Act Five: Yamazaki Highway from the play Chushingura (Treasury of the Forty-seven Loyal Retainers)

This print by Katsukawa Shunei depicts Act Five of Kanadehon Chushingura, the Treasury of the Forty-seven Loyal Retainers, set on the Yamazaki Highway. Act Five is one of the most beloved and dramatically tense scenes of the play. The retainer Hayano Kanpei, separated from his lord's circle, encounters in succession the bandit Sadakuro and the wild boar that crashes through the rainy night. The act is celebrated for its plein-air mise-en-scene and its abrupt shifts of register from rural pastoral to violent crime. Shunei composes the scene with several figures positioned along a winding road under a darkening sky, the storm rendered in passages of soft bokashi. The print belongs to a coordinated set of designs Shunei produced documenting the eleven acts of Chushingura, a project that played to the perennial Edo appetite for the loyal-retainers story and the Katsukawa school's strength in actor portraiture. Although traditionally classed among kabuki actor prints, scene-based Chushingura sheets like this one shifted emphasis from individual actor likeness toward stage tableau, anticipating later nineteenth-century narrative landscape prints. As Katsukawa Shunsho's principal pupil, Shunei was uniquely positioned to undertake the project, drawing both on the school's mastery of Edo yakusha-e and on his own developing interest in landscape composition. This impression is preserved in the Art Institute of Chicago among the museum's near-complete run of Shunei's Chushingura act prints.