100

  • Actor Iwai Hanshirô VI as Rikijiro̅'s Wife Hikite

  • 1852
  • Utagawa Kunisada II (Toyokuni IV) (1823-1880), carved by Shoji
  • Color woodblcok print, vertical ôban, from the series From the Tales of the Eight Dog Heroes (Hakkenden Inu no soshi no uchi) published by Tsutaya Kichizo̅;
  • 35.6 x 24.7 cm., 14-1/16 x 9-3/4" image
  • Augustana College Art Collection, 1982.17

Essay by Mari Nagase, Associate Professor of Asian Languages

The woman holding a torch in the dark woods is Hikute, a beautiful, chaste, brave young widow of a samurai. She lives with her sister Hitoyo and her mother-in-law Otone in the mountains, hiding, to assist the grand scheme of the heroes in the story of The Eight Dog Chronicles (Nanso̅ Satomi Hakkenden).

The Eight Dog Chronicles, the popular historical novel of 106 volumes, was periodically published between 1814 and 1842. It was written by Takizawa Bakin (1767-1848), a famous fiction-writer of early-modern Japan. The novel is an adventurous story of eight samurai heroes who are mysteriously born from Fusehime, a daughter of the Satomi clan, who is impregnated by a dog's spirit. Though the eight heroes are raised in different places, a supernatural force gathers them and together they assist the Satomi clan to reestablish the household. Each hero represents a Confucian moral, and the story is full of virtuous and courageous men and women, as well as violence and gore.

The novel was an instant success and remains as one of the most influential literary works in Japanese society. In the early 19th century, different authors contemporaneously adapted the novel in different media. Some adapted the novel for Kabuki theaters; some published the abridged versions adding illustrations; some ukiyo-e masters made prints highlighting certain scenes and characters. In more recent times, the novel has been adapted into movies, TV dramas, manga, anime, and video games.

The ukiyo-e portrait of Hikute that Augustana possesses is one of the fifty prints included in a set of ukiyo-e portraits entitled From the Tales of the Eight Dog Heroes (Hakkenden Inu no so̅shi no uchi). The set was created by a famous ukiyo-e master Utagawa Kunisada II and printed by a successful publisher Tsutaya Kichizo̅ in 1852. The commercial success of the ukiyo-e set was assured not only by the big names of the artist and the publisher and the popularity of the novel, but also by the fact that Kunisada II incorporated likenesses of popular Kabuki actors into the portraits of the Hakkenden characters. The portrait of Hikute is, for example, also a portrait of the Kabuki actor Iwai Hanshiro̅. Ukiyo-e prints were cherished by both the prospering townsmen in the city of Edo and the visitors from the countryside alike. Later when Japan opened its ports to the West, the prints proved to be an attractive souvenir from Japan. Having bid farewell to the other forty-nine characters, Hikute, a supporting female character from the Hakkenden, journeyed to Augustana in 1982 with her story.