Fearless Tomoe

The second of Takeda's two Saru series prints devoted to Tomoe Gozen, Kiso Yoshinaka's female retainer celebrated in the Heike Monogatari for her martial skill at the Battle of Awazu. Where the companion sheet isolates a single emblematic action, this version reworks the subject from a different angle — a strategy Takeda used elsewhere in the series to revisit pivotal figures from shifting compositional vantages. The print is mokuhanga on washi, executed with the traditional carving-and-printing workflow but designed in the flat, contour-driven idiom Takeda developed during his earlier career as a cartoonist and illustrator. The simian rendering of Tomoe sits inside a long iconographic lineage of warrior portraits while deflating it: the monkey is both warrior and joke. The doubling of Tomoe within the series — against the Heike narrative's overwhelmingly male cast — registers an editorial choice consistent with the satirist who won the Bungei-Shunju Cartoon Award in 1976.