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Overview
Besides his two important bijin-ga (beautiful women) prints, Te Papa's collection currently has include four works by Kesai Eisen (1790-1848) from an 11-composition set, each illustrating one of the acts of Kanadehon Chūshingura (Treasury of Loyal Retainers), one of the enduring classics of the kabuki repertoire. The play’s original 1748 jōruri (‘narrated script’) recounted the historical events of the so-called Akō Affair of 1701–03 in the jidaimono format, which reframed the main protagonists in the guise of earlier events. Its Byzantine narrative melded numerous sub-plots into an 11-hour theatrical extravaganza. In the play’s opening act, ‘Tsurugaoka shinzen’ (‘Before the Shrine at Tsurugaoka’), the sinister Kō no Moronao offends the court novice Enya Hanga Takasada when he attempts to seduce Hangan’s wife, the demure Lady Kaoyo. For his illustration of the second act, ‘Momonoi no yashiki’ (‘At Momonoi’s Mansion’), Eisen represented the famous matsu-kiri ‘cutting the pine’ scene, introducing Hangan’s loyal ally Momonoi Wakasanosuke, his retainer Kakogawa Honzō, Hangan’s young retainer Öboshi Rikiya and his betrothed, Honzō’s daughter Konami. Early the following morning, while attending a Nō play at the Kamakura villa of Ashikaga Tadayoshi, Enya Hangan is goaded into attacking Moronao.
Here Eisen represents an episode in the fourth act, ‘Hangan seppuku’ (‘The Suicide of Enya Hangan’). As punishment for drawing his blade in the court setting, Hangan has been sentenced to perform seppuku (ritual disembowelment) and to forfeit his estate. Where many illustrators chose to represent the heart-rending scene of Hangan’s suicide and Kaoyo’s grief, Eisen, rather more subtly, elected to show the final scene of this act. Hangan’s chief retainer, Ōboshi Yuranosuke, had been absent through the events leading up to the seppuku. He returned home at the 11th hour, too late alas to save his master. Here, standing outside the walls of Hangan’s forfeited villa, brandishing the short blade with which the seppuku had been performed and surrounded by the loyal retainers, he pledges to avenge his wronged lord.
Stage representations of Chūshingura are exciting and filled with tension. The excitement was sustained in part by the music and dance performances that informed acts or by the actors’ highly expressive frozen mie (poses) that punctuated key moments in each act. Compositions like Eisen’s capitalised on these mie moments, set in naturalistic landscape settings or in syntheses of stage-set constructions and contrived landscape views. These compositions provided Eisen’s viewers with something of a shorthand narrative composed of snapshot views of key events – images they could view at their leisure, and around which they could crystallise their own imaginative reflections on the play’s themes of on (obligation of debts of filial piety), kō (honour), chū (loyalty) and giri (fulfilment of obligation before self-interest).
See: David Bell, 'Floating world at Te Papa: the Heriot collection', Tuhinga, 30 (2019), pp. 56-81.
Dr Mark Stocker Curator, Historical International Art May 2019