Chitase Goyo 智多星吴用 (Wu Yong) / Tsuzoku Suikoden goketsu hyakuhachinin no hitori 通俗水滸傳濠傑百八人一個 (One of the 108 Heroes of the Popular Water Margin)

This print depicts Chitase Goyo, the Chinese hero Wu Yong known as the Star of Wisdom, drawn from the series Tsuzoku Suikoden goketsu hyakuhachinin no hitori, One of the 108 Heroes of the Popular Water Margin. Held in the British Museum and surfaced via ukiyo-e.org, the design participates in a long lineage of Japanese print interpretations of the Chinese vernacular novel Shuihu zhuan, whose violent and resourceful outlaws became enduringly popular through Bakin's translation and Hokusai's and Kuniyoshi's earlier serializations. Hashiguchi Goyo (1880-1921) is best known today as a bijin-ga master of the shin-hanga movement, but his deep grounding in classical ukiyo-e history made him a thoughtful interpreter of warrior subjects as well. Educated at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts under Kuroda Seiki and later steeped in research on Harunobu and Utamaro, Goyo brought scholarly attentiveness to figural design, costume, and historical attribute. In this sheet the hero is identified by his characteristic accoutrements; the composition trusts the viewer to read posture and emblem rather than narrative landscape. The series participates in the Meiji and Taisho appetite for revisiting the Suikoden cycle while filtering it through modern printmaking sensibilities. For Goyo, who would later break with publisher Watanabe Shozaburo to oversee his own carving and printing, projects of this kind documented a working interest in older ukiyo-e formulas that informed the precision of his later shin-hanga production. The print is a useful counterpoint to his more famous depictions of women at the bath, showing the breadth of his early engagement with the woodblock tradition.