TSUKIOKA YOSHITOSHI

Condition Report

Impression & Colour

Excellent. A superb impression — the keyblock is sharp throughout, holding the hair-fine tendrils of the vine, the individual whiskers on the gourd, and the hatched strands of the ghost's loosened hair without a break. The colour is fresh and unfaded: the grey-slate of the night sky carries clear woodgrain from the block, the bokashi transition from night down through bay blue into the pale ground at the base is smooth and unbroken, the leaf greens are deep and evenly laid, and the moon disc retains its soft warm tint rather than the bleached white of a tired printing. The blue of Yūgao's lips — the convention for the dead — reads clearly. Colour on this design is the first thing to go; here it has not gone.

Paper & Backing

Excellent. The sheet is untrimmed and complete, retaining both publication margins: the full red registration and publisher inscription down the left edge. The paper is clean and even, with only the light warm tone proper to washi of the 1880s. The sheet carries an album backing from an earlier Japanese mounting — the standard survival route for this series, and the same state in which the best Japanese-market impressions of this design are offered today. We have left the backing in place: removal on a sheet of this quality risks the fugitive red and the delicate white printing for no gain in appearance.

⚠ Please examine all photographs carefully 

The ghost who is not in the novel

There is a small, perfect problem at the centre of this print. Everyone calls it the ghost of Yūgao — and in The Tale of Genji, Yūgao has no ghost. She is the woman a jealous spirit comes for, not the spirit that comes. Genji finds her in a ruined house at Gojō, her fence smothered in white gourd flowers; she will not give her name, so he names her after the blossom; within hours of taking her to a deserted villa she is dead, and the novel closes over her. Murasaki Shikibu never lets her come back.

She comes back on the nō stage. Two plays — Hajitomi and Yūgao — take up what the novel abandons. In Hajitomi, a monk at Unrin-in performs a service for the flowers offered on the altar and a woman appears at dusk holding a white bloom. Asked her name, she says it will be known soon enough; she has come, she says, from the shadow of this flower — and vanishes into it. When the monk goes looking, he finds the derelict house at Gojō with moonflowers climbing the half-shutter, and it is from behind that shutter that Yūgao's spirit finally steps out, tells her story, dances, and asks to be prayed for before dawn takes her. The whole play is the monk's dream.

That is the tradition Yoshitoshi is drawing on: not the chapter but the dream of it, four centuries of stage practice in which the woman and the flower become one thing. Read the sheet that way and its strangeness resolves. She is not haunting the garden — she is what the garden is made of.

What Yoshitoshi does with the vine

The design turns the ordinary hierarchy of a print inside out. Yoshitoshi gives the moonflowers full weight — dense leaf green, firm keyblock outline, white petals with crisply carved edges, one heavy bottle gourd hanging bristled and solid at the right — and gives the woman almost nothing. Her robe is laid in the palest blue over the sky behind it. Where a tendril crosses her body, the tendril wins: it is printed over her, unbroken, and she is the thing that yields. Colour weight has been used as a statement about existence. In the whole sheet, the only person is the least substantial object in it.

Her hair is the counterweight — a long grey fall carved in fine parallel strokes, the one part of her the blocks commit to fully, spilling down past her waist and dissolving into vapour before it reaches the ground. She has no feet. The composition simply stops rendering her, low down, exactly where the printed sky bleaches into bare paper. The face is turned in strict profile, eyes lowered, mouth blue: she is not looking at us and never will.

Everything technical in the sheet serves this. The sky is a full-width bokashi that falls from near-black slate at the top to nothing at the bottom, so that the print grows fainter as your eye descends — the same fade the figure performs. The moon is a flat pale disc set high at the left, deliberately undramatic, more lamp than spectacle. The white flowers were given karazuri blind-printing to raise the petals off the sheet, and nunomezuri textile-printing appears in the design as recorded by the Fitzwilliam Museum's impression. This is the small workshop of Akiyama Buemon at full stretch, on a design where the printing carries as much meaning as the drawing.

The series, and where this sheet sits in it

Tsuki Hyakushi occupied Yoshitoshi from 1885 until his death in 1892 — one hundred ōban designs, issued in small batches by Akiyama Buemon of Nihonbashi, each built around the moon and around a figure drawn from Japanese or Chinese history, legend, poetry and the nō repertoire. New designs were awaited by collectors and sold out fast. It is the last great series of the ukiyo-e tradition, and by common consent Yoshitoshi's masterpiece. Shortly after his death in June 1892 the complete hundred were issued as a bound album with a preface and table of contents — which is why so many surviving sheets, this one included, come out of Japanese albums.

Within the hundred, the Yūgao is the one nearly everybody names. It is the design that gets chosen for exhibition posters and book jackets, the one that carries the series' reputation for atmosphere, and — in the plain evidence of the Japanese trade — the one that is priced in a different bracket from its neighbours. It is also, as the London dealer Israel Goldman has noted of the design, one of the hardest sheets in the set to find in an early impression: the pale printing that makes it work is the first thing lost in later pulls.

Yoshitoshi, 1886

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839–1892) entered Kuniyoshi's studio at eleven and made his early reputation on the violence of the 1860s — the Boshin War prints, the musha-e, the notorious cruelty designs — before collapsing into poverty and breakdown in the early 1870s. He came back under a new art name, Taisō (大蘇, "great resurrection"), the seal that appears in red beside the signature on this sheet, and spent his last two decades making work of an entirely different temperature: interior, literary, psychologically exact.

By March 1886 he was a year into the moon series and at the height of his powers, working with carvers and printers who could execute anything he drew. The Yūgao is what that combination produced when the subject asked for restraint rather than force — a print by the artist of the battlefield in which nothing happens at all, and which is nonetheless the most frightening sheet in the set.

Collector's Note & Market

This is the top design of Tsuki Hyakushi, and the Japanese trade prices it accordingly. Hara Shobō offered it last year for ¥700,000 and currently has an impression available for ¥800,000. The Jimbōchō specialist Ōya Shobō has catalogued a backed impression of Genji yūgao maki at ¥660,000, against ¥165,000 for Kokka no tsuki (the Lonely House) and ¥88,000 for Sekiheki no tsuki from the same series and the same shop.

Against those comparables, what is offered here is a sheet with the two things the market pays for and rarely gets together: an unfaded, sharply printed impression, and an untrimmed sheet with the complete publication margins.

Shipping: Sent flat between acid-free tissue and rigid boards, in a reinforced carton, by tracked and insured post. Ships from Germany.

Guarantee: An original Japanese woodblock print of March 1886, published by Akiyama Buemon. Guaranteed authentic and as described, with full refund if not.