Death Of Minamoto Yoshitsune

The print stages the 1189 suicide of Minamoto no Yoshitsune at Koromogawa in northern Japan, where, betrayed by Fujiwara no Yasuhira and surrounded by enemy troops, he killed his wife and child before taking his own life. In Takeda's Saru series, the tragic hero of the Genpei War appears as a monkey, and the climactic scene of his death is rendered with the same satirical flattening applied to the rest of the cycle. The mokuhanga technique permits Takeda to compress the scene into bold silhouettes against simplified architectural and landscape elements, a graphic strategy closer to his cartooning roots than to the dense narrative plates of nineteenth-century [musha-e](/glossary/musha-e). The Kyoto-printed sheet uses traditional [washi](/glossary/washi), hand-mixed pigments, and [baren](/glossary/baren)-burnished impressions, lending the monkey-Yoshitsune a paradoxical dignity. Within the larger arc of the series, this print functions as the narrative conclusion to Yoshitsune's story, paralleling the death scenes that anchor classical Heike Monogatari illustration.