Human Decomposition in Japanese Artwork

In traditional Buddhist teachings, contemplating about death is an integral part of meditation. Buddha himself said that death is “the greatest of all teachers”, for it teaches us to be humble, destroys vanity and pride, and crumbles all the barriers of caste, creed and race that divide humans, for all living beings are unescapably destined to die. Many Buddhist cultures also practice sky burials, where human corpses are left out in the open, such as mountain tops and forests, to be eaten by wild animals. This may seem macabre and gruesome for people of other cultures, but for practicing Buddhists, sky burial is yet another way of acknowledging the impermanence of life. Such pragmatic and mature approach to the subject of death is the rationale behind the gory and unapologetic Japanese art form called kusôzu that appeared in the 13th century and continued until the late 19th century. Kusôzu , which means “painting of the nine stages of a decaying corpse”, portrays the sequential decay of a cadaver, usually female, in graphic detail. The shocking art genre appeared routinely for more than five hundred years in various formats, including scrolls and printed books. One of the earliest examples of this genre is a 14th-century scroll titled Kusōshi emaki , whose English translation is rather lengthy—”Illustrated handscroll of the poem of the nine stages of decaying corpse”. The scroll consist of ten narrative illustrations portraying the nine stages of decomposition starting with a healthy subject—an aristocratic female who has been identified as the 9th-century poetess, Ono no Komachi. In the second panel, she has died and is laid out on the floor and covered with a blanket. In subsequent panels, her body, now in the open, can be seen getting progressively decomposed and putrefied until all remaining flesh and bones had been pecked clean by scavenging animals. Below: Body of a courtesan in nine stages of decomposition.