Yorimasa and the Nue — what did Kuniyoshi hide in his woodblock print?
The language of Kuniyoshi’s woodblock prints
There are woodblock prints you look at like an illustration, and there are those that first happen in the air — like a sudden shift of pressure before a storm — and only then descend, layer by layer, ever deeper. Kuniyoshi’s triptych about a certain night in 1153 at the Konoe palace begins exactly like that: a steel sky with soft bokashi. Black clouds underlined by a red glow. Architecture scored to the rhythm of beams, stairs, and balustrades. And finally — that moment when, above the palace roof, the monster nue appears. And in the upper-right corner, inside a bright cartouche, the image itself hands us the key — the third year of Ninpei, black clouds from Higashi Sanjō, an arrow that cleaves the night; then a waka about the cuckoo and the “bow-moon,” as if, after everything, the world still had to be healed with language, not only with a weapon. This is not decoration. It is an instruction for reading.
Kuniyoshi was a master of what is hardest in ukiyo-e: how to show time and dynamism on flat paper. In this triptych he does it almost cheekily: he turns the flight of an arrow into two long, luminous streaks that bind three sheets into a single gesture, while at the same time demanding iron precision from the printer in alignment — because in a triptych it is easiest for borders to “slip.” And that is why the details that usually vanish at first glance are so fascinating: the vertical nafuda (名札) frames with the heroes’ names, the black figure lying on a platform like a fallen axis of the world — or perhaps simply the axis of the aristocratic world? And the small bushi (warrior) who defeats the monster and simultaneously carries Japan into another era — the samurai era. Kuniyoshi could play in these half-tones: instead of making Yorimasa a monument, he made him a symbolic axis around which the nation’s history turned in the twelfth century. And perhaps the nineteenth as well — in Kuniyoshi’s Edo?
That is precisely why it is worth lingering over this image longer, as one lingers over a well-written sentence that reveals its second depth only after a moment. Because “Yorimasa and the nue” is at once a story about Heian — about a world of aristocracy that, in a moment of crisis, asks a warrior for rescue — and about Edo, where power lies elsewhere than symbol, and “black clouds” often take the shape of things one cannot say outright when the shogunate’s censorship is watching. In today’s text we will read the triptych from top to bottom, from ink to history, from block to metaphor: first we will see what Kuniyoshi truly created, then we will step into the old Heian legend, and at the end we will try to grasp what remains after everything — not triumph, but a quiet, mature thought about how Japan, over centuries, learned to distinguish order from appearances.
“In 1153*, at Emperor Konoe’s palace, the archer Minamoto no Yorimasa brings down the nue.”
仁平三年 近衛御所 源頼政 鵺を射る
(Ninpei sannen / Konoe gosho / Minamoto no Yorimasa / nue o iru)
– Utagawa Kuniyoshi (歌川国芳), c. 1842, Edo, triptych
*Literally: the third year of the Ninpei era
What exactly do we see in the woodblock print?
This is the kind of Kuniyoshi print that first works like a weather phenomenon, and only later like an illustration of a legend. The triptych stretches space across three sheets and makes it into more than “background”: it becomes stage, perspective, and motion. We see the palace, the night, long bands of clouds and — somewhere high up, as if on the border between roof and sky — a monster that does not have to be enormous to seize control of the image. For Kuniyoshi grants it not so much the center of the frame as the center of the atmosphere.
Top: a sky that is already narrative
We begin with the highest band of the composition. The sky has a cool, dark, steel-gray tone, but it is not a uniform blot. You can see small “breaths” of gradation — gentle tonal transitions that, in woodblock printing, are achieved through bokashi (shading applied by hand with a brush onto the block). Thanks to this, the air has depth and weight.
And here Kuniyoshi immediately enters with his theatrical gesture: blackness is accompanied by red, running like embers along the edges of smoke. It looks at once like fire and like an aura torn from another world. This red matters both technically and symbolically: technically — because in color woodblock printing it means a separate block, separate registration, a separate moment in the printing process; symbolically — because it turns the cloud into a being: active, dynamic, ready to strike.
In the upper-right corner, against the roof, there is a text cartouche — a rectangular, bright block of writing. In Kuniyoshi’s triptychs such cartouches are more than a signature: they balance the masses of color, they “make the composition think,” and at the same time they remind us that we are looking at a work in a culture that reads the image together with the signs.
Description:
仁平三年 近衛院御在位の時、東三条の森より黒雲たち来たり、御殿の上をおおい…頼政これを射落とす
“In the third year of the Ninpei era, during Emperor Konoe’s reign, black clouds came from the forest of Higashi Sanjō and covered the palace roof… Yorimasa shot (the monster) down to the ground with an arrow.”
Waka poem:
ほとゝぎす 名をも雲井に あぐるかな
弓はり月の いるにまかせて
“Cuckoo — how you raise his name even into the clouds, into the heavenly heights.”
“And I? Let it be like the ‘moon drawn taut like a bow’: let it ‘set’ (and strike) wherever it is destined.”
The ignition point: the nue
At the center of the upper portion — above the roof edge of the middle sheet — appears what was mentioned above as a dynamic cloud-being: the nue. It is not shown here as a monumental monster filling the entire field of vision (Kuniyoshi sometimes does that; he carved the nue many times), but as a concentrated, predatory knot of form. We see a brownish, furry, tiger-like body, heavy paws, motion caught in a twist. Around it the cloud turns into something like flames: red tongues, black coils, writhing ends like smoke from a fire. And above it all rises a snake-tail — thin, pale, curled in the air like a question mark.
This is very much Kuniyoshi: the monster is a hybrid, so the artist does not try to define it zoologically. He creates it dramaturgically. What hits hardest here is not a catalogue of body parts, but the sense that the nue is something that arrived in the form of a cloud and has the nature of both predator and storm.
If you look carefully, near the beast appear bright, sharp lines — suggesting the flight of projectiles or a violent cutting of the air. Kuniyoshi does not need to spell everything out literally: in woodblock printing, what counts is abbreviation and rhythm. And here the rhythm is one: the cloud flows from the left, thickens at the center, explodes around the nue, and spills onward.
Roof and palace: the geometry of order
Below begins the architecture — long, stretched across the middle and right sheets. And here Kuniyoshi sets a counterpoint: the building is constructed from straight, repetitive lines. The roof — dark, heavy, with the eave profile clearly drawn. Beneath it, the rhythm of pillars. Farther on — a veranda with a balustrade in warm red pigment, repeated like a metronome. Inside and outside we see curtains — bands, grays, verticals, repetitions. This is a world with structure, ceremony, hierarchy.
And that is exactly why, even if the nue is physically small, its presence is immense: because its cloud breaks that geometry. It is a wave, while the palace is a grid.
On the right sheet Kuniyoshi shows large stairs leading up to a platform and veranda. Upon it lies a figure in black clothing — curled, motionless, as if the weight of night dropped straight onto the body. You do not yet need to know “who exactly” (we will return to that in the section where we recount the legend of the nue) to feel the meaning of this figure: power (the clothing suggests power) is helpless and horizontal here. It lies defeated. It is cut off from action. In a print where everything screams with motion (clouds, streaks, diagonal tensions), a lying body is like proof of weakness.
The strangest element: two/three streaks across the entire space
Now the thing that is the visual “hook” of this triptych, and at the same time a demonstration of how Kuniyoshi thinks about perspective. Two long, bright streaks run through the entire composition — one, initially split, runs in a powerful diagonal from the left and from the “viewer” toward the center; the other runs almost horizontally across the whole triptych to the right. They have a warm, slightly reddish edge, as if lit from within.
What is it? Kuniyoshi plays here on the border of literalness. These forms can resemble rays; they can look like stretched bands of light, but in the context of the archer on the left and the beast on the roof, their “natural” reading is arrows shown in an extreme foreshortening — as if we were standing almost on the axis of flight and seeing them as long, almost abstract wedges cutting the night.
This is crucial, because in woodblock printing — a flat medium — one operates more by abbreviation and rhythm than by the geometry of perspective. Kuniyoshi does it with one move: he does not draw the arrow as a small stick with feathers; he turns the flight into a monumental form that binds three sheets. Thanks to that we feel that between the lower-left corner and the upper center an action has occurred: someone released death into the air.
And at the same time it is a purely artisanal bravura: to keep such long, clean bands of color and their edges across three separate sheets so that they “glue” optically requires excellent registration (kentō) and the printer’s discipline. In a triptych there is always the risk that elements will “drift.”
Lower left: Yorimasa — the hero who is not the center of the composition
On the left sheet, at the bottom, stands an archer in richly decorated attire: blue and orange patterns, an eboshi on his head, a distinctly martial posture and silhouette. He is dynamic: legs wide, torso twisted, bow drawn — the moment before releasing the arrow. Beside him hangs a vertical yellowish plaque with his name — a typical character “identifier” in ukiyo-e.
“源三位頼政”
“Minamoto no Yorimasa (Third court rank)”
And at once we notice something perverse: the main hero is small. His motion is violent, but the scale of the world is much larger than him. Above him stretches the emptiness of the sky and a distant landscape: mountains in snowy patches, far bands of forest, and a bit nearer, low buildings in blue. This landscape is strangely calm, cool — as if the world below still does not know that horror is happening above the palace. This is a classic method: the contrast between everyday, “indifferent” nature and a pinpoint eruption of terror. Later Yoshitoshi will develop this device masterfully, especially in his “One Hundred Aspects of the Moon.”
Lower middle and right: people as witnesses, not masters of the situation
In the lower part of the middle sheet we see a second figure — a man in blue clothing, as if recoiling in dread but with his hand near a weapon. He is less “heroic,” more human — like someone torn from his role, forced to respond to something that should not exist. By the figure we see a name frame:
“猪早太寛直”
“Ino Hayata Hironao”
At the lower right stands yet another warrior, in red-gray clothing, with swords at his belt. He is like a guard at the threshold of the stairs. His stance is stable — but again: he is small against the architecture, and smaller still against the sky. What he is meant to protect lies above — in blackness, without movement. Beside him floats a name frame:
“渡辺長七郎”
“Watanabe Chōshichirō”
And here one can already propose a first, very cautious thesis — derived solely from what is visible, without entering philosophy: Kuniyoshi is not painting a scene of a “warrior’s victory.” He is painting a scene of order disturbed. The palace is orderly, repetitive, geometric. People are “functional”: archer, guard, companion. And yet the true protagonist of the image is the atmosphere — black clouds with red embers and two enormous streaks of flight that turn the space into a field of impact.
This is at once very Japanese and very theatrical: terror does not have to be large in size. It is enough that it appears above order, that it flows downward as a sign, that it forces order into stillness. That is why this triptych strikes the imagination so powerfully: we see not only a monster, but an entire staging of a night in which the arrow becomes a compositional line, the cloud becomes the director, and the palace becomes a stage that suddenly ceases to belong exclusively to humans.
Since we have acquainted ourselves with the literal appearance of the woodblock print, let us now try to read the next, deeper layer of meaning in this work…
The Legend: The night at the Konoe palace and Yorimasa’s arrow
In the very corner of the triptych Kuniyoshi leaves us something that functions like a key: a cartouche with a short narrative and a waka. This is not an “ornament” — it is a summary of the world in which this image makes sense. We are in the third year of the Ninpei era (that is, in European terms: 1153), in the late Heian period, when the court is still the center of ceremonial order, but beneath that poetic glitter a new tension of the age is already growing: fear, political fragility, and the awareness that strength increasingly resides not in palace etiquette, but in the hand of the warrior bushi, the future samurai (about this transformation I wrote, among other places, here: How Did Japan Become the Land of the Samurai? – The Pirate King Fujiwara no Sumitomo’s Rebellion at the End of the Heian Era). This is exactly the tension Kuniyoshi plays out through composition: the palace’s geometry versus the “weather of dread” on the roof, the helplessness of the black-clad figure versus the bent bow and the arrow’s flight.
Let us begin with the heroes — those Kuniyoshi signed on the image itself.
“源三位頼政” – Minamoto no Yorimasa
This note says more than the surname alone. “Sanmi” (三位) is the third court rank — which means Yorimasa is not merely a “wild provincial samurai,” but someone who also moves within the world of the court, knows its language, its hierarchy, and its nerves. Historically he was a figure of the borderland: a warrior, but also a man of culture, an archer with the reputation of a “steady hand,” associated as well with the world of poetry. And that is why this legend fits ukiyo-e so well: it is a story about the moment when the court must ask for rescue from someone who can act.
“猪早太寛直” – Ino Hayata.
In versions of the legend, Yorimasa’s companion, who after the arrow strikes finishes the nue with a sword. Kuniyoshi shows him differently than a classic “sidekick”: his posture is more human, as if in mid-motion he recoils before something that should not exist. And this matches the logic of the myth: yes, warriors can kill the monster, but the very fact that the monster appears above the palace is a crack in what we usually consider the natural order of the world.
“渡辺長七郎” – Watanabe Chōshichirō
This is the third signed figure, standing by the stairs. In this composition he plays the role of a “threshold man”: he is closest to what matters most within the palace, and at the same time an expression of helplessness. The court has guards, rituals, weapons… but on this night all of it is only scenery. His role is therefore concrete: he secures access to the emperor, shields the space of the stairs and veranda, stands ready — yet he cannot protect the emperor by himself, because this is not a night when ordinary guard duty is enough.
And finally, the black-clad figure lying on the platform. Kuniyoshi does not sign it with a name, because the viewer is meant to recognize it by role. It is Emperor Konoe (or, more broadly, “court authority”), shown at the moment when he is no longer majesty, but a body. The legend says it directly: the emperor begins to be tormented at night by a series of nightmares, until at last a black cloud and ominous voices appear above the palace. Medicine and prayers do not help. In this framing, the lying figure in black has a double sense: it is a sick man, and it is a symbol of a system that, in the face of irrational fear, loses its verticality. That is why Kuniyoshi lays it horizontally against the stairs — as if hierarchy itself (those steps) could no longer bear its summit.
Now let us move on to the nue itself.
The Nue
In the “Heike Monogatari” tradition, the nue is a chimeric creature: most often described as having a monkey’s head, a tanuki torso, tiger limbs, and a snake tail. But more important than zoology is how this “animal” operates in the imagination: the nue is not merely a monster; the nue is a sign. A night omen, something that comes as a black cloud, and whose voice (like a nocturnal bird’s) becomes a harbinger of misfortune. In the triptych Kuniyoshi literally materializes this mechanism: the nue does not “stand” on the ground like a beast to be hunted — it floats in a cloud. It is more weather than body. More a state than an opponent. But what exactly does this particular legend say?
The setting is the imperial palace in Heian-kyō, a ceremonial, ordered space where everything should be predictable. Kuniyoshi shows this through architecture: the rhythm of pillars, repetitive curtains, the reds of balustrades, the regularity of steps. This palace is almost like a pattern. And then comes the first crack: at night a black cloud begins to arrive — the cartouche specifies that it comes from the direction of the Higashi Sanjō forest. In the triptych this corresponds to the bands of black sliding beneath the mountains.
With the cloud comes a voice. In the legend it is precisely the voice — baleful, unnamed — that weakens the ruler faster than any illness. This matters, because we have here a story of fear that is “without touch,” and yet destroys the body. Kuniyoshi cannot draw sound, so he draws its effects: the black-clad body lying motionless, as if night truly became a weight too heavy to bear.
The court responds with what it knows: prayers, rituals, an attempt to restore order. But it does not work. And at this moment the legend makes a turn that, in the woodblock print, becomes an aesthetic turn: someone is needed who will not “calm the world,” but will strike. Someone who will treat the phenomenon as a target.
Yorimasa enters. In the story he keeps watch at night, waiting for the moment when the black cloud thickens above the roof. In the triptych this moment is stretched and turned into spectacle: Kuniyoshi shows the very flight of the arrow as two immense, luminous wedges. This is his brilliant narrative shortcut. We do not need to see a tiny arrow in the air — we see time, we see “from–to”: from the drawn bow at the lower left to the ignition point on the roof.
The arrow hits. In versions of the story it is sometimes emphasized that this is not an ordinary arrow — sometimes mention is made of a special point or feathers — but Kuniyoshi accents something else: he does not fetishize the tool; he shows the moment of the cloud being breached. Notice how around the nue the blackness carries a red glow — as if, at the moment of impact, the phenomenon revealed its “interior,” as if night flared for a second.
The nue falls or is incapacitated, and then Hayata enters: he finishes the monster with a sword. Kuniyoshi does not show that final fight in close-up (Yoshitoshi will do that later). Here what matters is not “how many blows,” but the fact that after the hit the phenomenon finally becomes a body. That what was cloud can now be touched by a blade. That is why, in the composition, Hayata is near the ground, closer to physicality — in contrast to Yorimasa, who is an “operator at a distance,” an archer.
And finally comes the famous point: after the nue dies, a cuckoo (hototogisu) is heard, and the court rewards Yorimasa. In tradition the sword “Shishiō” appears, but in this triptych Kuniyoshi stresses something else more strongly: language. In the cartouche we have two lines of waka in which there is praise (“cuckoo, how you raise his name into the clouds”) and Yorimasa’s riposte — modest and at the same time brilliant, because it plays with the image of the “bow-moon.” Let us cite that waka once again:
ほとゝぎす 名をも雲井に あぐるかな
弓はり月の いるにまかせて
“Cuckoo — how you raise his name even into the clouds, into the heavenly heights.”
“And I? Let it be like the ‘moon drawn taut like a bow’: let it ‘set’ (and strike) wherever it is destined.”
And suddenly we understand why Kuniyoshi so strongly wants us to read the image together with letters: this legend does not end at the monster’s corpse. It ends in the culture of the court — in a word, in a metaphor, in an elegant reply that restores verticality to what, in the image, lay prone.
This is the logical closure: fear arrives as a cloud, brings down the emperor, the court is helpless, a warrior arrives, the arrow “draws” order anew, the monster dies, and then culture — through poem and reward — heals the crack. Kuniyoshi shows precisely this moment of transition: everything is still tension, the cloud has not yet drifted away, the shadow still lies on the stairs… but the arrow has already flown, and therefore history is decided.
The second layer of meaning: a historical commentary
In this triptych what is most significant is that Kuniyoshi does not tell the legend as “a brave warrior kills a monster.” He tells it as a crisis of order, in which the court’s world suddenly ceases to be self-sufficient. You can see it in the anatomy of the image: the palace is scored to the rhythm of beams, stairs, balustrades — that is, the architecture of order. And above that order flows something that has no institutional form: a black cloud, a ribbon, a phenomenon. The court lies — literally. The warrior stands — but is small. And yet it is not the palace that “wins,” but the line of action, those two enormous streaks of arrows that bind three sheets like a single gesture. If one were to seek a sentence Kuniyoshi states through the image, it would sound roughly like this: “when power becomes helpless before what is unnamed, rescue comes not from ceremony but from precision and the courage to act.”
In the realities of late Heian (and the legend is set precisely there), the imperial court lived in a world where signs carried political weight. An omen, a strange voice in the night, a “black cloud” above the palace — this is not merely folklore. It is a language in which one speaks about the condition of the state and the fragility of authority. If the emperor does not sleep, if he falls ill with an illness that “cannot be treated,” the problem is not private. In the order of Heian-kyō, the ruler’s body is part of cosmology: his condition says whether the world’s order is coherent. Kuniyoshi translates this very literally into the image: the black-clad figure does not sit on a throne; it is not vertical. It is weight. It lies helplessly on the platform — and that is powerful, because in painting and woodblock printing the position of the body is always a comment on position in the hierarchy.
In this sense, the nue is something more than a monster. It is a form of political fear: a hybrid that escapes classification and therefore escapes management as well. The court can manage ritual, rank, gesture, prayer. It cannot manage something outside that scheme. That is why the legend needs Yorimasa — a man who stands somewhat outside the language of ritual. This does not have to be read as “samurai versus aristocracy” in a simplistic sense, but as a sign of an age: in a moment of crisis, the weight of agency shifts toward those who can act in chaos. Kuniyoshi draws this without sentimentality: Yorimasa is important, but he is not enlarged. He is an instrument of precision in a world losing control of its own sky.
But Kuniyoshi created in the Edo period!
Third Layer: A political commentary.
Now the second horizon: Kuniyoshi creates in Edo (many centuries after Yorimasa) — in a city that is itself a gigantic mechanism of order, control, and rhythm. His audience is a public that loves stories of ancient warriors and supernatural phenomena, but lives in a world where politics is both omnipresent and cannot be named outright. And here the interesting entanglement begins.
In such a context, a legend about a palace tormented by something that cannot be captured within institutional frames becomes extraordinarily current as a metaphor. Kuniyoshi does not have to say “this is about your fears” — it is enough that he shows the mechanism: night enters the center, power loses its verticality, and rescue comes from outside the official structure. Notice how he “directs” fear: not through naturalistic violence, but through atmosphere. The clouds are a calligraphy of unease, and the red at their edges looks like fever. A viewer in Edo does not need to know every detail of the Heian story to feel the sense: this is an image about how the civilized façade of a palace can be veiled by a single, stubborn streak of night.
The very form of the triptych also matters. A triptych is a medium of spectacle — a wide breath, panning, a “theatrical stage.” Kuniyoshi uses it not to show more details of the legend, but to show the effect: the arrow becomes the axis of space. And this is very Edo: a fascination with a technical, almost engineering display of motion in a medium that is, by nature, still. He literally makes the flight of a projectile into the compositional load-bearing beam of the image. This is a praise of effectiveness — but not in a banal, triumphalist sense. Rather in the sense that sometimes the only answer to chaos is a simple, precise gesture, without rhetoric.
If one were to look for the political core of this woodblock print, it lies in the contrast of three modes of being.
The first mode is ceremonial power — palace, stairs, curtains, the rhythm of repetition. It is beautiful, ordered, serious. But on this night it is helpless. Kuniyoshi does not ridicule it; he does not caricature the emperor. He does something subtler: he shows that structure itself, though powerful, has no tools for boundary experiences. When the problem is “from another category,” the institution can only collapse onto the floor.
The second mode is the warrior’s agency — not as brutality, but as competence. Notice that Yorimasa is “small,” but his action is “great.” It is not he who dominates the frame, but the consequence of his gesture. Kuniyoshi is not selling us a myth of a superhero. He gives us a vision in which a human being matters when he can, in the world’s chaos, display precision and concentration.
The third mode is the formless — the nue and the cloud. This is where it gets most interesting, because Kuniyoshi does not demonize the monster in a cheap way. He shows it as a symptom: something that appears above the roof — that is, above the system’s “head.” In that sense the nue is an image of a phenomenon that destabilizes — collective fear, rumor, catastrophic foreboding, a crisis without a face.
Kuniyoshi’s reflection
In the cartouche Kuniyoshi leaves one more thing that moves us from politics into the philosophy of culture: the waka about the cuckoo and the “moon like a drawn bow.” This is not an ornament after the event. It is an element of the world’s “healing” mechanism. Heian does not merely recount “who killed whom,” but also: how meaning is restored after meaning has been breached.
Notice that, in this story, the return of order is not shown as a parade. It is shown as a passage from night into word. First there is the black cloud and the monster’s voice — a voice that does not belong to the human world. Then there is the arrow — the gesture that “trims” the phenomenon down to earth. And at the end there is the poem — a form that restores the event to culture, memory, and language. The ultimate tool for ordering reality is not the sword but poetry — is that not perfectly Heian?
This triptych — “Konoe-in gosho, Ninpei sannen,” a vertical ōban tate-e, signed “Ichiyūsai Kuniyoshi ga” — tells Heian not as a “fairy tale about a monster,” but as a moment when the weight of power shifts: the emperor’s body lies motionless, and effectiveness comes from the warrior’s hand. This is precisely the historical truth of the decline of aristocratic Heian-kyō (Kyoto): when the court loses the ability to respond to crisis (here captured as a “black cloud” and nocturnal fear), someone from another order appears — a bushi (warrior), admittedly of court rank, but already representing the growing world of force.
And this story continues beyond the nue legend: the same Yorimasa later appears in real history as a participant in the rebellion with Prince Mochihito in 1180 — one of the sparks of the conflict that will lead to the Genpei War and the birth of warrior rule — samurai Japan; Kuniyoshi therefore shows not a “supernatural episode,” but a symbolic threshold of an era.
But this image was created in Edo, around 1842–1843, at a time when the Tokugawa had ruled for generations and when the “court–warriors” relation was reversed and formalized: the emperor in Kyoto remained a source of legitimacy and symbol, while real politics belonged to the bakufu. In that light, the Heian scene ceases to be merely a retrospection — it becomes a readable mirror of Kuniyoshi’s own age: power “lies” in the palace, and action happens elsewhere; that is exactly the arrangement on which the Tokugawa order rested.
And it is no accident that this is the period amid the Tenpō censorship regime and restrictions which, from 1842 onward, struck actor and courtesan prints — pushing artists toward history, warriors, and a “safe” past (more on this, for example, here: Japanese Artists vs. Edo Shogunate Censorship: How Kuniyoshi Criticized Power in the Painting “Takiyasha the Witch”); in such a situation, a legend about a monster above the emperor’s roof could sound like a double speech: on the one hand, compatible with warrior ideology; on the other — as a delicate comment about a state that, in the name of stability, continues to fight its own “black clouds.”
Most deeply, however, Kuniyoshi speaks here about something even more durable than a change of ruling classes: about how culture orders fear. That is why, in this particular work, form matters so much: the vertical triptych in which motion cuts through space; and that stubborn dialogue between image and letter — the kotobagaki and waka on the cartouche do not “describe the scene,” they close it culturally, because after the arrow, language must return — name, metaphor.
Kuniyoshi — an artist formed in the Utagawa school (more about this school here: Utagawa – A School of Japanese Ukiyo-e Woodblock Prints Whose Masters Are Still Admired Today), who gained fame through great warrior series (like his “Suikoden” from 1827) — in works like this shows that Japan continually reworks its own history through recurring figures: the imperial roof as the world’s center, night as a crisis of meaning, the warrior as agency, and the poem as the re-stitching of reality. And perhaps that is why the nue is so important here: not as a “monster,” but as a sign that no order — courtly or shogunal — is eternal. Clouds will come one day. And another Yorimasa will appear, who, driving those clouds away, will topple the old order and introduce his own — a new one.
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"Strong Japanese Women"
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未開 ソビエライ
An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)
Personal motto:
"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)
Mike Soray
(aka Michał Sobieraj)
未開 ソビエライ
An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)
Personal motto:
"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)
Mike Soray
(aka Michał Sobieraj)
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Ciechanów, Polska
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