Surprise Attack upon Hiyodorinoe

The image depicts the celebrated military maneuver at Ichi-no-Tani in 1184, when Yoshitsune led a small cavalry detachment down the near-vertical Hiyodorigoe cliff to fall on the Heike encampment from the rear — one of the most frequently illustrated episodes in Japanese battle prints. Takeda's monkey-warriors descend the slope on monkey-mounts, and the dramatic diagonal that organized Kuniyoshi's and Yoshitoshi's treatments of the same subject is preserved in his mokuhanga composition. The cutting concentrates on the rhythmic repetition of plunging bodies, with bokashi gradations on the cliff face providing depth without naturalistic shading. Printed in Kyoto by Tadashi Toda using traditional sumi keyblock and successive color blocks on washi, the sheet treats one of the touchstones of medieval Japanese military lore as comic spectacle. Within the Saru series, the Hiyodorigoe scene exemplifies Takeda's strategy of importing the most heroic moments of the Genpei War wholesale and undercutting them by sheer substitution of subject.