The Monster’s Chūshingura (Bakemono Chūshingura 化物忠臣蔵),

ca. 1863

The Monster’s Chūshingura (Bakemono Chūshingura 化物忠臣蔵)

ca. 1863

Utagawa Kuniyoshi 歌川国芳

Woodblock prints (twelve koban on three ōban tate-e format); ink and color on paper

each sheet: 38.4 × 26 cm (15 1/8 × 10 1/4 in.)

Museum purchase, Laura P. Hall Memorial Fund, selected for acquisition by students in ART 425: The Japanese Print

2015-6735 a-c

Asia, Japan

Signed: Ichiyūsai Kuniyoshi ga 一勇斎國芳画

Censor: kiwame

The theme, Chūshingura, was a major Edo-period subject, in prints and other mediums, including literature, Kabuki, and puppet theatre. It began as a historical event in the Edo period – the story of forty-seven retainers of a warrior lord unjustly put to death who sacraficed their own lives to save his honor. This print is unusual in that Kuniyoshi casts the characters as bakemono, or supernatural monsters, another prominent theme in the Edo period. Bakemono have a long history in the painting (and textual) culture of Japan, sometimes frightening, sometimes humorous, and the Edo period saw a proliferation of bakemono stories and prints for a mass popular audience. Kuniyoshi’s pairing of these two themes – the Chūshingura and bakemono – is very unusual and as-yet unexplained. This triptych was made as ephemera (indicated by the thinness of its paper and by the use of relatively uncomplicated printing techniques), a type of print that was a major category of Edo-period print making. Each sheet comprises four distinct scenes, and it is clear from marks between the scenes that the sheets were meant to be cut into four smaller prints, producing a total of twelve. (Each scene is numbered in sequence.) In fact, one of the only other known copies of this set of prints, in the Tokyo National Museum, is preserved as an album of the small prints mounted back to back to create a small book. That this set remains in its uncut state is unusual, as is its overall excellent state of preservation, clarity of printing, and unfaded color. In its exaggerated deformations of form and apparently humorous content, the triptych differs greatly from the more serious and composed subject matter of actor and landscape prints. In this visual language, it is a precursor to modern-day manga.

Japanese

Edo (Japanese period)

koban, oban, prints

ink, paper (fiber product), koban, oban

woodcut (process)

warriors, figures (representations), humor, folk tales