Utagawa Kuniyoshi (歌川国芳) (artist 11/15/1797 – 03/05/1861)
No. 48 Ōkute (大久手): The Old Woman of the Lone House (Hitotsuya rōba - 一ツ家老婆), from the series Sixty-nine Stations of the Kisokaidō Road (Kisokaidō rokujūkyū tsugi no uchi - 木曾街道六十九次之内)
07/1852
9.75 in x 14.625 in (Overall dimensions) Japanese woodblock print
Signed: Ichiyūsai Kuniyoshi ga
一勇斎国芳画
Artist's seal: kiri
Publisher: Yahataya Sakujirō (Marks 581 - seal 01-020)
Carver's seal: Hori Takichi
Date seal: 1852, 7th mo.
Censors' seals: Mera and Watanabe
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
British Museum
Tokyo Metropolitan Library
Waseda University
Hiroshige Museum of Art
Mitake Museum
Musée Cernuschi
Östasiatiska Museet, Stockholm
National Museums of Scotland
Lyon Collectiion - another example of a display at Asakausa
Lyon Collectiion - another example of a display at Asakausa
Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College
Carnegie Museum of Art
Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art "In Japanese literature, the horror-story trope of a lonely house on a desolate moor, where unwary travelers meet terrible fates, goes back at least to the eleventh century, when the legend of Kurozuka in the northern province of Mutsu was mentioned in a poem in the anthology Collected Poetic Gleanings (Shūiwakashū). The story of a murderous old woman who is really a demon was later dramatized in the nō play called Kurozuka or Adachigahara. The Edo-period version of the story, frequently illustrated by Kuniyoshi and his pupils, takes place at Asajigahara on the outskirts of Edo, not far from the great temple of the bodhisattva Kannon at Asakusa.
An evil old woman who lives in a solitary house on the moor takes in travelers and then murders them for their belongings. Her weapon is a large rock suspended in the dark rafters above the head of a sleeping victim, which falls when she cuts the rope that anchors it. The old woman's beautiful daughter reluctantly helps to lure travelers to their doom. One night, the intended victim is a young temple page boy so innocent (or in some versions of the story, so handsome) that the daughter cannot bear to see him killed and tries to stop her mother. The boy is then revealed as an incarnation of the Kannon of Sensō-ji Temple in Asakusa, who has appeared in order to end the killings.
Kuniyoshi depicts the struggle between mother and daughter, with the rope holding the stone cutting diagonally across the composition. The young traveler is not shown, but the shadowy figure of his true form, the merciful bodhisattva Kannon, hovers in the background. In Buddhist art, Kannon may appear in any of the thirty-three different forms. Kuniyoshi chose the thousand-armed Kannon, whose many limbs symbolize the divine ability to help in many different ways, because the name of Ōkute station sounds like 'many' (ōku) 'hands' (te).
The series title border is composed of souvenirs of Asakusa: dolls called tondari-hane-tari that jump on bamboo springs, with covers in the shape of masks or umbrellas that pop off when they jump."
Illustrated in and quoted from: Utagawa Kuniyoshi: The Sixty-nine Stations of the Kisokaidō by Sarah E. Thompson, Pomegranate Communications, Inc., 2009, page 112, no. 48.
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The Multi-headed Kannon
If you click on the image and enlarge it considerably you will notice that the faint image of the Kannon in the background is not only multi-armed, but also multi-headed. Yoshiko K. Dykstra at the University of Hawai'i in her translation of the Chirizuka Monogatari: Tales of a Dust Mound at footnote 10 said: "The Two- or Four-Armed Eleven-Faced Kannon 十一面観音 has nine small faces on its head and eleven smaller ones on its crown, all of which show various expressions of mercy, anger, scorn, etc. This Kannon saves especially those in the realm of ashura 阿修羅 (fighting demons), one of the six realms of heaven, human being, ashura, animal, hungry ghost, and hell where one’s soul transmigrates. This tale reveals the assimilation of Buddhism and Shintoism as Bodhisattva Kannon is embodied in Michizane and worshipped as a Shinto deity." Of course, this is only one of Kannon's multitudinous manifestations.
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Here is the description of Ōkute from Hiroshige.org:
Past this post town, travellers walked on a flat road along the mountain with exposed rocks. From the Biwa Pass between Okute and Hosokute, they could see Mt. Ibuki, Mt. Hakusan and the Bay of Ise far away in the distance.Past this post town, travellers walked on a flat road along the mountain with exposed rocks. From the Biwa Pass between Okute and Hosokute, they could see Mt. Ibuki, Mt. Hakusan and the Bay of Ise far away in the distance.
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There is another copy of this print in the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, Leiden.
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Listed, but unillustrated, in Japanese Woodblock Prints: A Catalogue of the Mary A. Ainsworth Collection, by Roger Keyes, p. 192, #535.
Yūrei-zu (幽霊図 - ghosts demons monsters and spirits) (genre)
landscape prints (fūkeiga 風景画) (genre)
Yahataya Sakujirō (八幡屋作次郎) (publisher)