Word: sharaku
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Dates: during 1956-1956
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...most mysterious master in the history of Japanese art was a printmaker who signed himself Sharaku, meaning depict pleasure. One spring day in 1794 Sharaku entered a guidebook and print shop on the edge of Edo's red-light district carrying some stark, needle-sharp portraits of Kabuki actors. The shopkeeper agreed to publish his drawings, so for the next ten months Sharaku depicted the pleasures of the stage. His prints sold badly, and Sharaku vanished, never to produce again. He left behind a body of work as exquisite as it was small: two painted fans, 17 drawings...
...display in Tokyo's huge Mitsukoshi department store was a newly discovered Sharaku depicting not another actor but a wrestler: the famed and presumably feared Daidozan ("Great Boy Mountain") Bungoro. Daidozan's career is almost as much a mystery as Sharaku's own. At eight, when Sharaku drew him, the little athlete weighed 180 Ibs. and boasted a 47-inch waistline. Sharaku showed him charging belly-on toward the spectator and squinting in delighted anticipation of the coming collision with his opponent. Daidozan never fulfilled his large promise, for he quit the ring at a mere...
...much more is known about Sharaku. He simply appeared for a moment, brilliant and unexpected as a comet, in the rich, slowly circling heaven...
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