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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 Akū 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. It accommodates the theatrical gamut, from heart-rending love stories, to grisly murders, earthy sub-plots and bloody battles. Narrative representations of Chūshingura usually followed the theatrical structure closely, each print representing a key scene from a particular act of the play. Characters were generally arranged in the highly expressive mie, or 'frozen poses', that punctuated each scene. Although they illustrated only a single dramatic moment, these images offered sufficient information for knowledgeable fans – and there were many – to reconstruct the surrounding events in their imaginations.
The illustration for Act VIII, ‘Tōkaidō michiyuki’ (‘Journey Along the Tōkaidō’), is something of an intermezzo in stage presentations. It shows the journey of Honzō’s wife, Tonase, and her daughter Konami as they make their way along the Kamakura coast road to Yamashina to reconfirm Konami’s engagement to Oboshi Rikiya. The imposing profile of Mt Fuji towering over the horizon echoes the Act I location at Kamakura. Through the last three acts, the final preparations of the rōnin (leaderless samurai) are gradually revealed, and the narrative climaxes in the completion of their vendetta precisely two years after its instigation in the night attack on the villa of Kō no Moronao. As gishi – ‘righteous warriors’ – the real rōnin were subsequently sentenced to perform seppuku (ritual disembowelment). Their tombs can be visited today at Sengakuji, near Shinagawa Station in Tokyo.
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 like ‘Tōkaidō michiyuki’, 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 like that for ‘Tōkaidō michiyuki’, 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