Josetsu

Who They Were

Josetsu (如拙) was a Japanese painter and Buddhist monk who worked during the Muromachi period (1336 – 1573), the era when warrior government based in Kyoto set the cultural tone for the whole country. He was born in Kyushu in 1386 and died in Kyoto in 1428, during the third year of the Genchū era (元中). He is counted among the earliest Japanese masters of suiboku (水墨), ink-wash painting, a monochrome style that had travelled to Japan from China along with Zen Buddhism.

Suiboku painting uses black ink diluted in water on paper or silk, and it depends on brushwork rather than colour to suggest space, weather and weight. Josetsu worked at the moment this Chinese import was becoming a Japanese tradition in its own right, and he is remembered as one of the first painters to make it his own.

Life and Career

Josetsu was a Buddhist monk as well as a painter, and his career is bound up with the Zen monasteries of Kyoto. He is generally associated with Shōkoku-ji (相国寺), a major Zen temple in the city, and he is thought to have taught Tenshō Shūbun (天章周文), the painter who carried the ink-wash style forward into the next generation. That teacher–student link places Josetsu at the head of a line of painters who dominated Japanese ink painting for a century.

His best-known work is Catching a Catfish with a Gourd, a painting made around 1413 and held at Taizō-in (退蔵院), a sub-temple of Myōshin-ji (妙心寺) in Kyoto. The picture shows a comically drawn man trying to land a catfish, with a winding river and a bamboo grove behind him. The subject is said to have come from a riddle posed by an Ashikaga shōgun: how do you catch a catfish with a gourd? The gourd is smooth and round, the catfish is slippery and lives in water — the task is absurd on its face, which is precisely the point.

The painting can be read as Zen humour, or as a kōan (公案) in visual form: a puzzle meant to push the viewer out of ordinary habits of thought and into a different way of seeing. Either way, it is one of the founding works of Japanese ink painting, and it survives in Kyoto where it was made.

Why They Matter

Josetsu stands near the beginning of a genuinely Japanese tradition of ink painting. Before him, the style was a foreign import practised at the edges of religious life; after him, it became a recognised art with masters, students and famous works. The line that runs from Josetsu through Tenshō Shūbun to Sesshū (雪舟), the most celebrated ink painter in Japanese history, starts here.

His importance also lies in what he painted. Catching a Catfish with a Gourd is not a portrait of a deity or a scene from scripture. It is a joke with a philosophical edge, made for a Zen audience that expected art to do intellectual work. That combination of humour, brushwork and religious intent became a signature of Muromachi ink painting, and Josetsu is one of the earliest clear examples of it.

The Name in Japanese

The painter's name is written 如拙. It is read in kana as じょせつ, and in romaji as Josetsu.

The name breaks down into two kanji:

• 如 — read here as じょ (jo). The character carries the sense of "thus", "as it is", "like" or "suchness". In Buddhist writing it is a weighty word: it points to things being exactly as they are, without distortion. It appears in phrases such as 如実 (にょじつ, nyojitsu), "reality as it truly is".
• 拙 — read here as せつ (setsu). It means "clumsy", "unskilled" or "poor", and it is used as a humble way of referring to oneself or one's own work. A speaker might call their own writing 拙文 (せつぶん, setsubun), "my poor writing", to be polite.

Together the two characters make a name that reads like a piece of self-deprecation with a Zen twist: something close to "clumsy as I am" or "thus, unskilled". Monks and artists of the period often took such humble names, and the pairing of "suchness" with "clumsiness" suits a painter whose most famous work is a joke about the impossibility of a task.

Legacy

Josetsu's direct legacy runs through his students and the monastery workshops of Kyoto. Tenshō Shūbun, whom he is thought to have taught, became the leading painter of the following generation, and the Shōkoku-ji circle he belonged to trained the painters who came after. Through that chain, Josetsu's approach to ink and brush reached Sesshū and, beyond him, the whole later history of Japanese ink painting.

Catching a Catfish with a Gourd remains his signature work. It is kept at Taizō-in in Kyoto, where it is treasured both as an early masterpiece of suiboku and as a document of Zen wit. For a painter whose surviving reputation rests on a small number of works, that single image has carried his name for six centuries.