Saori Toyoda
Rare Books and Old Materials Division,
Reference and Special Collections Department

This article is based on the article in Japanese of the same title
in NDL Monthly Bulletin No. 599 (February 2011).

Photo 1: Portrait of Dr. Mitsutaro Shirai
(Frontispiece, Shirai Mitsutaro chosakushu volume 6, Kagaku Shoin, 1990)

The National Diet Library (NDL) holds approximately six thousand items previously owned by Dr. Mitsutaro Shirai (1863-1932; Photo 1), a botanist. The NDL acquired them through purchase during 1940 and 1942, and a donation from family of his diaries and manuscripts in 1976. This "Shirai Bunko" makes up the core of the NDL's herbalism collection along with the "Ito Bunko" and it contains distinctive materials such as letters of herbalists including Ranzan Ono (1729-1810) and Shaseibutsu ruihinzu (illustrated by Sessai Hattori and others)ⁱ , an illustrated scroll of plants and animals.

Yume no tamakura (lit. dreamy arm pillow) in the Shirai Bunko, however, is not a herbal. It has neither its original cover nor a daisen (title slip attached to the cover); the lettering of 'Yume no tamakura' is barely visible on the hanshin (central part of a sheet which makes an edge of a covered binding book). I was amazed at its lively color when I first saw it. The book is made up of fifteen leaves (thirty pages), however the part after the back page of leaf 13 to the end is missing, to which instead Shirai added handwritten illustrations and texts (Photo 2 and 3). He drew the characters in a masterly way though he seems to have made a rough sketch beforehand. At the end of the book, there are a couple of notes proving that he worked on it in 1889, when he was a professor at the Tokyo School of Agriculture and Forestry.

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Yume no tamakura is originally a kibyoshi (an illustrated storybook in yellow covers) titled Katakiuchi haru no tamakura (lit. vengeance, spring arm pillow). In the story, a peasant named Shichigoro fled after murdering Taminosuke Yamamoto, his benefactor who had recommended him for samurai status, but he suffered revenge at the hands of Taminosuke's surviving son, Eijiro. Here, taking up the same scene, let's make a comparison between the Katakiuchi haru no tamakura and the Yume no tamakura (Photo 2 and 4). Focusing on Eijiro, who is just slashing his foe Shichigoro, Shirai's illustration seems more dynamic than Utagawa Toyohiro's original. The Katakiuchi haru no tamakura ends with the front of leaf 15, in which Eijiro is getting tumultuous applause from onlookers just after delivering the death blow. On the other hand, the Yume no tamakura wraps up the story by adding a half leaf to the original, back of leaf 15 (Photo 3), where Eijiro was rewarded by the lord, married a daughter of the chief retainer and "lived happily ever after."

According to Shirai's pupil, Naoji Suematsu, Shirai had been showing such a talent for painting since childhood that he even thought he would make a living as an artist. The Shirai Bunko contains plant collecting diaries and travel sketches, and many of them have illustrations. For example, in the Enoshima Kamakura kiko,ⁱⁱ a record of a trip to Enoshima and Kamakura in 1881 with seven friends, Shirai amusingly described his fellows dropping out from fatigue and hunger though they set out in high spirits to walk all night from Tokyo to Enoshima, and he gave illustrations of the view of Enoshima and the Great Buddha statue of Kamakura.

Shirai is known as someone who valued customs handed down from ancestors and would not accept western culture. He was so thorough that he would not even wear a scarf, socks, gloves, or a hat as being Western-style clothing, and ate very little beef. This attitude, however, did not end up as a mere prejudice, but it might have helped drive him into the herbalism of the Edo period, which had tended to be disregarded after the Meiji Restoration.

In this book you can find Shirai's humor and a sense of his attachment to old stories of the Edo period.

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Machinasai Imanari (Illustrated by Utagawa Toyohiro), Yume no tamakura,
published by Izumiya Ichibei in 1804. 1 vol. 18cm.
<NDL call number: 特1-2814> (held in the Tokyo Main Library)

Note:
Images of a part of Shirai Bunko are available on the NDL website. (Japanese only) and the digital exhibition "Fauna and Flora in Illustrations" (Japanese only). The other larger part including Yume no tamakura is planned to be provided on the Internet in fiscal 2011.

• ref.:
  • Naoji Suematsu, "Honkai shodai kaicho Shirai Mitsutaro sensei no seitan dai hyakunen o mukaete," Nihon Shokubutsu Byori Gakkaiho 27 (3), 1962, pp.99-101
  • Kokuritsu Kokkai Toshokan shozo kojin bunkoten: tenji mokuroku, Kokuritsu Kokkai Toshokan, 1982
  • Shirai Mitsutaro chosakushu volume 5 and 6, ed. Yojiro Kimura, Kagaku Shoin, 1988-1990

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ⁱ<NDL call number: 寄別 10-43> Digitized image is available on the NDL website
ⁱⁱ<NDL call number: 特 1-3626>Written in 1881, 17cm