Training Of Ushiwakamaru

Takeda's monkey-version of the celebrated legend in which the young Minamoto no Yoshitsune, then known as Ushiwakamaru, is trained in swordsmanship by the tengu of Mount Kurama. The subject has a long history in Japanese print culture, treated by Yoshitoshi and Kuniyoshi as a heroic [musha-e](/glossary/musha-e) set piece of leaping bodies and pine-darkened mountainsides. Takeda, working in mokuhanga with Kyoto printer Tadashi Toda, replaces the boy-hero with a small monkey and his tengu instructor with an equally absurd primate counterpart, flattening the legend's mythic register into something closer to a children's storybook. The cutting is deliberately graphic, with strong contour lines reserved on the keyblock and broad fields of unmodulated color built up in successive impressions on [washi](/glossary/washi). The print belongs to the Saru series of the late 1980s, in which Takeda systematically retold the Genpei cycle through monkeys, drawing on his early training as a satirical cartoonist and his Tama Art University background in sculptural form.