“Act II, Scene 2: Along Train Tracks in America,” from the series The Strange Tale of the Castaways: A Western Kabuki
by Adachi Ginkō
- Date:
- 1879
- Medium:
- Woodblock print (nishiki-e); ink and color on paper; vertical ōban
- Source:
by Adachi Ginkō
This 1879 vertical ōban nishiki-e, held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is from Adachi Ginkō's imaginative series 'The Strange Tale of the Castaways: A Western Kabuki,' which dramatizes the experiences of Japanese travelers abroad through the visual conventions of kabuki theatre. The sheet stages 'Act II, Scene 2' along American railroad tracks, with figures posed as if on a kabuki stage but set against an unmistakably Western landscape of telegraph poles, steam locomotives, and frontier terrain. The hybrid is striking: kabuki posing, costume, and color logic wrap around a recognizably American scene, producing a print that is simultaneously theatrical and ethnographic. The series belongs to the broader Meiji-era genre of kaika-e (enlightenment prints) and provides one of the period's most distinctive treatments of Japanese encounter with the modern West. As a documentary source, the print captures how the American railroad, an icon of nineteenth-century industrial modernity, entered the Japanese popular imagination, and how kabuki conventions were mobilized to make the foreign legible to a Tokyo audience. It is part of the Metropolitan Museum's collection of Meiji woodblock prints.
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“Act II, Scene 2: Along Train Tracks in America,” from the series The Strange Tale of the Castaways: A Western Kabuki was created by Adachi Ginkō (安達吟光) in 1879.
“Act II, Scene 2: Along Train Tracks in America,” from the series The Strange Tale of the Castaways: A Western Kabuki depicts rain.