Sachi Monogatari (Tales of Fortune), Volume 1: Kaneko Tomiemon confronting a tanuki spirit

This 1819 woodblock-printed book illustration by Katsushika Hokumei appears in the first volume of Sachi Monogatari (Tales of Fortune, 幸物語), a Bunsei-era yomihon written by Ritsujōtei Kiran (栗杖亭鬼卵, 1744-1823) and published in Kyoto by Zuikindō. The page reproduced here depicts the samurai Kaneko Tomiemon (金子冨右衛門) in a moment of confrontation with a tanuki or other supernatural creature emerging from grass and rocks at the right, a scene rendered in the spare, energetic linework characteristic of the late Hokusai school's book-illustration practice. The image survives in Waseda University Library's holdings (call number 文庫18, he13 00876) and is accessible in digital form through Wikimedia Commons, where Waseda has released the full book under a public domain dedication. The Wikimedia metadata explicitly identifies the illustrator as 葛飾 北明 (Katsushika Hokumei), confirming her authorship of the figural designs in a yomihon collaboration with Ritsujōtei Kiran, one of the prolific late-Edo writers of moral tales. The illustration belongs to a category of work that constituted a major portion of Hokusai school output but is less studied than single-sheet prints: pupils of Hokusai routinely provided figural designs for the woodblock-printed books that supported much of the Edo publishing economy, and Hokumei's contribution to Sachi Monogatari documents her engagement with this central but undervalued strand of school activity. The yomihon format, dominated by text with periodic full-page or double-page illustrations, gave illustrators a different rhetorical task than the [surimono](/glossary/surimono): instead of a single autonomous image, the illustrator had to coordinate with the narrative across multiple chapters, sustaining character continuity and scene staging across the book. The Kaneko Tomiemon scene exemplifies this work, showing the figure in mid-action against an abbreviated landscape, a treatment that reads as both narratively legible and graphically self-sufficient. The book's preservation at Waseda and the release of the digital surrogate under open license make this one of the most accessible examples of Hokumei's book-illustration practice for current scholars.