Act Five: Yamazaki Highway from the play Kanadehon Chushingura

Katsukawa Shunei's print of Act Five: Yamazaki Highway from the play Kanadehon Chushingura, dated to around 1807, depicts the famous nighttime encounter on the Yamazaki highway between the disinherited samurai Hayano Kanpei, the hunter Yoichibei, and the bandit Sadakuro. The act is one of the cycle's most theatrically powerful, combining rural setting, sudden violence, and the moral degradation of Sadakuro into a single concentrated episode that audiences anticipated with particular eagerness. Working late in his career, Shunei here returns to the Chushingura material in a narrative mode rather than as single-actor portraiture. Although best known for his [yakusha-e](/glossary/yakusha-e) contributions to the Katsukawa school's dominance of late eighteenth-century Edo [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e), Shunei's narrative prints show his ability to adapt the school's draughtsmanship to action and landscape. The 1807 date places the print in the early nineteenth century, when the Katsukawa school's influence was being absorbed and reshaped by younger generations and rival lineages. The work thus stands as a late example of Shunei's continued productivity into a changing Edo print scene. It is preserved at the Art Institute of Chicago and documented at https://www.artic.edu/artworks/87455, where it joins the museum's broader holdings of Chushingura imagery from across the ukiyo-e tradition.