There were forty-seven Ronin. Why, then, do forty-eight tomb-stones stand beneath the cedars at Sengakuji? Truly the answer has caused tears to fall from the eyes of many a visiting pilgrim, for the forty-eighth tomb holds the body of the Satsuma man, who in an agony of grief and remorse ended his life, and was buried beside the hero, whose body he had scornfully trampled upon in the streets of sacred Kyoto.
This history of the Forty-seven Ronin is an epitome of Japanese ethics, for in it is exemplified their feudal devotion, their severe code of honour, their distorted vision of duty and fealty to a superior, justifying the most lawless acts. Thus the conduct of Kuranosuki during his wild year of reckless abandonment, in which he threw off all moral restraint in order to deceive his enemy, breaking the heart of his faithful and devoted wife, was considered by his countrymen meritorious and a proof of his devotion. The Ukiyo-ye artists, who loved to take for models the beautiful denizens of the “Under World,” chose this obsession of Kuranosuki as the subject for many of their illustrations, so that at a first glance the series might almost be mistaken for scenes from the life of the Yoshiwara.
Here and there, however, we come across the Ronin engaged in terrific conflict with Kotsuki-no-Suke’s retainers. Cruel and bloodthirsty are the blades of their relentless katanas, which once unsheathed must be slaked in human blood, and their garments, slashed into stiletto-like points of inky blackness, forming a chevaux de frise round their fierce faces, seem scintillant with the spirit of vendetta.
In examining the sets of impressions, illustrating the popular story, it is hard to give preference to any special artist: to choose between the Utamaro-like violets and greens of Yeisen; the rich dark tints and fine backgrounds of Kunisada; the delicately massed detail of Toyokuni, unlike the usual boldness of his style, and the varied sword-play of the versatile Hiroshige, set in a frosted, snowy landscape. Hokusai, who abjured theatrical subjects after breaking away from the tutelage of Shunsho, published a series of prints illustrating the famous vendetta, but as his great-grandfather had been a retainer of Kotsuki-no-Suke, losing his life during the midnight attack, the story formed part of his ancestral history. The series is signed Kako, and the sweeping lines and contours of the female figures show the Kiyonaga influence. Yellow preponderates, outlining the buildings and long interior vistas, and the impressions are framed with a singular convention of Hokusai at that period, drifting cloud effects in delicate pink. Utamaro also illustrated the story, substituting for the Ronin the forms of women, a favourite conceit of the artist of beauty.
This digression in favour of the masters of the Popular School has carried us over a hundred years, and we must return to the close of the seventeenth century. Moronobu illustrated the carnival of Genroku, but toward the end of the century, under the domination of a Shogun who combined the qualities of extravagance and profligacy with the delirious superstition of a Louis the Eleventh, a period of unbridled license set in. The military men, who were the nation’s models, forgot their fine traditions and fell from their estate, so that the latter manners and customs of Genroku became a by-word. Then followed a puritanical reaction. Under the eighth Shogun, the knights were restricted from attending the theatre, just coming into favour, and the looser haunts of pleasure were strictly under ban. The Ukiyo-ye print, being the medium for illustrating these joys and pleasures, forbidden to the great, but still indulged in by the people, was strictly condemned, and to this day the aristocracy of Japan accord but grudging and unwilling recognition to the merits of the masters of Ukiyo-ye, the old caste prejudice still blinding their artistic sense.
At this stage Ukiyo-ye broke into rival schools, the founders of both belonging to the academy of Hishigawa Moronobu. The leader of the first, the school of painting, was Miyagawa Choshun, who in order to preserve aristocratic patronage and praise, eschewed the use of the printing-block, still taking his subjects from the “floating world,” and so being in one sense at unity with the other branch, that of printing founded by Kiyonobu, the first master of the great Torii School. As the Print artists are our subject matter we cannot follow the other branch of Ukiyo-ye, founded by Miyagawa Choshun, but leaving the atelier of the painters, we must devote ourselves to the fortunes of the Torii School, the laboratory of the Ukiyo-ye print, working parallel with the pictorial school for the first half of the eighteenth century.
The first sheets of Kiyonobu (about 1710), the founder of the Torii School, were printed in ink from a single block. Part of the edition would be issued in this uncoloured form, the rest being coloured by hand. The colours most used were olive and orange, these prints being called Tan-ye, whilst those in ink were named Sumi-ye. Urishi-ye (lacquer pictures), was the generic term for hand-painted prints. Beni-ye (literally red pictures), followed the Urishi-ye. They were printed in two tones, rose and pale green, enforced by black, a harmony exquisite in delicacy. The use of the multiple colour blocks gave rise to the title Nishiki-ye, or brocade paintings. The national mania for the stage induced Kiyonobu and his followers to take for their subjects popular actors, and the theatrical poster may be said to date from the decade following Genroku.
Later in the century the process of colour-printing by the substitution of blocks for flat colours was gradually evolved, and to no special artist or engraver can the credit be given, for all contributed to its development, though the genius of Suzuki Harunobu drew to a focus in 1765 the achievements of his brother artists, and it was he who solved the problem of uniting the skill of the engraver with the full palette of Miyagawa Choshun and his follower Shunsui, thus uniting the two branches of Ukiyo-ye art.
The Popular School, however, is bound up with print development. Japanese book illustration and single-sheet printing revolutionized the world’s art. The great connoisseurs of colour tell us that nowhere else is anything like it, so rich and so full, that a print comes to have every quality of a complete painting.
The other leaders of the Torii School were Torii Kiyomasu and Okumura Masanobu, namesake of the great founder of Kano, who must not be confounded with the later artist of the same name, belonging to the school of Kitao. Masanobu deserves special mention, for his style being chiefly pictorial, and his subjects not confined to the stage, he formed a link between the painter’s atelier and his own.