Ochiai Yoshiiku

This artist playfully connects classical Japanese literature with contemporary tales, pairing texts and images to form clever similes. Watanabe no Tsuna, a samurai known for his adventures, is pictured with an amputated arm of a demon in this scene. The dismembered arm is likened to the cast-off robes mentioned in a chapter from the Tale of Genji, a narrative from the 1000s referenced in the text above the image. Utagawa Yoshiiku’s series includes 54 prints, each pairing a chapter from the Tale of Genji with a contemporary story.

The samurai Watanabe no Tsuna (993-1024) was famed for having cut off the arm of the demon Ibaraki after a long night’s watch at the Rashomon Gate of Kyoto. The illustrated inset at the top of the print matches this subject with “The Shell of the Locust” (Utsusemi), chapter 3 of the 11th-century Tale of Genji, the earliest novel in Japanese literature. The connection between the historical subject and the theme from the novel is unclear, but usually there is a relationship between such insets and the main subject of the print.