ALIS (Arts & Literature International Service) is a small Japanese publisher that specializes in illustrated books and acts as a kind of bridge between Japan and the West, particularly England. Japan has its own tradition of illustrated books, but at the outset it was the English tradition of books illustrated with wood engravings that was the stimulus. ALIS began by publishing Japanese editions of the English woodcut engraver Yvonne Skargon's best-selling books about cats, and has since gone on to publish illustrated translations of classical Japanese literature. "Tales of Days Gone By" is a translation of 17 stories from the Late Heian (late 11th or early 12th century) collection "Konjaku monogatari shu," which contains over 1,200 tales.
The choice of both the literary work and the individual stories was made by Naoko Matsubara, a wonderful artist whose work is in many important public collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the British Museum. Her work is remarkable for its expressive freedom and energy, and she uses the large format of this book to great effect, pouring into her work a variety of techniques. Being heir to the Japanese tradition, she often adopts the unusual and imaginative viewpoint found in the work of Edo Period (1603-1857) artists like Utagawa Hiroshige. Such a viewpoint is used to grandly vertiginous effect, as in the picture of a demon playing the stolen imperial biwa on top of the Rashomon gate as a courtier peers up from below ("A Demon Steals the Genjo Biwa"), or in the picture of a woman transformed into a serpent and flaming with rage as she rushes toward the Dojo-ji temple bell beneath which the acolyte she loves has hidden himself ("The Lotus Sutra Saves Two Serpents").
Surface patterns predominate, and what depth there is in these woodcut prints is created by means of strongly opposed diagonals that create torsion against the picture plane. Or, like the Edo artist Kitagawa Utamaro, Matsubara will use intense close-ups, sometimes rendered more intense by the cropping of the original print, as in the great whirl of movement of the eagle in the illustration for the story "An Infant in Tajima is Carried Off by an Eagle." For the depiction of the battle between a giant serpent and a giant centipede ("Seven Fishermen Come to the Aid of the Serpent God"), the artist isolates the figures on the two edges of facing pages, creating a huge tension between them as they threaten each other across an expanse of white page and text.