Kunisada • Edo Murasaki 五十四章 • 日本木版画 - 日本 - Edo Period (1600-1868)

Artist: Utagawa Kunisada / Toyokuni III (歌川国貞 / 三代豊国, 1786–1865), with background by his pupil Ichiyūsai Kuniteru (一雄齊國輝)
Subject: Chapter 2, Hahakigi (帚木) — "The Broom Tree"
Series: Edo Murasaki Gojūyojō (江戸紫五十四帖) — The Fifty-four Chapters of the Edo Murasaki (Edo Purple)

Technique: Woodblock print (ukiyo-e), full colour (nishiki-e)
Date: Japan, 1852 (Kaei 5, late Edo period)
Format: Ōban tate-e, approx. 36 × 24.5 cm
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Paper & condition

A good, fresh impression in the bright, confident palette of Kunisada's Genji-e. The sheet is built in two registers. Dominating the foreground is a handsome young man, sword half-raised, the pale-steel blade swept up on a strong diagonal; he wears a vermilion over-robe scattered with white blossom-roundel crests over a blue under-collar and a black kimono, his hair dressed in a high looped topknot bound with rose-pink cord. Above and behind, framed by a soft band of mist, a delicately printed riverside vignette opens out: two court ladies among flowering cherry — one seated in green and gold, one standing with a lit hand-lantern — beside a stone lantern, with a tree-lined far shore under a pale sky. The contrast of the bold, close-up figure against the airy, miniature-like landscape is the charm of the design, and the superb cutting of the hairline betrays the hand of a first-rank carver.

The print was professionally restored from an Edo-period album: the original album folds (one horizontal, one vertical) have been flattened and the sheet stabilised, so the paper is now firm and supple.
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Hahakigi — "The Broom Tree"

Hahakigi is the second chapter of Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji, and one of its most celebrated. It opens with the famous "rainy-night discussion" (amayo no shinasadame), in which the young Genji and his companions pass a wet evening ranking the qualities of women of different stations — a conversation that frames much of what follows in the tale. The chapter then introduces Utsusemi, the provincial governor's wife whom Genji pursues but who slips away from him; the "broom tree" of the title is the old poetic image of a tree visible from afar that vanishes as one approaches, a figure for her elusiveness. Like the rest of this series, the design does not illustrate the Heian text directly but evokes its mood through the contemporary, theatrical idiom of Edo Genji-e.
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The Edo Murasaki Gojūyojō Series

This is one of Kunisada's many homages to the Tale of Genji — a set assigning one design to each of the novel's fifty-four chapters. The title puns on Edo Murasaki, the deep-violet dye for which the city was famous, and on Murasaki Shikibu herself; the series belongs to the hugely popular Genji-e genre that Kunisada had launched decades earlier with his illustrations for Ryūtei Tanehiko's best-selling parody Nise Murasaki Inaka Genji (A Rustic Genji). In these sheets the master typically designed the principal figure while a studio pupil supplied the landscape inset — here the young Kuniteru — making the prints a neat record of the Utagawa workshop at work.