Inkstone Case with Poetic Scene of Shio no Yama in Makie

Although the Japanese sometimes followed the Chinese example of keeping an inkstone separately, it was often stored together with a water dropper, inkstick, brush, penknife, and awl in a special box. Such boxes developed in response to the Japanese living space, which was based on Heian-period aristocratic residences (shinden), where various activities including meals, reading, writing, and dressing all took place in one room, and instead of fixed furniture they devised a variety of portable boxes. The inkstone case contains the essential items of Japanese stationery.
The case is decorated with plovers playing along a shoreline, but it is far from a simple landscape motif. Script scattered about the picture quotes lines from a poem in Kokin wakashū (Collection of Ancient and Modern Japanese Poetry): “The plovers on the jutting crags beneath briny Shio Mountain cry out, ‘May the years of your life number eight thousand and more.’” It is fair to say that up through the medieval period, no Japanese lacquerware was without meaning or landscape depiction, and even where there was no script, educated owners understood the significance of the motifs.
The large number of highly complex makie (sprinkled pictorial design) techniques used on this piece make it a wonderful example of Muromachi-period lacquer art: these include nashiji (pear-skin ground, in which metal flakes are scattered to create a speckled surface), ikakeji (densely sprinkled gold or silver powder),
gold hiramakie (“flat” densely sprinkled metal decoration ), gold togidashimakie (burnished decoration), gold sabiage takamakie (raised lacquerwork using a paste known as sabi), silver kanagai (thin inlaid sheets of silver), kirikane (small cuttings from thin sheets of gold and silver), tsukegaki ( fine raised lines), kakiwari (line details left bare), and inlaid carved silver. The wave design inside the box, as well as the inkstone, and the brush-rack were probably added in the Edo period. This work formerly belonged to the family of Viscount Tsuchiya.