北斎 • Mongaku 僧侣 苦行 • 三联画 • 日本木版画 • 浮世绘 - 日本 - Meiji period (1868-1912)

** 市川團十郎 IX 的其中一个晚年角色，记录于他去世前数月。 **

Artist: Utagawa Hōsai 歌川豊斎 (1848–1920)，署名为 Utagawa Hōsai hitsu (歌川豊斎筆)
Also known as: Kunisada III, Baidō Kunimasa IV, Kōchōrō Hōsai
Series: Kabukiza Shin Kyōgen 歌舞伎座新狂言 — "New Plays at the Kabuki-za"
Play: Nachi no Taki Chikai no Mongaku 那智滝祈誓文覚
Performance: Kabuki-za, Tokyo, November 1902
Date of print: October 1902 (Meiji 35)
Technique: Woodblock print (mokuhanga) — nishiki-e (polychrome)
Format: Ōban tate-e triptych (three sheets)

Roles depicted, from the cartouches:

Centre: Ichikawa Danjūrō IX 市川團十郎 as Fudō Myōō 不動明王 and as Mongaku Shōnin 文覺上人
Left: Onoe Kikugorō V 尾上菊五郎 as Seitaka Dōji 制多迦童子
Right: Nakamura Shikan V 中村芝翫 as Kongara Dōji 矜羯羅童子
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CONDITION

The three sheets were joined and subsequently trimmed at the folding points. The impression is strong and the colours unfaded, with nothing serious to note. Each sheet carries a light washi backing.

场景

Endō Moritō wanted another man's wife. He plotted to kill Watanabe Wataru and take Kesa Gozen for himself; Kesa, to save her husband, lay down in her husband's place in the dark, and Moritō cut off her head before he understood what he had done. He shaved his head, took the name Mongaku, and went to Nachi to do penance — standing under the great waterfall in midwinter until the cold stopped his heart. He was pulled back from death by Fudō Myōō's two boy attendants, Kongara and Seitaka, sent down to the falls to revive him. He lived, became one of the most forceful clerics of his age, and it was Mongaku who later pushed Minamoto no Yoritomo into open rebellion against the Taira.

Hōsai gives the whole miracle in one image. The falling water runs unbroken across all three sheets in fine parallel lines of blue and white — the physical setting and, structurally, the thing that ties the triptych together. Mongaku lies collapsed in the shallows at the foot of the centre sheet, stripped to the waist, rosary still in his hand, eyes open but spent. Above and behind him Fudō rears up out of red flame, grey-skinned and glaring, holding the upright sword and the noose, dressed in brilliantly patterned brocade against the black of the rock. The two dōji come in from either side: Seitaka at the left in vermilion body-paint with a sword raised over his shoulder, Kongara at the right, pale-faced and calm, carrying a lotus. The contrast between the flat red flames and the cool vertical water is the whole visual argument of the print, and it is printed here with real strength.

There is a poignancy to the sheet beyond its subject. Danjūrō IX and Kikugorō V were the two dominant actors of the Meiji stage — half of the Dan-Kiku-Sa triumvirate that defined late nineteenth-century kabuki. Kikugorō V died in February 1903, Danjūrō IX in September of the same year. This production, staged that November, was among the last times the two appeared together, and prints from it are effectively a record of the end of an era on the Tokyo stage.