Chirashigaki: Scrambled Writing
A collection of six manuscript letters (ranging from 495 x 360 mm. to 465 x 290 mm.) & four envelopes, all written by court ladies (<I>nyōbō</I>) at the Imperial Palace in Kyoto.
[Japan]: 1583-mid-Edo, but we believe these are later copies.
The Nagahashi no tsubone 長橋局 (“room at the long bridge”) was a powerful administrative office within the Imperial Court in Kyoto, located close to the Seiryōden (the emperor’s private residence). Headed by a woman, who was the senior secretary of the Bureau of Palace Attendants (Kōtō no naishi), the office was in charge of the imperial household accounts and controlled communications and negotiations between the palace and the outside world.
Because the emperor rarely wrote official executive orders, this activity was taken on by the Nagahashi no tsubone’s office, which issued official documents expressing the emperor’s directives. The documents — known as nyōbō hōsho 女房奉書 (“court woman’s official letter”) — were not written in the rigid, formal male-bureaucrat script known as rinji, but in a flowing kana syllabary, following the style of chirashigaki 散らし書き (“scrambled writing”), where text is arranged with the opening and most important parts indicated not by their position on the page but by the size of the characters and the boldness of the ink (as in modern-day word clouds where the important words appear bolder).
In fine condition.
Price: $1,650.00
Item ID: 11544
