長安一片月 萬戸擣衣聲
“One sliver of moon over Chang'an; from ten thousand households, the sound of cloth being beaten.”
Li Bai, Ziye Wu ge — Autumn Song, eighth century
| Artist | Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (月岡芳年, 1839–1892), signing Yoshitoshi 芳年 with the red artist's seal |
| Series | Tsuki Hyakushi (月百姿) — One Hundred Aspects of the Moon, published 1885–1892 |
| Title | Kinuta no tsuki — Yūgiri (きぬたの月 夕霧) — Cloth-beating Moon: Yūgiri |
| Subject | The wife of Ashiya no Sayemon at the fulling block, with her maidservant Yūgiri — the central scene of the Noh play Kinuta |
| Date | Meiji 23, fourth month (April 1890) |
| Publisher | Akiyama Buemon (秋山武右エ門), Kokkeidō, Nihonbashi |
| Block-cutter | Carver's mark Enkatsu tō (圓活刀) in a rounded cartouche at lower left |
| Technique | Woodblock print (mokuhanga), polychrome nishiki-e; the robe built up from an orange under-block printed beneath the plum ground and around each motif |
| Format | Ōban tate-e — approx. 36 × 24 cm (14⅛ × 9½ in.) |
| Reference | Stevenson 84. An impression is held by the Museum of International Folk Art, Santa Fe (A.2001.21.84); the complete series in album form is in the National Diet Library, Tokyo. |
Impression & Colour
Excellent on every measure. A strong, clean impression. The orange in the robe has oxidised to a warm, faintly metallic surface — entirely normal for this pigment, and here it works in the design's favour, ringing every gold bar and every leaf with an ember-like glow.
Paper & Margins
The paper is clean and even, with the light warm tone proper to washi of 1890. The sheet carries an album backing from an earlier Japanese mounting. The full left-margin publication block is present and legible — printing date, publication date and the Akiyama Buemon address.
⚠ Please examine all photographs carefully!
Yoshitoshi almost never asks the back of a figure to carry a whole design. Here he does. The wife kneels with her spine turned squarely to us, her face entirely hidden, the mallet lifted above the fulling block; everything we are permitted to know about her state of mind has to be read from a shoulder line, a bowed head, and the way the great robe pools and settles around her. It is a piece of restraint that would be unremarkable in a Noh performance and is extraordinary in a print — and it is why this sheet keeps its power at a distance, as a shape, before you have identified a single thing in it.
The robe does the rest. It is a karaori of the kind worn on the Noh stage, ruled with a gold lattice and strewn with green and violet leaves, and it is printed with a sophistication that repays close looking: an orange block laid under the plum ground and slightly outside each motif, so that every bar of the lattice and every leaf is haloed in fire. The woman is dressed in banked embers. Nothing else in the sheet carries a warm colour except the girl's scarlet at the far left, and the distance between those two reds is the whole composition.
Then look at where the moon is. It sits high on the same grey ground that carries the painted bush clover, above a vertical panel seam, inside the screen. Whether Yoshitoshi means a real moon glimpsed past the screen or a painted one on it, he leaves genuinely open — and in a design about a woman beating cloth so that the sound will travel to a husband who is not coming, a moon that may only be a picture of a moon is precisely the right ambiguity to leave standing.
Kinuta, attributed to Zeami, is one of the bleakest works in the Noh repertory. A man from Kyushu has been detained in the capital for three years by a lawsuit. He sends his maidservant Yūgiri home with word that he will return before the year is out. To distract her mistress, Yūgiri begins beating cloth on the fulling block — the kinuta, the low wooden stand seen at the right of this sheet with the length of white cloth over it — and the wife, despite her rank, takes the mallet from her and beats it herself through the night, hoping the autumn wind will carry the sound the length of the country to her husband. Word then comes that he will not return after all. She loses her reason and dies. He comes home to find her dead; her spirit appears and reproaches him, and finds release only through the chanting of the Lotus Sutra.
The cloth-beating scene is the emotional centre of the play, and Yoshitoshi's reading of it is unsparing. The two women occupy the same veranda and share nothing. Yūgiri, in her red robe with the checked sash, kneels half out of the picture with her head lowered, having brought a consolation that has not worked. The wife has gone somewhere the girl cannot follow. The comfort has failed, and the print is about the failure rather than the offer.
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 a figure from Japanese or Chinese history, legend and poetry. Sheets were awaited by collectors and sold quickly. It is the last great series of the ukiyo-e tradition and, by common consent, Yoshitoshi's masterpiece. Shortly after his death the complete hundred were reissued as a bound album with preface and contents — which is why so many surviving sheets, this one included, come out of Japanese albums.
This is a late design. By April 1890 Yoshitoshi was five years into the project and two and a half from the end of his life, and the series had long since stopped being a commission he was working through and become his summary statement. The late sheets are quieter than the early ones — fewer ghosts and warriors, more literature, more empty ground, more asked of the viewer. He had come back from the poverty and breakdown of the early 1870s under a new art name, Taisō (大蘇, "great resurrection"), and the whole of the moon series belongs to that recovered late phase. Trained under Utagawa Kuniyoshi, he is widely regarded as the last great master of the tradition.
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 April 1890, published by Akiyama Buemon. Guaranteed authentic and as described, with full refund if not.