Article
Newsletter: Summer 2006
The work is an 1879 print by Adachi Ginko depicting a scene from the second act of The Strange Tale of the Castaways: A Western Kabuki. The Strange Tale was performed at Tokyo's Shintomi theater in 1879, in the wake of a visit by President Ulysses S. Grant. Grant's visit touched off a vogue for the foreign; Kabuki theater, with its relentlessly up-to date repertoire, was not to be left out of the excitement generated by imagining America. Actors from the famed Ichikawa family played the roles of the hero, a young Japanese man escorting the Japanese consul's daughter from San Francisco to a young ladies' school in New York, and the Native Americans who ambush the train on which the pair ride east. Adachi produced a series of prints highlighting the climactic moments of the second act. The museum's print from this series captures the dynamic staging of the ambush of the cross-country train.
