Talk:Kabukidō Enkyō

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Kabukidō Enkyō/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Chiswick Chap (talk · contribs) 21:02, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

I'll take this interesting and attractive article. Chiswick Chap (talk) 21:02, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

Lead

• Please add a brief explanation of ukiyo-e for general readers.
  • Isn't that what the first paragraph of the "Background" section does? Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 21:27, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

The job of the lead is to provide a compact, stand-alone, introduction and summary of the article. It's fine for there to be some duplication: in fact, there has to be.

Sorry, didn't realize you were talking about the lead.

• Please add a comma after yakusha-e (before the explanatory gloss, which is just right).

Done.

• Since the article is about the artist, not his works, perhaps we need to say "very little is known about his life" before talking about dividing his works into two groups.
  • Done. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 21:27, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

No you haven't, this is about the lead section.

Ack.

Background

• Please gloss Kabuki.
  • Done.
• "ukiyo "floating world" lifestyle". I think this needs a cited sentence or two to give specific context to the images.
  • I'm not sure how much detail would be appropriate. I've added "hedonistic", which I think covers it for this scope.

If you feel that's enough background. I'd have done more.

• "Pleasure districts". Please also give the name Yūkaku, and consider including an image of these.
  • I'd rather not include an image, given that his entire output was of actors.

Not a problem.

• Shunshō: suggest we gloss him something like "Shunshō, the leading artist of the Katsukawa school".

• "the enigmatic Sharaku": we do need a few words about the man, something along the lines of "print designer, known for his portraits of kabuki actors."
  • I'm sorry, but isn't that redundant to what's already there?

I think we at least need "the enigmatic designer Sharaku"; we write "the evolutionary zoologist John Smith" even in articles on evolutionary zoology: it's always possible that printmakers can be kyōgen playwrights, after all....

Better?

Yes, now that I've fixed the typo!

Biography (missing)

• Almost entirely missing is what would normally be the 'meat' of a biographical article. I can see the problem, but all the same if this is to be an article about the artist, then we need to have a short section headed "Life" or "Biography". Obviously it must say that almost nothing is known of the artist: but we do need to say and cite here what little there is - I take it that means he was born c. 1770 or so, flourished c. 1796 somewhere in Japan, and produced these 7 remarkable prints. If there are any more scraps, we do need to have them here, and to cite them.
  • Have you read the "Identity" section yet? Ther's really literally nothing that can be said of the artist (even if it's a "he") other than that they produced seven known prints c. 1796.

Hmm, could you first read my comments below about the Identity section. Basically I think it should come up here, with some extras. See that first, then let's talk if need be. There is an alternative, though I'm not sure how much you'd like this, which is to retitle the article to something like "Enkyo's ukiyo-e prints", in which case life details are just a matter of context. At the moment we're neither a "works" article nor a "biography".

Rearranging the article is doable, but I can't agree with the renaming—the implication is that hundreds, maybe even thousands of such articles would have to be renamed, and I doubt there's a concrete benefit (the lives of most ukiyo-e artists have been poorly documented). Anyone wanting to find or link to an article on Kabukidō Enkyō's work will instinctively search for or link to Kabukidō Enkyō. It would also imply there'd be other Kabukidō Enkyō articles, which there never will be. Wikipedia prefers concise article titles, such as United Kingdom rather than the more correct United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Sorry I've been taking so much time to get back to this, but there's more to it than simply moving the section up—for instance, I don't want that gallery at the end to come before Enkyō's works. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 22:50, 5 February 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for explaining, and I can see we don't want to move the gallery up; nor do we want to give the misleading impression that we're relying on another article on Enkyō which unaccountably doesn't exist. He is almost absent here, but I guess that's the point. Reviewers habitually look for sections such as "Early life", "Career", "Family life" in a biography article, and are startled when there isn't even one on "Life" or "Biography". Reviewers also look out for coatrack-type issues, as when an article about a famous biochemist contains barely a mention of her life but a substantial amount on certain biochemical reactions. You'll appreciate, then, that the structure of this article rings various bells. The comment about other articles is sensible, but the classic Wikipedian response would be "WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS" as you're certainly aware. I judge, however, that the "where's the article on Enkyō himself then?" argument is decisive: we should not mislead readers.

Works

• "None bear a publisher's seal." This important fact needs a little discussion here.
  • There's specualation in the "Identity" section

But this section currently comes first. If you move the identity section up as I suggest, then indeed we can close this item w.r.t. that action.

First group

• " the seal "Kabukidō Enkyō Ga" " - please explain the "Ga".
  • Done.

• First group titles: Please explain "Shodai" and "Sandaime".
  • Their translated by "I" and "III"—do they need more than that?

• "relatively greater" - is tautologous. "greater" will do fine.
  • Done.

• "Sharaku's of the same" should be something like "Sharaku's print of the same actor".
  • Hmm ... it's of the same actor in the same role, rather than just the same actor, but that would be a bit of a mouthful ...

I think we should err on the side of clarity; if the sentences become too long, we can find a way to split them.

"Sharaku's version" is all that's required, I've said that.

Second group

• Please explain why these are thought to form a set - I can guess, but the reader ought to be told.
  • The only explanation I've found is what's given in the first paragraph of the "Works" section: "Scholars divide them into two groups based on differences in the artist's seal."

Forgive me if I've got the wrong end of the stick here, but having a group by seal doesn't sound the same as saying that the works in one of the groups form a set. After all, if that were true, then the works in the other group with the other seal would form a set, which it seems they don't? I think the second group are a set because they have artistic and stylistic unity, and were conceived and executed as a set - it certainly looks to be so, and we ought to be able to find a source which expresses that view. If not, we shouldn't make the claim. But perhaps there are other facts to be brought to bear here?

Oh—they appear to be a set because they depict three brothers from the same play. That's the long and the short of it.

All right, but the stylistic unity is striking, and I suspect someone must have written about this: the article would definitely benefit from a discussion of that unity, for the good reason that it would form a substantial chunk of what we understand about the artist, his power and breadth of design.

There's really remarkably little on Enkyō; I've scoured the internet and the municipal and prefectural libraries. I can't even find a colour reproduction of one of the prints, and I wonder if there's ever even been one.

Then we should seriously consider renaming and reframing the article on Enkyō's works, as I've suggested elsewhere in this review.

• Please say a little about "the play Sugawara Denju Tenarai Kagami" - I see it's both a bunraku puppet and kabuki work, which needs a little explanation, I'd say (how did the puppets fit in?).
  • It just means the bunraku version was adapted to kabuki (which was common). I've reworded the first line of Sugawara Denju Tenarai Kagami.

OK, interesting fix!

• "The second print of the set Nakamura Noshio II as Sakuramaru" - is confusing as it stands, as the image is shown third in the set! And there needs to be a comma after "set" so the title doesn't look like the name of the set.
  • I don't have the source with me, but I can't imagine how anyone could have determined it was the "second" print, anyways. I've reworded it to "The print of Nakamura Noshio II as Sakuramaru".

Thanks.

Identity

• This should I think be next to, and probably as a subsection within, the (new) "Biography" section, before we get on to the prints; and the first paragraph seems to be almost as much biography as we're going to get, so let's have it there.

• ''aiban-sized: as this is redlinked, we do need some explanation (at least a footnote, perhaps more) on what the size is, and if need be some brief comparison with ōban-size. If you don't intend to work on the redlink, perhaps best to remove it (and why should it be linked when ōban is not?).
  • I've created a redirect.

Great, thanks. I've done the same for ōban-size.

• "Morellian techniques" - does need some explanation. It might just be to say "Morellian comparison of the painting of minor details, such as the folds of subject's ears", for instance (the details referred to being visible, not a matter of X-ray or infra-red examination or whatever).
  • How about "minor details of the artist's style"?

Done.

• "as superficial and point to " needs a comma after "superficial".

Done.

• "In such a case, it may be that his work was but the hobby of an amateur, and lacks a publisher's seal due to having been printed" comes across oddly. I think what is meant is "In that case, the work was the hobby of an amateur, and would have lacked a publisher's seal because it would have been printed".
  • Done.

• "Ōta Nanpo was an acquaintance of Nakamura Jūsuke's, ... connection." should I think read "However, Ōta Nanpo, an acquaintance of Nakamura Jūsuke's, leaves no mention of such a connection in his writings."
  • I don't like breaking up sentences like this. Is "but" not sufficient?

Well, the whole sentence just doesn't work at the moment. I've proposed an emendation that does, and it does not break the sentence up: instead, it is a single sentence that says what appears to be necessary. I chose the structure to be as similar as possible to the existing wording, to disturb as little as possible.

Sorry, that's not what I meant by "break up the sentence"—I meant things like having lots of commans and having the subject broken off from its verb with ", an acquaintance of Nakamura Jūsuke's," ... they make the sentence go bumpity-bump, and make it less straightforward to parse.

I've read it again, and it flows well and naturally; it also conveys the required meaning, which the existing sentence does not. However I am not mandating a specific wording: you are free to propose alternatives that achieve the same result.

I'm sorry, but I don't understand what you think is wrong with the sentence as is.

It was extremely indirect, with the meaning hanging on the final few words, even the last word of the sentence ("...connection."). I've proposed a rearrangement which conveys the meaning directly with no more commas.

Works cited

• Could we have translations of all the Japanese titles, please.
  • done.

That's much better, thanks.

• Kokusai Ukiyo-e Gakkai - is that editor's name correctly formatted?
  • Do you mean because of the 編? That just means "edited by".

No, there's no comma, so I wondered if we had a (Surname, Forename) / (Forename Surname) formatting error.

"Kokusai Ukiyo-e Gakkai" is the name of an organization.

Thanks.

• Please fix the " Unknown parameter |script-series= ignored" error in the Matsuki citation.
  • I'll have to bring this up at the template talk page.

OK.

External links

• The media on Commons are the same as the images in the article, which are linked. Not sure it's really worth including a section just to repeat those. Are there no websites worth linking?
  • Different editions of the prints might end up under the category, so I'd rather keep it. If there were any interesting sites, I'd've used them as citations.

Summary

This article covers an interesting topic in Japanese art informatively, using the sources to tell what little is known of the subject to Good Article standard. Should any future critic analyse Enkyō's life and works in more detail, the article should of course be extended to include that analysis. Chiswick Chap (talk) 08:37, 6 February 2017 (UTC)