Hungry Demon (Shuragaki)

This etching, numbered 4 of 50, is one sheet from Furusawa Iwami's Shuragaki (修羅餓鬼, The Hungry Demons of the Asura Realm) cycle, a corpus of thirty etchings developed across three decades from approximately 1963 to 1993 and published at the cycle's completion in 1993 as a boxed limited edition originally priced at ¥1,200,000. The cycle title combines two of the six realms of unenlightened rebirth in Buddhist cosmology — shura, the asura realm of perpetual warfare, and gaki, the realm of the hungry ghosts who can neither eat nor drink — to frame thirty closely observed, intaglio-bitten images of the violence and starvation Furusawa had witnessed as a soldier in northern China and as a prisoner of war between 1943 and 1946. The visual lineage is explicit: the cycle is widely understood as the Japanese twentieth-century parallel to Francisco Goya's Disasters of War (1810-1820), with which it shares a black-line documentary intensity and an iconography of bodies in extremity, and as a sibling project to the war-witness etching practice of Hamada Chimei (1917-2018). Furusawa worked the copperplate with the dense, scarred line he had developed across decades of intaglio practice, producing surfaces that register as much by their bitten textures of bite and tone as by drawn contour. The complete boxed cycle is exceedingly rare on the market in part because of the small edition size and in part because the emotional weight of the imagery has discouraged many collectors from acquiring all thirty sheets; single sheets such as this one provide accessible entry into one of the most substantial achievements of post-war Japanese intaglio. The print bears the standard Furusawa pencil signature and edition notation at the lower margin.