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 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. 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.