KUNISADA • 源义经千本樱 • 日本木版画 • 浮世绘 - 日本 - Edo Period (1600-1868)

Artist: Utagawa Kunisada / Toyokuni III (歌川国貞・三代豊国, 1786–1865)
Title: Untitled — no series cartouche. Identified from the role cartouches:
– Left sheet: 相模五郎 Sagami Gorō
– Right sheet: 安德天皇 Emperor Antoku (red cartouche) and 典侍局 Suke no Tsubone (yellow cartouche)

Subject: Yakusha-e — the Tokaiya / Daimotsu-ura act (Act II) of Yoshitsune Senbon Zakura 義経千本桜, "Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees"
Format: Ōban tate-e diptych, two separate sheets, each approx. 36 × 24 cm
Technique: Nishiki-e (full-colour woodblock print)
Date: ca. 1850s (Kaei–Ansei)
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Condition: Excellent colour and impression — bright, fresh and well-registered. Minor toning and soiling. The paper is firm and subtle. Please refer to the images for full condition detail.
----------------------------------------------------------------------

About the print

Yoshitsune Senbon Zakura is a play with three hearts, and each of its great acts belongs to a different man. Act IV is the fox Tadanobu's. Act III is Igami no Gonta's. Act II — the one Kunisada gives us here — belongs to Taira no Tomomori, and it is the darkest of the three.

Yoshitsune's party is waiting at Daimotsu Bay in Settsu for weather fair enough to sail for Kyushu, lodging with the shipping agent Tokaiya Ginpei. Ginpei, his wife Oryū and their young daughter Oyasu are in fact Taira no Tomomori, the imperial nurse Suke no Tsubone and the child Emperor Antoku — all three supposedly dead at Dan-no-ura, all three living quietly under false names and waiting to restore the Taira. The two figures on the right sheet are the disguise dropped: the boy emperor in white court robes and gilt cap, and beside him Suke no Tsubone in white over scarlet hakama, a folded fan gripped in both hands, her face already set into the expression of someone who knows how this ends.

The man on the left sheet is the reason the plot works at all. Sagami Gorō arrives at the Tokaiya with his follower Irie Tanzō, both announcing themselves as retainers of Hōjō Tokimasa and demanding a boat to hunt Yoshitsune down. The scene is played for laughs — the pair's celebrated sakana-zukushi exchange is spun entirely out of the names of fish — and only later does the audience learn that they are Tomomori's own men, staging a quarrel to put Yoshitsune at his ease. The two return in the Daimotsu-ura scene in a far harder register. Kunisada has taken him in that second key: kumadori striping his face, armour and mail over a bare, braced leg, his sword on the ground, the fight already past its first blow.

Behind both figures runs the same cold sea. Taira war-ships with red banners stand off in the dark under a night sky, and the water is cut in the fine, repeating linear wave pattern Kunisada reserved for open-sea scenes. What is coming is the sea battle the Taira lose: Suke no Tsubone takes the Emperor in her arms to drown with him and is stopped by Yoshitsune, who swears to protect the boy; she kills herself, and the mortally wounded Tomomori winds an anchor rope round his body and goes over into the water. The ships in the middle distance of this diptych are the last calm before that.

We have not been able to trace another impression of this design in a public collection or dealer record. Kunisada printed the play constantly, but overwhelmingly the fox-and-drum material of Act IV; Antoku and Suke no Tsubone are a considerably less common pairing, and the naval setting less common still.