Art - Ned Denny on the beautiful immanence of the Japanese precursor to the strip cartoon

The "floating world", or ukiyo, is a place not only in a remote oriental past, but also, thanks to representations of it by contemporary printmakers, one in the mind. On the one hand, the phrase refers to the culture of dreamy hedonism that flourished in Edo (now Tokyo) after the capital was rebuilt following the fire of 1657. "Living only for the moment," wrote Asai Ryoi in his Tale of the Floating World, "turning our full attention to the pleasures of the moon, the snow, the cherry blossoms and the maples, singing songs, drinking wine, and diverting ourselves in just floating, floating . . . this is what we call ukiyo." But that world of samurai and courtesans, street theatre and painted silks, takes on an entirely different reality in work by artists of the ukiyo-e (literally, "pictures of the floating world"). Using strong black lines and bright simple colours, they invented a kind of orient of the mind, a realm from which all imperfections seem to have been burnt away to leave a luminous essence of movement, pattern and form. It is, in fact, a world that seems familiar and peculiarly modern, because it is the beginning of the world of strip cartoons and animation.

The similarities between ukiyo-e and cartoons are already apparent in the work of the first artist to be designated ukiyo eshi, or "floating world picture master". Hishikawa Moronobu's series The Sake-Drinking Boy (c1680) illustrates one of the most popular stories of the day, telling of a warrior enlisted to kill a demon that had been abducting nubile young girls from the capital. The surviving pictures show, in classic strip-form, the concluding episodes of the tale - the demon being decapitated, his horned head being presented to the emperor and then paraded through the streets on an ox-drawn cart. The black-and-white printing is enlivened by small touches of red, tinting first the spiky blood-burst that shoots from the demon's neck and then, curiously, his eyes in one picture of the severed head and his eyebrows in another. Unlike the largely insipid western art of the period, there is no concern with fidelity to the surfaces of an "objective" world. Moronobu's clean lines seem to strip reality down to the essentials, bringing to it both unexpected comedy (given the monstrousness of the subject matter) and an irrepressible liveliness.

Various factors had led to the development of this brash new style. One was the increased use of woodblock printing, a method of reproduction cheap enough to suit the needs of the growing and art-hungry merchant class. While the hand-inked pictures of the previous generation are delicate and precious, an art for the delectation of connoisseurs, the woodblock method necessitated a strong simplicity that makes every figure in these images seem charged with magic powers. No wonder that the exploits of superheroes were to become the main subject for modern Japanese animators (seconded by animated erotica, a genre that also has its roots in this period). Another influence on the ukiyo-e printers was the popular passion for kabuki theatre, initially a kind of bawdy mime that was closely associated with the brothel quarters. The somewhat later, "rough" acting style, developed in Edo and tailored for the largely male audiences there, involved playing out melodramatic battles between monsters and heroes. Transposed into black-and-white, woodblocked images with an astonishing fluidity, such dramas laid the ground for the manga cartoons of today.

But these artists have something that modern animators don't. In the work of Torii Kiyonobu I and the slightly younger Okumura Masanobu, the leading artists depicting scenes from kabuki and puppet plays, every detail lives. Laboriously carving each line out of wood and without using colour or any kind of animation technique, they created images in which every part seems to buzz with latent energy. Their leaping demons and sword-wielding samurai, schematised into two-dimensional patterns, dots and dancing lines, are more like strange occult symbols than attempts at realism. They do something odd to the brain, reminding it of the prelinguistic realm that spawned all these monsters in the first place. Above all, however, the ukiyo-e artists were great orchestrators of silence, of the clean white spaces that swell their prints like the wind in a kite. The head of the effeminate-looking actor on the exhibition poster is a bizarre interplay of appearances and disappearances, his ear seeming to emerge from a whiteness as dense as milk. His eyes and lips, alert as minnows, hover in the void of his face. Future cartoonists would turn all this imagined movement into actual motion, but their images would never be more mysteriously alive.

"The Dawn of the Floating World" is at the Royal Academy, London W1 (020 7300 8000), until 17 February 2002

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