The Battle at Yashima between Genji and Heike

The Battle at Yashima between Genji and Heike is a musha-e (warrior print) by Keisai Eisen drawn from the central conflict of the Genpei War (1180-1185). The battle of Yashima was fought in 1185 along the coast of Sanuki Province and is best known in Japanese literature for the scene in which the Minamoto archer Nasu no Yoichi, riding into the sea, shoots a fan held aloft on a Taira ship - an episode endlessly reillustrated by ukiyo-e designers. Eisen, though not primarily a musha-e specialist, contributed periodically to this genre and his Yashima sheet shows his command of the conventional vocabulary: galloping horses in the foreground, banners with the Minamoto sasarindo and the Taira ageha-cho crests, and the foreshortened drama of mounted samurai converging on the water. The image is reproduced from the ukiyo-e.org archive (Eisen Keisai, No Series, The Battle at Yashima between Genji and Heike). Such warrior prints reminded Edo audiences of the legitimating heroic past of the Minamoto - ancestors of the Tokugawa - and they sat comfortably alongside the bijin-ga and landscapes for which Eisen is more often remembered, demonstrating the breadth of subject matter that a working Edo ukiyo-e artist of the 1820s and 1830s was expected to handle.