Utagawa Kuniyoshi (歌川国芳) (artist 11/15/1797 – 03/05/1861)
No. 1 Nihonbashi (日本橋): Ashikaga Yorikane (足利頼兼), Narukami Katsunosuke (鳴神勝之助), and Ukiyo Tohei (浮世渡平), 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)
05/1852
9.875 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: Tsujiokaya Bunsuke
(Marks 548 - seal 21-228)
Date seal: 5/1852
Censors' seals: Hama and Magome
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Tokyo Metropolitan Library
British Museum
The Agency for Cultural Affairs
Hiroshige Museum of Art
Musée Cernuschi
National Museum of Japanese History (via Ritsumeikan University)
Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College
Chiba City Museum of Art "Nihonbashi (literally 'Japan Bridge') was the official center of Edo, the point of departure for highways such as the Tōkaidō and Kisokaidō. The inset landscape shows the beginning of a journey, the procession of a feudal lord departing from the city at dawn. The action of the main scene takes place on the bridge itself, where the powerful sumō wrestler Narukami Katsunosuke (whose name might be translated as Victor Thunderbolt) protects his employer, Lord Ashikaga Yorikane, from an attack by Ukiyo Tohei.
Yorikane is one of the central characters in a group of plays and stories inspired by the real-life power struggle in the Date clan in the seventeenth century. Because the censorship regulations of the Edo period banned the mention of any high-ranking person who had lived after 1573 (the end of the Ashikaga shogunate), names were changed and stories were set in the distant past. Thus, the historical Lord Date Tsunamune became Lord Ashikaga Yorikane, and the story of the dispute within the clan was transposed from the seventeenth century to the fourteenth or even the twelfth century, depending on the play.
The fictional Yorikane fell in love with the courtesan Takao and purchased her contract from the owner of the Miuraya brothel for Takao's weight in gold... The series title, at the upper right, is decorated with gold coins overflowing from a measuring box, in reference to the purchase of Takao's contract. When Yorikane learned that Takao was actually in love with another man, he flew into a rage and killed her. (The real Date Tsunamune did have an affair with a courtesan named Takao, but he did not purchase her contract or murder her.)
The best known version of the story are two kabuki plays The Precious Incense and Bush Clover of Sendai (Meiboku Sendai hagi) and The Date Struggle and Okuni Kabuki (Date kurabe Okuni kabuki), but this scene is from a manuscript book (jitsuroku) entitled A Record of the Struggle in the Kaga Clan (Kaga sōdōki). Takao's true love, Shimada Jūzaburō. sends Ukiyo Tohei to Nihonbashi to kill Yorikane in revenge, but the assassination plot is foiled by Yorikane's massive bodyguard."
Illustrated in and quoted from: Utagawa Kuniyoshi: The Sixty-nine Stations of the Kisokaidō by Sarah E. Thompson, Pomegranate Communications, Inc., 2009, pages 18-19, no. 1.
****
Listed, but unillustrated, in Japanese Woodblock Prints: A Catalogue of the Mary A. Ainsworth Collection, by Roger Keyes, p. 189, #488.
Tsujiokaya Bunsuke (辻岡屋文助) (publisher)
sumō (相撲) (genre)
landscape prints (fūkeiga 風景画) (genre)