Impressions of Ukiyo-E. Dora Amsden

Hokusai, Phantom of Kohada Koheiji, from the series One Hundred Ghost Stories, 1831.

      Colour woodblock print, 25.8 × 18.5 cm.

      Musée Guimet, Paris.

      Katsushika Hokusai, Oiwa’s Spectre, from the series One Hundred Ghost Stories, 1831.

      Hand-coloured woodblock print, 26.2 × 18.7 cm.

      Musée Guimet, Paris.

      So in solemn procession the forty-seven Ronin, bearing their enemy’s head, approached the Temple of Sengakuji, where they were met by the abbot of the monastery, who led them to their master’s tomb. There, after washing in water, they laid it, thus accomplishing the vendetta; then, praying for decent burial and for masses, they took their own lives.

      Thus ended the tragic story, and visitors to the temple are still shown the receipt given by the retainers of the son of Kira for the head of their lord’s father, returned to them by the priest of Sengakuji. Surely it is one of the weirdest relics to take in one’s hand, this memorandum, its simple wording adding to its horror:

      Item – One head.

      Item – One paper parcel, and then the signatures of the two retainers beneath.

      Another manuscript is also shown in which the Ronin addressed their departed lord, laying it upon his tomb. It is translated thus by Mitford:

      “The fifteenth year of Genroku, the twelfth month, and fifteenth day. We have come this day to do homage here, forty-seven men in all, from Oishi Kuranosuke Yoshio, down to the foot soldier, Terasaka Kichiyemon, all cheerfully about to lay down our lives on your behalf. We reverently announce this to the honoured spirit of our dead master. On the fourteenth day of the third month of last year our honoured master was pleased to attack Kira Kozuke-no-Suke Yoshinaka, for what reason we know not. Our honoured master put an end to his own life, but Kira lived. Although we fear that after the decree issued by the Government, this plot of ours will be displeasing to our master, still we who have eaten of your food could not without blushing repeat the verse. ‘Thou shalt not live under the same heaven nor tread the same earth with the enemy of thy father or lord,’ nor could we have dared to leave hell and present ourselves before you in paradise, unless we had carried out the vengeance which you began. Every day that we waited seemed as three autumns to us. Verily we have trodden the snow for one day, nay for two days, and have tasted food but once. The old and decrepit, the sick and ailing, have come forth gladly to lay down their lives. Having taken counsel together last night, we have escorted my lord, Kira, hither to your tomb. This dirk by which our honoured lord set great store last year, and entrusted to our care, we now bring back. If your noble spirit be now present before this tomb, we pray you as a sign to take the dirk, and striking the head of your enemy with it a second time to dispel your hatred forever. This is the respectful statement of forty-seven men.”

      There were forty-seven Ronin. Why, then, do forty-eight tomb-stones stand beneath the cedars at Sengakuji? Truly the answer has caused tears to fall from the eyes of many a visiting pilgrim, for the forty-eighth tomb holds the body of the Satsuma man, who in an agony of grief and remorse ended his life, and was buried beside the hero, whose body he had scornfully trampled upon in the streets of sacred Kyoto.

      This history of the forty-seven Ronin is an epitome of Japanese ethics, for in it is exemplified their feudal devotion, their severe code of honour, their distorted vision of duty and fealty to a superior, justifying the most lawless acts. Thus the conduct of Oishi Kuranosuke during his wild year of reckless abandonment, in which he threw off all moral restraint in order to deceive his enemy, breaking the heart of his faithful and devoted wife, was considered by his countrymen meritorious and a proof of his devotion. The Ukiyo-e artists, who loved to take for models the beautiful denizens of the “Underworld,” chose this obsession of Oishi as the subject for many of their illustrations, so that at a first glance the series might almost be mistaken for scenes from the life of the Yoshiwara.

      Here and there, however, we come across the Ronin engaged in terrific conflict with Kira Kozuke-no-Suke Yoshinaka’s retainers. Cruel and bloodthirsty are the blades of their relentless katanas, which once unsheathed must be slaked in human blood, and their garments, slashed into stiletto-like points of inky blackness, forming a cheveaux de frise round their fierce faces, seem to scintillate with the spirit of vendetta.

      In examining the sets of impressions, illustrating the popular story, it is hard to give preference to any special artist: to choose between the Utamaro-like violets and greens of Yeisen; the rich dark tints and fine backgrounds of Kunisada; the delicately massed detail of Toyokuni, unlike the usual boldness of his style, and the varied sword-play of the versatile Hiroshige, set in a frosted, snowy landscape. Hokusai, who abjured theatrical subjects after breaking away from the tutelage of Shunshō, published a series of prints illustrating the famous vendetta, but as his great-grandfather had been a retainer of Kira Kozuke-no-Suke Yoshinaka, losing his life during the midnight attack, the story formed part of his ancestral history. The series is signed Kako, and the sweeping lines and contours of the female figures show the Kiyonaga influence. Yellow preponderates, outlining the buildings and long interior vistas, and the impressions are framed with a singular convention of Hokusai at that period, drifting cloud effects in delicate pink. Utamaro also illustrated the story, substituting ‘for the Ronin the forms of women, a favourite conceit of the artist of beauty.

      Torii Kiyomasu I, Ichikawa Danjūrō I as Soga Gorō, 1697.

      Hand-coloured woodblock print, 54.7 × 32 cm.

      Tokyo National Museum, Tokyo.

      Torii Kiyomasu I, Kintoki and the Bear, c. 1700.

      Hand-coloured woodblock print, 55.2 × 32.1 cm.

      Honolulu Academy of Arts, gift of James A. Michener, Honolulu.

      This digression in favour of the masters of the Popular School has carried us over a hundred years, and we must return to the close of the seventeenth century. Moronobu illustrated the carnival of Genroku, but toward the end of the century, under the domination of a Shogun who combined the qualities of extravagance and profligacy with the delirious superstition of Louis XI, a period of unbridled license set in. The military men, who were the nation’s models, forgot their fine traditions and fell from their estate, so that the latter manners and customs of Genroku became a by-word. Then followed a puritanical reaction. Under the eighth Shogun, the knights were restricted from attending the theatre, just coming into favour, and the looser haunts of pleasure were strictly under ban. The Ukiyo-e print, being the medium for illustrating these joys and pleasures, forbidden to the great, but still indulged in by the people, was strictly condemned, and to this day the aristocracy of Japan accord but grudging and unwilling recognition to the merits of the masters of Ukiyo-e, the old caste prejudice still blinding their artistic sense.

      At this stage Ukiyo-e broke into rival schools, the founders of both belonging to the academy of Hishikawa Moronobu. The leader of the first, the school of painting, was Miyagawa Chōshun, who in order to preserve aristocratic patronage and praise, eschewed the use of the printing-block, still taking his subjects from the “floating world,” and so being in one sense at unity with the other branch, that of printing founded by Torii Kiyonobu, the first master of the great Torii School. As the print artists are our subject matter we cannot follow the other branch of Ukiyo-e, founded by Miyagawa Chōshun, but leaving the atelier of the painters, we must devote ourselves to the fortunes of the Torii School, the laboratory of the Ukiyo-e print, working parallel with the pictorial school for the first half of the eighteenth century.

      The first sheets of Torii Kiyonobu (about 1710) were printed in ink from a single block. Part of the edition would be issued in this uncoloured form, the rest being coloured by hand. The colours most used were olive and orange, these prints being called Tan-e, whilst those in ink were named Sumi-e. Urushi-e (lacquer pictures), was the generic term for hand-painted prints. Beni-e (literally red pictures) followed the Urushi-e. They were