楠正成藁人形造敵箭奪図  ·  Robinson T341  ·  Ansei 4 (1857)

UTAGAWA KUNIYOSHI

歌川国芳  (1798–1861)

Kusunoki Masashige and His Men Making Straw Dummies
to Trick the Enemy into Exhausting Their Arrows

Ōban tate-e triptych (大判三枚続)  ·  Publisher: Mikawaya Tetsugorō  ·  3rd month, Ansei 4

Excellent. A strong, clean impression with the keyblock lines crisp throughout — visible in the woven straw of the dummies, the lacing of the armour, the pine-needle clusters and the fine hatching of the arrow bundles at lower right. This is a night design, and the dark palette is the whole point of it: the deep charcoal-grey ground of the sky and the black-green pine masses are evenly and richly printed, with no thinning or patchiness across the three sheets. 

Very good. Three separate sheets of firm, supple Japanese washi. There is minor trimming. Each sheet carries a vertical fold at the left margin, consistent with the folds made to fit a print into an album. Along the fold, the paper had become weak on two of the three sheets; these areas have been reinforced from the reverse with kōzō fibres, and the sheets are now stable. 

⚠ Please examine all photographs carefully. This is a 169-year-old set of three sheets with an album-fold history; the images are the most accurate record of the object, and we are happy to supply further detail photographs on request.

Read it from the right, as its first owners would have. Kusunoki Masashige sits on a folding camp stool beneath the great pines, his name in a red cartouche above him, doing nothing at all — the still point of the entire design. Around him his retainers work. Some strip arrows out of straw bodies; others crouch over the harvest, binding the shafts into bundles for reuse. Behind them a fat column of pale smoke boils up from a signal fire, printed in an unexpected salmon pink that is the only warm note in the whole triptych.

The centre sheet gives the operation itself. A straw man is lashed to a pine trunk, fitted out with a broad hat and a wooden pole for a spear — the mannequin is finished and standing. Above and behind him, two named officers, Onchi Sakon and Jingūji Kotarō, are turned toward the valley, one of them arm outstretched, pointing at the enemy. Below them the slope is a mass of soldiers hauling dummies overhead, several of them already bristling with spent arrows like pincushions.

The left sheet supplies the reason for all of it. Beyond the pines the ground drops away into darkness, and out of that darkness rises a thicket — not of trees but of spear points, with banners and pennants riding above them. Kuniyoshi does not draw the besieging army; he draws its hedge, a picket of verticals stretching back into the murk, and lets the viewer do the arithmetic. It is an economical, and rather chilling, way of putting a hundred thousand men on a sheet of paper.

In the spring of 1333, during the Genkō War, Kusunoki Masashige was holding the mountain fortress of Chihaya on Mount Kongō for the exiled Emperor Go-Daigo against the armies of the Kamakura shogunate. The Taiheiki gives him fewer than a thousand men and puts the besiegers at a million — a figure nobody takes literally, and which exists precisely to make the point that the odds were absurd.

Direct assault had already cost the shogunal army thousands of casualties under rolling boulders and falling tree trunks, so the besiegers settled in to starve the castle out. Boredom set in on both sides. According to the chronicle the attackers filled the time with poetry contests and gambling; Kusunoki filled it differently. One night he had twenty or thirty dummies built, dressed them in armour, armed them, and set them among the trees below the walls. At dawn five hundred real soldiers stationed behind them raised a battle shout. The besiegers, seeing armoured figures on the slope and hearing the cry, concluded that the starving garrison had finally come out to fight, loosed their arrows and charged uphill — whereupon the five hundred withdrew into the castle and Kusunoki dropped some fifty boulders onto the men crowding around the scarecrows.

Kuniyoshi's title, however, does something the Taiheiki does not: teki ya ubau — seizing the enemy's arrows. In the chronicle the dummies are bait for the boulders; here they are a harvesting machine, and the sheets are given over to the unglamorous work of pulling the arrows out and tying them into sheaves. It is an embellishment from the later popular retellings of the story, and it carries an unmistakable echo of the most famous arrow-theft in East Asian literature — Zhuge Liang's straw-boat ruse in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a cycle Kuniyoshi knew intimately and returned to that very same year. Whether or not the parallel was consciously drawn, it is the resourcefulness that the design celebrates: not a battle, but a quartermaster's problem solved with hay and rope.

Robinson records ten warrior triptychs and diptychs for Kuniyoshi in 1857 (T339–T348). Four of them are Kusunoki subjects: this one in the third month, Masashige rallying his men at the Minatogawa in the fourth, and the two Shijōnawate triptychs — Masatsura's last stand under a rain of arrows — which were designed to be set side by side as a six-sheet composition, though they were issued four months apart. A fifth, the Nitta and Ashikaga fighting in the capital, belongs to the same Southern Court cycle. In a single year, and in the last years of his working life, Kuniyoshi went back again and again to the loyalists of the fourteenth century.

The timing is not incidental. By the mid-1850s Kusunoki Masashige had become the central emblem of loyalty to the throne, and the Nanboku-chō material carried a charge in Edo that a purely antiquarian subject would not have had — the Perry squadron had arrived in 1853, the Ansei treaties were being negotiated, and the imperial-loyalist argument was gathering force in the political culture. Warrior prints were one of the few places where such sympathies could be aired at all, dressed in five-hundred-year-old armour and therefore beyond the reach of the censors.

What makes this sheet the most interesting of the four is that it is the least heroic. The Minatogawa and Shijōnawate triptychs are about noble death. This one is about labour: men making things, carrying things, taking things apart, laughing while they do it. Kusunoki's genius here is logistical, and Kuniyoshi — who spent his whole career giving crowd scenes the density and comic specificity of a good street — was exactly the artist to make that legible.

Born in Edo, the son of a silk dyer, Kuniyoshi trained under Utagawa Toyokuni I and spent years in obscurity before the publisher Kagaya Kichibei commissioned him, around 1827, to illustrate the heroes of the Chinese novel Water Margin. The resulting series made his name overnight and fixed his reputation: musha-e no Kuniyoshi, "Kuniyoshi of the warrior prints." Over the following three decades he produced work in almost every genre — beauties, actors, landscapes, cats, satire, ghost and monster designs — but it is the warrior material, and above all the large multi-sheet battle compositions, on which his standing rests. Robinson catalogued more than 370 warrior triptychs and diptychs across his career.

The late triptychs of the 1850s are his most ambitious compositions in the format: panoramic, densely populated, and organised so that each ōban sheet stands on its own while the three together read as one continuous field. This design shows the method at full stretch — a single landscape carried across seventy-odd centimetres, a dozen simultaneous actions, and a colour scheme keyed almost entirely to darkness. Kuniyoshi died in 1861, four years after this print was published, having trained the generation that carried ukiyo-e into the Meiji period — Yoshitoshi, Yoshiiku, Yoshitora and the rest.

The design is catalogued by Robinson as T341, published by Mikawaya Tetsugorō in the third month of Ansei 4. Complete triptychs surface in the Western and Japanese trade from time to time — this is not a great rarity — but the condition variable that matters here is the dark ground. A night design of this kind depends entirely on the evenness of its blacks and charcoal greys, and impressions that have been light-struck, rubbed or washed lose the effect completely. The three sheets offered here have kept it.

Shipping: Shipped flat, protected between acid-free tissue and rigid boards, by tracked and insured international post. Ships from Germany.

Guarantee: An original Japanese woodblock print of 1857. Guaranteed authentic. Full refund if not as described.