Emaki and Yamato-e

Open a handscroll and the picture begins to hold time. The story moves only as fast as your hand unrolls it, right to left — a picture whose reading speed the reader controls, which is rare anywhere in the world. The Tale of Genji Scrolls (12th century, National Treasure) follow a set of conventions: fukinuki yatai, where the roof is lifted away so you look down into the room, and hikime kagihana, faces drawn with a thin line for the eyes and a hook for the nose. The frogs and rabbits of Chōjū-jinbutsu-giga (Frolicking Animals) — the first two scrolls from the mid-12th century, the last two from the 13th — read as a direct ancestor of manga's exaggeration today. Tradition credits the priest Toba Sōjō Kakuyū as the artist, though there is no solid evidence for it. This is also the era that drew a line between kara-e, pictures of Chinese subjects, and yamato-e, pictures of Japanese scenery and stories. That sensibility later flowed into Rinpa and ukiyo-e, and further still, into the current of manga I traced on the MANGA MAP.