Mark Of the fan

Part of Takeda's Saru series, which retells the Heike Monogatari with the warring clans rendered as monkeys. The title refers to the celebrated incident at the Battle of Yashima (1185) when the Minamoto archer Nasu no Yoichi shot down a fan mounted on a Taira ship's mast as a target. Takeda compresses this episode into a graphic emblem, the fan motif functioning as both narrative shorthand and compositional anchor. The mokuhanga technique here departs from Edo-period nishiki-e in palette and line, leaning on flat color fields and the cartoonist's contour drawing that Takeda developed during his early career as a satirist. Following his 1976 Bungei-Shunju Cartoon Award, Takeda increasingly translated his graphic vocabulary into woodblock, working with carvers and printers in the traditional Kyoto workshop system while inserting his own irreverent iconography. The Saru series, produced from the late 1970s onward, is the most sustained example of this hybrid practice, using washi and water-based pigments to render a thoroughly contemporary visual joke.