Kobayashi Kiyochika (小林清親) (artist 1847 – 1915)
Umewaka shrine (Umewaka jinja - 梅若神社)
ca 1878
13.6 in x 8.7 in (Overall dimensions) Japanese color woodblock print
Signed: Kobayashi Kiyochika
小林清親
Publisher: Fukuda Hatsujirō
British Museum
Honolulu Museum of Art - there are four copies of this print in their collection
Tokyo Metropolitan Library
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Keio University
Ishikawa Prefectural Museum of Art
Tokyo Gas Museum
Yokohama Museum of Art
Harvard Museums
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Hagi Uragami Museum of Art
Chiba City Museum of Art
National Museum of Asian Art - the first of two versions
National Museum of Asian Art - the second of two versions
Metropolitan Museum of Art - Hiroshige print showing this shrine
British Museum - Yoshitoshi triptych of the Umewaka story
Gregory Allicar Museum of Art
Chazen Museum of Art
Ishikawa Prefectural Museum of Art - a second version
Google maps - the location of Mokuboji in Tokyo
Edo-Tokyo Museum In 976 a young boy, Umewaka, wandered off from his family and was captured by a slave trader who brought him to the area of what eventually became the Mukojima section of Edo. The boy died there from exhaustion and sickness. Later a wandering priest built a mound in memory of the boy. In time the Mokuboji temple compound was built there. The mound still exists today and every year a memorial service for the boy is held there on April 15.
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Roger Keyes in his doctoral thesis on Yoshitoshi from 1982 gave some of the background story of Umewaka on page 203: "During the wars and disorders that marked the medieval period in Japan, the members of a Kyōto family named Yoshida were separated. The twelve-year-old son, Umewaka, wandered eastward to the Sumida River which runs through the present city of Tōkyō. Exhausted and ill from his travels, the boy died after composing a touching poem addressed to the gulls, asking if the dew on the riverbank would vanish. The boy was buried by the river, and a temple sprang up at his tomb; the temple, called Mokuboji, exists to this day. With the passage of time, the legend changed and grew. In one story the boy, a brilliant student at Getsurin Temple on Mt. Hiei, ran away after failing in competition with another youth named Matsuwaka. On the shores of lake Biwa he was seized by a slave dealer Nobuo Tōda, who led him as far as the Sumida River before the child perished. The Sumida River, a Noh play based on this legend, presents the overwhelming grief of Umewaka's mother, who searches the country for him and eventually comes upon his grave. The Noh play was also adapted for the puppet theater and later for the Kabuki stage. The story is popular to this day."
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In Color Woodcut International: Japan, Britain, and America in the Early Twentieth Century by Christine Javid of the Chazen Museum of Art it says on page 15: "In his nocturnal townscapes as well as his scenes of isolated Shinto shrines like Kiyochika embraces the mystery or at least the remoteness felt in those places most redolent of the past."
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In the middle foreground is a woman carrying an umbrella in a driving rain storm. She is headed toward the left side of the print where there is a rickshaw station. The sign says: jinrickshaw (人力車) out front. If you click on the image and enlarge it you will see that there is a little figure inside that station hunched down by the doorway. Most likely he is the rickshaw driver, i.e., the one that pulls it along. He appears to be waiting for a customer to come along. Will the woman with the umbrella hire his services?
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Illustrated in:
1) in color in 原色浮世絵大百科事典 (Genshoku Ukiyoe Daihyakka Jiten), vol. 9, p. 94, #215.
2) in a small black and white image in The Edward Burr van Vleck Collection of Japanese Prints, p. 229.
3) in color in Ukiyo-e Masterpieces in the Collection of Chiba City Museum of Art (千葉市 美術館 所蔵 浮世絵 作品選 - Chiba-shi Bijutsukan shozō ukiyoe sakuhinsen), 2001, p. 94, #232.
4) In two color reproductions in 小林清親: 文明開化の光と影をみつめて (Kobayashi Kiyochika: Studies in Light and Shadow of the Westernization of Japan, by Hideki Kikkawa, Seigensha Art Publishing, 2015, pp. 68-69, #90 and 91.
5) in a small color reproduction in Kiyochika: Artist of Meiji Japan by Henry D. Smith II, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1988, p. 43. The author wrote: "In Kiyochika's landscapes, Shinto shrines often convey moods of isolation. Umewaka Shrine, for example, was located far beyond the settled limits of the city, close by the east bank of the Sumida and well north of Hashiba ferry... it was dedicated to the memory of a kidnapped child who died here centuries before and whose story was perpetuated in the Nō play 'Sumidagawa.' The driving rain heightens the sense of isolation, as a woman tucked beneath an umbrella, her red undergarment... makes her way over the puddled earth; to the left a jinrikisha sits empty before a hut in which its puller crouches to wait out the rain."
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There is another copy of this print in the collection of the San Diego Museum of Art.
Fukuda Hatsujirō (福田初次郎) (publisher)
landscape prints (fūkeiga 風景画) (genre)
Meiji era (明治時代: 1868-1912) (genre)