Please join Comics: More Than Words for Time Benders: Fire and Water in Japanese Narrative Art, a discussion session with Heather Clydesdale (Santa Clara University).

Abstract: 

A massive fire dominates the thirteenth-century handscroll Night Attack on the Sanjō Palace, marking a historical event and an artistic innovation. The inferno consumes the palace, signaling the demise of Japan’s courtly Heian era and rise of a shogunate. It also demarcates and shuffles the order of events depicted in the scroll, transforming the narrative from documentary to allegory.

Later Japanese artworks also use natural elements like fire as a storytelling device. In woodblock prints and manga, fire and water both amplify the central narrative and reveal prior actions and future effects. They mold the viewer's experience of time and, in so doing, deepen the meaning of the image and resonance of the story.