KUNISADA • Ο Ιερέας-Αρουραίος • 1856 • Ιαπωνική Ξυλογραφία σε Ξύλο • Ukiyo-e - Ιαπωνία - Edo Period (1600-1868)

Utagawa Kunisada / Toyokuni III (歌川国貞・三代豊国, 1786–1865)
Ra (ら) – "Ra is for Raigō, the Rat Priest"
From the series Seisho nanatsu iroha (清書七意呂波) — Seven Calligraphic Models for Each Character in the Kana Syllabary

Date: 1856 (Ansei 3)
Technique: Woodblock print (mokuhanga), polychrome (nishiki-e)
Format: Ōban tate-e, approx. 36 × 24.5 cm
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IMPRESSION & COLOUR: Excellent. A strong, fresh impression with crisp keyblock lines throughout — the fine carving is fully preserved in the strands of the actor's coiffure, the scales of the embroidered dragon, and the dense brocade patterning of the robe. Colours are vivid and well balanced: deep purples and oranges in the costume, clear blues and greens in the floral roundels, and a saturated red in the title cartouche. The spectral rat looming in the grey ground above the figure is here very subtly printed, an effect prized in fine early impressions of this design — the apparition emerges from the gloom almost imperceptibly rather than as a hard, obvious silhouette.

PAPER & CONDITION: Very good. The sheet is firm and intact, with no tears, holes, or losses, and the image area is clean. There is minor trimming at the margin, well outside the image area, with no effect on the design.
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The Scene — The Warrior Who Inherited a Dead Monk's Curse

A young man fixes the viewer with a hard, brooding stare, his hands locked together before his chest in a sorcerer's mudra. He is gorgeously dressed — a heavy court robe across which coils a gold-scaled dragon clutching a flaming jewel, layered over brocades of orange, purple and blue. But the splendour of the costume only sharpens the menace of what hangs behind him: out of the smoky grey darkness, barely there, the ghostly form of an enormous rat takes shape, its blank eye and bristling whiskers dissolving back into shadow. This is not a beast he fears. It is a power he has summoned.

The figure is the kabuki actor Nakamura Fukusuke I in the role of Shimizu Kaja Yoshitaka, a warrior who, in the popular Edo retelling of the tale, has been taught the secret art of rat sorcery (nezumi no jutsu). Kunisada stages the moment of conjuration itself — the locked hands, the gathering apparition — and trusts the printer's restraint to do the rest. The deliberately faint printing of the rat, set against the dense colour and bravura pattern-work of the foreground, is the design's masterstroke: the supernatural is felt before it is seen.

Raigō and the Iron Rat — A Legend of the Broken Promise

The "rat priest" of the title is Raigō Ajari, an eleventh-century abbot of Mii-dera (Onjō-ji) and spiritual advisor to the Emperor Shirakawa. According to the legend preserved in the war chronicles, the emperor — long without an heir — promised Raigō any reward he wished if his prayers produced a son. A prince was duly born; but when Raigō asked for the right to build an ordination platform at his temple, the court refused, fearing the anger of the rival monastery on Mount Hiei. Consumed by rage at the broken promise, Raigō starved himself to death.

His grudge did not die with him. The Taiheiki tells how his spirit became Tessō, the "iron rat" — a monstrous creature with a body hard as stone and teeth and claws of metal — at the head of an army of eighty-four thousand rats that poured up Mount Hiei and devoured the sutras, scrolls and Buddha images of Enryaku-ji. The tale became one of the most beloved vengeful-spirit (onryō) stories in Japan, depicted by Kuniyoshi and, most famously, by Yoshitoshi in his New Forms of Thirty-six Ghosts.

The figure in this print, however, is not Raigō. In Takizawa Bakin's celebrated novel Raigō Ajari Kaisōden (頼豪阿闍梨恠鼠伝, illustrated by Hokusai), the dead monk's rat magic is passed to a new hero: the orphaned warrior Shimizu Yoshitaka, son of Kiso no Yoshinaka, to whom Raigō appears and grants mastery over the rats so that he may avenge his father — all the while hunted by an enemy whose name, Nekoma, begins with the character for "cat." It is this cat-and-mouse fiction that the kabuki stage adapted, and this moment of inherited sorcery that Kunisada records here.