Utagawa Kunisada (歌川国貞) / Toyokuni III (三代豊国) (artist 1786 – 01/12/1865)
Two page illustration from from an ehon of Chapter 20 of the Hokusetsu bidan jidai kagami ('Uplifting Tale of Northern Snows' Mirror of the Ages -北雪美談時代加々見)
1860s
Waseda University Library - both sheets
Waseda University Library - large selection of part of this ehon
Waseda University Library - general information sheet for this series, mainly in Japanese Izumi Kyōka was passionate from childhood with kusazōshi or picture books. "The level of his zeal for kusazōshi can be deduced by the meticulous state of his collection, as it features complete runs of series that ran for decades, including... all forty-four volumes of Shunsui’s Uplifting Tale of Northern Snows: Mirror of the Ages (Hokusetsu bidan jidai kagami, 1855-1883)..."
Quoted from: 'Eyes of the Heart: Illustration and the Visual Imagination in Modern Japanese Literature', the doctoral thesis of Pedro Thiago Ramos Bassoe, University of California, Berkeley, 2018, page 18.
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The text in the lower left reads: 十六夜の侍女松枝. We don't know the meaning of this text, but we do know that 十六夜 means 'a 16 day old moon' and 侍女 means 'lady attendant' or 'maid' and 松枝 is the name Matsueda.
picture book (ehon - 絵本) (genre)
Sanoya Kihei (佐野屋喜兵衛) (publisher)