Chikyu Greetings - Japanese Bookmark - Bijinga (Japanese Beauty)

Chikyu Greetings - Japanese Bookmark - Bijinga (Japanese Beauty)

A set of three Japanese-style bookmarks devoted to bijinga, the genre of Japanese printmaking given over to portraits of beautiful women. Published by Chikyu Greetings, each piece reproduces a print made with metallic inks that shift in brightness with the light, finished with a cord at the top end.

In Japan the bookmark — shiori (栞) — is a small everyday object given a degree of care out of all proportion to its size: it is offered as a gift, collected, and changed according to the season or the book being read. These three carry on that tradition with one of the most refined genres in Japanese art.

Bijinga (美人画), literally "picture of a beautiful person", was one of the great pillars of ukiyo-e during the Edo period. Its subjects were not mythological figures or court ladies but women of the city: courtesans of the pleasure quarters, teahouse waitresses, performers, geisha, and ordinary women in domestic scenes. The genre raised the portrayal of contemporary life to a major art, and produced some of the most celebrated names in Japanese printmaking — Suzuki Harunobu, Torii Kiyonaga, and Kitagawa Utamaro, who perfected the ōkubi-e, the large-format portrait focused on the face. What these artists sought was not physical likeness but the bearing, the gesture, the elegance of a hairstyle or the fall of a kimono.

The set brings together three compositions: two individual half-length portraits, with the hair swept up and set with combs and pins and the kimono in the foreground, and a group scene with several female figures against a dark ground. The tones run from cream and red to deep black, and the metallic sheen is concentrated in the details of the hair and the fabric patterns.

The finish combines metallic printing with fine detailing that gives each bookmark the look of a gift piece rather than a stationery item. They come mounted on a display card bearing the series design, ready to give as they are.

Perfect as a gift for readers, as a souvenir of Japan, or simply to have a set to alternate between books.

About Chikyu Greetings. Chikyu Greetings, based in Asakusabashi (Tokyo), is a Japanese stationery publisher whose "Chikyu" brand goes back to the Meiji era, around 130 years ago. It specialises in greeting cards and paper goods — envelopes, letter paper, pochibukuro, stickers and Japanese-style bookmarks — with a style the company itself describes as basic, warm designs with a touch of whimsy.