Genpei No. 5 - Invasion of the Southern Capital

Genpei No. 5 takes its subject from the Taira assault on Nara in late 1180, when Taira no Shigehira's forces sacked the southern capital and burned Todai-ji and Kofuku-ji, an act of destruction that the Heike chroniclers treated as the karmic seed of the clan's later defeat. Takeda translates the episode into a graphic image of fire, mounted warriors, and temple silhouettes, the burning structures rendered in the same flat saturated reds the artist uses for Taira banners elsewhere in the series. The mokuhanga technique is handled with a poster-like economy: keyblock outlining defines every figure, and color is applied in unmodulated fields rather than in the layered [nishiki-e](/glossary/nishiki-e) gradations associated with nineteenth-century historical prints. Within the Genpei cycle the sheet functions as a moral prologue, establishing the violence the Taira will later be made to answer for at Ichi-no-tani and Dan-no-ura. The choice to include the sack of Nara at all reflects Takeda's interest in the war's full chronicle rather than only its battlefield highlights.