The Story of the Intrepid Incomparable Cleaning Husband Trio

The first of three 2010 prints featuring a trio of husbands engaged in domestic cleaning — a subject Takeda treats with mock-heroic seriousness, the title's piled-up adjectives ("intrepid," "incomparable") sending up the conventions of advertising copy and self-help literature. The composition arranges the three figures across a shallow apartment interior, with vacuum cleaners, mops, or rags worked through a dense aquatint ground that lets domestic bric-a-brac emerge as silhouettes within graduated tone. The intaglio process — etched line for the figures' contours, aquatint for the rooms behind them — produces the specific grainy grey field that allows objects to read as half-conscious presences. The trio framing positions the husbands as a comic ensemble, drawing on the pairing logic of manzai comedy while relocating it inside the postwar apartment. The print is part of a small sequence that also includes "Outrageous" and "Perfectly Flawless" variants from the same year, each titled as a separate but related story.