial Palace upon his arrival in China The Kibi Daijin Nittō Emaki originally consisted of a single scroll high by long, the longest single scroll ever known, before being separated into four parts. It dates from the second half of the 12th century (end of the Heian period (794–1185) or early Kamakura period (1185–1333)), when a renewed interest in the narrative subjects and life of the people was reflected in the topics of contemporary emakimono. The main character in the work is Japanese Minister Kibi no Makibi (693–775), whose diplomatic trips to the powerful Tang court in China have inspired legendary chronicles. The emakimono takes as its theme an episode from these legends: the adventures of Kibi while staying at the Chinese Imperial Palace, where Chinese intellectuals and nobles wanted to put his wisdom and intelligence to the test. Secluded in a tower, Kibi had to accomplish three tasks: write an exegesis of a voluminous Chinese anthology, win a game of Go, and provide a commentary on a sophisticated and tortuous poem. The Minister managed to pass all of the tests, with the help of Japanese deities. • Illustration — Image of the Tang dynasty Imperial Palace used to divide the work into sections The scroll is divided into six sections, each including text and illustrations: • The introductory text of the work is lost, but the image shows Kibi's arrival by boat in China. There, a group of Chinese officials is waiting to take him to the palace, where he will be held in a tower. • A demon, who is none other than the ghost of Abe no Nakamaro, manages by trickery to enter the tower to offer Kibi his help, revealing his true identity. • A Chinese official submits to Kibi his first test, writing the exegesis of the famous Chinese anthology of poetry and literature entitled Wen Xuan. The demon then summarises the work to Kibi and takes him to the palace to attend a conference on the text. • Kibi writes his exegesis on the backs of calendars. A Chinese scholar comes to test Kibi's knowledge of the text, but cannot fault it. • Court officials hold a meeting, at which they plan to kill Kibi if he loses in the second event: the game of Go. The demon warns the Minister of these sinister plans and teaches him the basics of the game. • A Go master comes to challenge Kibi who manages to win by swallowing a coin. Suspicious, the master forces Kibi to take a purgative, but the latter conceals the coin using magic. Although the scroll ends at the conclusion of this second test, the text of Gōdanshō (1104–1108), a classic of Japanese literature, allows us to know the end of the story: after Kibi's success, thanks to the supernatural intervention of a spider, in the final test of providing a commentary on a poem, the Chinese decide to lock him up until he dies. Kibi, with the help of the demon, then makes the Chinese sun and moon disappear, forcing the terrified Imperial court to give him back his freedom. It is likely that a second scroll narrating the end of the legend originally existed, or was part of later versions.

• Illustration — The game of Go, the second task that Kibi had to accomplish The Kibi Daijin Nittō Emaki, like all emakimono of its time, was created in the then fashionable Yamato-e style of Japanese painting. It is similar in style to the Ban Dainagon Ekotoba, which dates from around the same time, and is attributed to Tokiwa Mitsunaga; that work has brilliant colours used for costumes and accessories, but is in a more realistic than poetic tone. Mitsunaga was a late Heian and early Kamakura period Yamato-e master: the records, and also the similarities in pictorial style, suggest that he was also the author of the Kibi Daijin Nittō Emaki, but that hypothesis is questionable according to art historians, because of the stylistic variations and the artistic superiority of the Ban Dainagon Ekotoba. Rather, the artist was probably a painter from the capital Kyoto and contemporary of Mitsunaga. The composition of the Kibi Daijin Nittō Emaki is based on repetition in the six scenes of the same easily identifiable decoration: the tower, the Imperial Palace and the palace gate. This is the simplest approach to suggest the temporal evolution of a story in narrative paintings, used in older works like the Kokawa-dera Engi Emaki. Perspective is rendered in a cavalier unrealistic manner, with long diagonals, while no landscape appears, except trees that decrease in size as they approach the horizon. • Illustration — Great gate of the Imperial Palace The very colourful, predominantly red paintings were realised using the tsukuri-e technique: first, a sketch of the outlines was done, then the opaque colour was added en aplat, and finally the outlines and small details were redrawn in ink over the paint. The artist seems to have had limited knowledge of the ancient Tang dynasty China, where the story takes place: rather the work is inspired by Japanese Buddhist paintings of the 11th and 12th centuries, usually based on Chinese models. The faces of the Chinese people in the work are very expressive, almost caricatural, but not very individualised. Kibi, for his part, is painted in a manner close to hikime kagibana: a white and expressionless face with a few features for the eyes, nose and mouth, a refined method in vogue in the works of the aristocrats of the Imperial Court such as the Genji Monogatari Emaki, here modified in relation to some details such as the moustache and the eyelids.