KUNIYOSHI • 春画绘本 • 梦中小憩 • 日本木版画 • 浮世绘 - 日本 - Edo Period (1600-1868)

UTAGAWA KUNIYOSHI (1797–1861)
Karine no Yume (仮寝の夢) — "Dreams While Napping"
Volume 2 of 3 (中之巻) — Shunga Ehon, 1836 (Tenpō 7)

Date: 1836 (Tenpō 7)
Format: 半紙本、袋とじ装丁 — 一冊本
Size: 約 22 × 16 cm
Technique: 木版画（木版印刷、木版摺り）、多色刷
Reference: 久保清泉プロジェクトの浮世絵性風俗画刊行物調査で、全三冊組（上/中/下）と元の装丁を記録した原本が確認されている。
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Condition

Excellent. The impression is crisp and the register clean; colours retain full saturation throughout — the deep blues, the strong reds and rose pinks, the dense blacks of hair and lacquer, and the graded bokashi skies of the night scenes. Metallic pigment accents remain visible in the textiles. Fine keyblock work in hair, textile patterning and the kanzashi arrays is preserved with real clarity.

The paper is very well preserved for a book of this age. The washi is clean and supple, with only minor handling soiling to some margins — entirely normal and unobtrusive. Binding intact. The printed text pages read clearly. Museum quality for an ehon of this date. Please examine all photographs!
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The Book — Kuniyoshi at the Height of His Powers

Karine no Yume — "Dreams While Napping" — appeared in 1836, in the middle of the most sustained run of erotic book design in Kuniyoshi's career. Between roughly 1829 and 1840 he produced a new enpon almost every year, and by the mid-1830s he had abandoned the decorative formulas of earlier shunga in favour of something closer to reportage: densely furnished Edo interiors, real weather, characters who argue and sulk and get caught.

The title is a pun of the kind shunga publishers loved. Karine is a light nap, a doze — but the word shadows karitaku, the temporary premises the Yoshiwara houses occupied whenever fire drove them out of the quarter, and the term surfaces repeatedly in this volume's text. The whole book reads as a dream of the pleasure quarter: overheard, half-remembered, and considerably less flattering than the official version.

Like all shunga of the period it was published without an artist's name. The Tokugawa prohibitions on erotic printing had been in force since 1722 and were periodically enforced with real severity — the Tenpō Reforms would fall on the print trade within a few years of this book's appearance. Anonymity fooled nobody. Kuniyoshi's hand is unmistakable in the facial types, the crowded compositions, and the sheer appetite for incident.
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Rarity

Complete shunga ehon of the 1830s survive in small numbers. They were printed in limited runs for a semi-clandestine market, read hard, and then — through the Meiji period and well into the twentieth century — actively destroyed or suppressed. Individual volumes surface at the specialist level from time to time; complete three-volume sets rarely. A volume in this state of preservation, with fresh colour, an intact original decorated cover and legible text, is the exception rather than the rule.

Among the standout designs: lovers sheltering in a moored boat beneath the pilings of a great Sumida River bridge in a night downpour; the noble couple embracing in an open boat on rough black seas — the design known from the literature; a rescue from the waves evoking the love-suicide (shinjū) climax of the jōruri stage and much more.

This integration of figures into full atmospheric landscapes places the book alongside Kuniyoshi's most ambitious erotic work of the mid to late 1830s.