Meet the subject
絵巻
Emaki are horizontal picture scrolls used for stories, biographies and other subjects. As a viewer opens the scroll toward the left, the portion already seen is rolled up on the right. The relationship between words, images and changing scenes works within that gradually revealed field.
The usual viewing direction is right to left.
Text and pictures often alternate, but some works have little or no accompanying text.
Scroll format and narrative technique allow many different combinations.
A mounted horizontal scroll can carry writing, calligraphy or paintings. The term emaki refers to painted works in that format, often alternating passages of text with corresponding images. Works with little or no explanatory text may also be called 画巻 or 図巻. The shared mounting does not require every work to organize its content in the same way.
Long sheets of paper or silk are mounted as a scroll that can be rolled for storage. The Fukuoka City Museum describes opening a section roughly shoulder-width and moving through it from right to left. A new section appears as the portion already viewed is rolled up.
The left roll shrinks as the right roll grows; the imagery is viewed from right to left. The motifs distinguish three opening positions.
Kotobagaki is the text associated with the pictures. In the Tale of Genji scroll, passages selected from the novel precede corresponding paintings. Other works can place writing within an image or rely mainly on pictures; the medium does not require one fixed balance of illustration and text.
Roads, buildings, clouds and moving figures can connect or separate scenes as a scroll opens. The Amagimi scroll of Shigisan Engi gives a concrete repeated-character example: the same nun prays before the Great Buddha at Tōdaiji and then dozes, with different moments sharing one setting. This device, iji-dōzu, expresses passing time through repeated figures. Other scrolls arrange selected episodes as separate pictures.
Eighth-century examples place scripture about the Buddha’s earlier lives and biography in the lower half, with corresponding pictures above. This early arrangement lets text and image run together in parallel registers, rather than alternating whole passages with separate paintings.
The twelfth-century Tale of Genji scroll combines selected episodes with related text. In Suzumushi II, a moonlit gathering is visible through fukinuki yatai: the ceiling is omitted to reveal people inside the building from above. The missing roof belongs to the painter’s viewing arrangement.
The Animal and Human Caricatures uses ink lines for animals, people and their activities without accompanying kotobagaki. Action, orientation and groups guide the eye. It demonstrates a different use of the horizontal scroll from the coloured courtly scenes alternating with text in Genji.
This passage presents animal activity in continuous ink drawing without alternating text. It illustrates word–image organization, without identifying every repeated animal as the same character.
Scrolls, paintings and Buddhist texts circulated within East Asia. Japan’s surviving eighth-century Illustrated Sutra of Cause and Effect scrolls and fragments preserve an early text-and-image format. They are precursors to later emaki, with a distinct arrangement of their own.
Heian-period subjects included literary tales, anecdotes and temple stories. Temple and shrine origins, eminent monks’ lives and warfare developed further in the Kamakura period. Long pictures and accompanying text could accommodate substantial narratives while recording clothing, objects and inhabited spaces.
Artists continued making scrolls for battles, processions and other subjects. The Kubosō Memorial Museum’s collection exhibition includes the Muromachi-period Sannō Reigenki and the Edo-period Kōbō Daishi Gyōjō scrolls as later examples. Surviving works can also change format: in 1932, the Genji scroll’s pictures and text were separated and remounted in frames for preservation. An individually displayed painting may once have belonged to a long sequence.
From right to left, rolling up the portion already seen on the right.
The writing associated with the pictures; its presence and arrangement vary.
It omits the roof or ceiling as a pictorial device to reveal the interior.
Not necessarily. Some scrolls were divided or remounted, as happened to the Genji scroll.