Utagawa Kuniyoshi (歌川国芳) (artist 11/15/1797 – 03/05/1861)
Okabe (岡部): The Story of the Cat Stone (Neko ishi no hanashi - 猫石のはなし) from the series Tōkaidō Gojūsan Tsui (Fifty-three Parallels for the Tōkaidō Road - 東海道五十三対)
1845 – 1846
9.75 in x 14 in (Overall dimensions) Japanese color woodblock print
Signed: Ichiyūsai Kuniyoshi ga
一勇斎国芳画
Artist's seal: kiri
Publisher: Ibaya Kyūbei (Marks 126 - seal 21-078)
Censor's seal: Mura
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
British Museum
Waseda University
Museum für angewandte Kunst, Vienna
Hagi Uragami Museum of Art
National Diet Library
Muzeum Sztuki i Techniki Japońskiej Manggha, Krakow
Walters Museum of Art
Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford
The Hermitage Museum
Van Gogh Museum
Fujisawa Ukiyo-e Museum
Museum of Oriental Art, Venice (via Ritsumeikan University)
Pushkin State Museum
Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida
Smith College
Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen (Rijksmuseum Volkenkunde, Leiden) via Ritsumeikan University
The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts (via Cultural Japan)
The National Gallery, Prague
Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst, Köln
Victoria and Albert Museum There are nine prints from this series, Fifty-three Pairings for the Tōkaidō Road (Tōkaidō gojūsan tsui - 東海道五十三対), in the Lyon Collection. See also #s 382, 816, 819, 861, 951, 1022, 1095 and 1269.
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"Despite Kuniyoshi's love of cats, these creatures invariably play a very negative role in Japanese ghost stories. One reason that cats may have been held in such low esteem might be that in some versions recounting the death of the Buddha, they appear as the only animal not to weep. In Kuniyoshi's time it was widely believed that when a girl visited a temple after dark she ran the risk of being welcomed by a friendly old woman who would offer her a bed for the night. Once inside her house, the old woman would be transformed into a witch who would then kill and devour the poor girl. As cats frequently prowled around temples, it was assumed that the witch was a cat in human form.
The village of Okabe is remembered for the dark weathered cat-shaped stone located next to a small temple. People generally thought that a cat witch once haunted the temple grounds and that the ordeal for the villagers would not end until the cat witch had died and turned to stone. The Okabe story was adapted for the kabuki theatre... but the text at the top of this print also states that nobody knows the exact details of the tale."
Okabe is the 22nd post station on this road.
Illustrated and quoted from: Heroes and Ghosts: Japanese Prints by Kuniyoshi by Robert Schaap, p. 72.
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There are other copies of this print in the National Gallery, Prague, the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford.
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Illustrated:
1) in color in Kunisada's Tōkaidō: Riddles in Japanese Woodblock Prints by Andreas Marks, Hotei Publishing, 2013, page 104, #T78-22.
2) in color in The Art of Japan, China and Korea in Russian (Искусство Японии, Китая и Кореи) by Irina Novikova, 2017, p. 299.
3) in black and white in Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Springfield Museum of Art, 1980, #124.
4) in color in Tōkaidō Texts and Tales: Tōkaidō gojūsan tsui by Kuniyoshi, Hiroshige, and Kunisada, edited by Andreas Marks, University Press of Florida, 2015, pp. 29, 85 and 170.
5) in color in an online publication, 'Tōkaidō gojūsan tsui – Uma Série Japonesa na Coleção do Museu Calouste Gulbenkian' by Beatriz Quintais Dantas, master's thesis, p. 81, April, 2021. Also shown in a small color reproduction of the copy that is in the Gulbenkian Collection at #22. And in a full page color reproduction 'Anexo 66', a copy from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, page 34.
6) in color in the Catalogue of the Van Gogh Museum's Collection of Japanese Prints by Charlotte van Rappard-Boon, Willem van Gulik and Keiko van Bremen-Ito, 1991, p. 285, #415.
7) in black and white in 'A Remarkable Tōkaidō Set (2)' by Helmut Wilmes in Andon 60, September, 1998, fig. 1, p. 36.
8) in color in Japanese Yōkai and Other Supernatural Beings: Authentic Paintings and Prints of 100 Ghosts, Demons, Monsters and Magicians by Andreas Marks, Tuttle Publishing, 2023, p. 24.
9) in color in Heroes and Ghosts: Japanese Prints by Kuniyoshi by Robert Schaap, Hotei Publishing, 1998, page 72, no. 47.
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The original Tōkaidō was established by the Kamakura bakufu (1192-1333) to run from Kamakura to the imperial capital of Kyoto.
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The Tōkaidō gojūsan tsui: A collaborative work
Andreas Marks wrote in 'When two Utagawa masters get together. The artistic relationship between Hiroshige and Kunisada' in Andon 84, November 2008, pp. 37 and 39:
"The artistic relationship between Hiroshige and Kunisada entered a new period in 1845, when both artists were commissioned to contribute to the series Fifty-Three Pairs of the Tōkaidō (Tōkaidō gojūsan tsui). The Fifty-Three Pairs of the Tōkaidō is an example of a series where a number of artists were commissioned to contribute complete and individual designs under a specific theme. A few years before, the Kisokaidō series by Hiroshige and Eisen had been published with the same concept. This concept became quite common in the second half of the 1840s until the early 1850s, and sometimes the artists were supported by their disciples who drew inset cartouches.
The main contributor to the Fifty-three Pairs of the Tōkaidō was actually Kuniyoshi with 30 designs, followed by Hiroshige (21 designs), and Kunisada (eight designs)." This series of 59 ōban falls in a period when designers, actors, writers, and publishers had been imprisoned or expelled from Edo in the aftermath of the so-called Tenpō reforms (Tenpō no kaikaku). Only the joint effort of six different publishers made this series possible."
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Laura W. Allen wrote on pages 3-4 in 'An Artistic Collaboration: Traveling the Tōkaidō with Kuniyoshi, Hiroshige, and Kunisada' in Tōkaidō Texts and Tales: Tōkaidō gojūsan tsui by Kuniyoshi, Hiroshige, and Kunisada, edited by Andreas Marks: "Kuniyoshi was at his most prolific between the years 1842 and 1846, when by one estimate he designed "at least twelve hundred single sheets," many of them illustrating tales of heroism and bravery similar to the stories selected for the Tōkaidō Pairs. Such tales were also a staple of kabuki plays set along the Tōkaidō in the decades leading up to the Tōkaidō Pairs project, and Kuniyoshi's work provides a concrete link between the plays and the print medium. Some ten years before the Tōkaidō Pairs series was published, Kuniyoshi designed a print triptych based on a scene from a play titled Early Spring Plum Blossoms: The Fifty-Three Stations (Ume no haru gojūsan tsugi). The play, performed in 1835 at the Ichimura Theater in Edo, featured fifty-three "acts" in a "saga of the various traditions and stories connected with the post-stations of the Tōkaidō." Kuniyoshi's triptych dramatizes the tale of a frightening cat monster (bakeneko). The same story is taken up again in the print for Okabe... in the Tōkaidō Pairs, although a different Tōkaidō-themed play appears to be the source for that picture. Perhaps a seed for the Tōkaidō Pairs series was planted in Kuniyoshi's fertile mind when he created the cat monster triptych, but this is just speculation."
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The text reads on page 84: "蔦の細道神社平の上の方に猫石といふあり 古松六七株の陰に猫の臥たる形に似たる巨巌あり 其昔此所に一ツ家ありて 年ふる山猫老女に化し多くの人に害をなし人民を悩ませしに 天命逃れず終に死して其灵石と化すと世俗にそれを言つたへけれども 其絶詳らかならず"
The translation: "If you follow the ivy path above the level precinct of the shrine, you will find a stone called the Cat Stone (Nekoishi). This gigantic rock nestled behind six or seven old pine trees looks like a cat lying down. There was once a house in this very location where an old wildcat transformed itself into an old woman and harmed and tormented a lot of local people. However, the cat could not escape its own fate and died. People handed down by word of mouth the belief that the ghost of the cat turned into the stone, but there is no certain evidence for that."
The explanatory notes say: "The ivy road referred to here and extensively discussed in the Tōkaidō meisho zue is a narrow and dark pass, overgrown with ivy, about which Ariwara Narihira (825-880) wrote a poem cited in the Tales of Ise (Ise monogatari). The Tōkaidō meisho zue just briefly takes note of the Cat Stone, but the cat ghost described here was introduced later, in the kabuki play Traveling Alone alone along the Fifty-Three Stages (Hitori tabi gojūsan tsugi by Tsuruya Nanboku IV (1755-1829), performed in 1827. Act 2 features a Ghost at the Cat Stone of Mariko (Mariko Nekoishi no sei), a role also picked up by succeeding plays that focus on stories along the Tōkaidō."
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About the fan cartouches found at the top of each print in this series
Laura W. Allen wrote about these fan-shaped cartouches on page 9 in 'An Artistic Collaboration: Traveling the Tōkaidō with Kuniyoshi, Hiroshige, and Kunisada' in Tōkaidō Texts and Tales: Tōkaidō gojūsan tsui by Kuniyoshi, Hiroshige, and Kunisada: "At the outset someone decided that the publishers would promote their individual brands through the use of different-shaped cartouches... at the top of hte prints in the set: a bean shape (mame) for Ibaya Senzaburō (active 1810s to 1860s), a fan shape (ōgi) for Ibaya Kyūbei (active ca. 1804 to 1850s), two overlapped snowflake roundels (yukiwa) for Kojimaya Jūbei (active 1790s to 1860s), two overlapped round fans (uchiwa for Enshūya Matabei (active 1760s to early 1880s), a stylized shrimp (ebi for Ebiya Rinnosuke (active 1830s to 1890s), and a square (kaku for Iseya Ichiemon (active 1820s to 1860s). The six men were all former members of the fan makers' guild, and they worked in close proximity to each other, sharing or independently operating shops within the same Edo neighborhood, Nihonbashi Horiechō, all within the blocks designated as Itchōme and Nichōme. It was only the dissolution of the guild system during the Tenpō reforms that allowed other craftsmen, such as these former fan makers, to begin publishing single-sheet prints. The Tenpō reforms thus stimulated not only artistic change - in the development of new themes - but also social mobility, as the fan makers came to occupy new terrain with the publishing industry."
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Notice the subtle silhouette of the cat seen on the partial view of the lamp in the lower left near the cowering maiden. The orange color of the hag's outfit has oxidized somewhat.
Ibaya Kyūbei (伊場屋久兵衛) (publisher)
Yūrei-zu (幽霊図 - ghosts demons monsters and spirits) (genre)