Farce of the lions at stone bridge.

This print adapts the subject of Shakkyō (Stone Bridge), a classical Noh drama in which a Buddhist monk witnesses divine lion spirits dancing on a stone bridge at Mount Qingliang in China, into a comic or satirical register. Kiyochika was an active political caricaturist for publications including the Marumaru Chinbun during the 1880s and 1890s, and this work likely belongs to that strand of his output rather than to his atmospheric landscape prints. The term 'farce' in the title signals a deliberate lowering of the classical material: the sacred lions of the Noh tradition are subjected to parody, possibly through the substitution of recognizable contemporary figures or through exaggerated movement and grotesque physiognomy characteristic of comic woodblock prints. Such prints engaged with a sophisticated audience familiar with the original Noh and Kabuki versions of the Shakkyō story, deriving humor from the gap between the elevated source and its deflated treatment. Line work in comic prints prioritizes clarity and expressive distortion over the tonal subtlety of Kiyochika's landscape work.