Edo Art Revealed; Works long stored in Boston reach Tokyo.(Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, Massachusetts))

Byline: Kay Itoi

Though it happened a decade ago, Masato Naito vividly remembers the moment of discovery. He and fellow art scholars were studying old Japanese paintings in a research room at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. Unfolding a piece of old fabric, they glimpsed a rare cotton banner bearing the portrait of Zhong Kui, the Demon Queller, the legendary Chinese figure believed to ward off evil. The piece was quickly confirmed to be the only existing banner handpainted by the renowned Edo artist Katsushika Hokusai. "We were so excited," recalls Naito, the chief curator of Tokyo's Idemitsu Museum of Arts. That wasn't the only surprise they found while studying more than 700 ukiyo-e paintings collected by a 19th-century Boston surgeon named William Bigelow, which had never been thoroughly examined before. "We didn't know of the existence of 90 percent of them," says Naito. "Those were the happiest days of my career."

After 10 years of research, conservation and planning, curators are finally bringing their find to Tokyo audiences. "The Allure of Edo: Ukiyoe-Painting From the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston," at the Edo-Tokyo Museum (Oct. 21-Dec. 10), includes some 80 gloriously colorful paintings of beautifully kimonoed courtesans, Kabuki actors and mythical animals. Bigelow, who lived and vigorously shopped for art in Japan in the 1880s, later donated tens of thousands of works--including the 700 original ukiyo-e paintings--to the MFA. Ukiyo-e, which means "a picture of the floating world," was popular during the Edo period (1603-1867) and primarily depicted mass entertainment and the lives of commoners. The paintings were originally created to capture the vitality of old Tokyo (called Edo), but many of them have never been seen there. (The exhibition made stops at museums in Kobe and Nagoya earlier this year, but the Tokyo show is the true homecoming.)

The exhibition is sure to wow the Japanese, who mostly think of ukiyo-e as small, mass-produced woodblock prints--like Hokusai's famous wave--rather than lush, large-format paintings. The paintings on view come in surprisingly diverse formats: screens, scrolls, banners, theatrical signs and even lanterns. Visitors will also see "how fine and luxurious the paintings are, with attention to small details," says Anne Nishimura Morse, the ...