Kumawakamaru

Painted in 1907, when Kokei was twenty-four and still under the wing of Kajita Hanko at the Nihon Bijutsuin, Kumawakamaru takes its subject from the fourteenth-century Taiheiki war chronicle. The boy at the centre of the picture is Kumawakamaru (also read as Akushinmaru), the young son of Hino Suketomo, a courtier exiled to the island of Sado for his role in Emperor Go-Daigo's failed Genkō plot against the Hōjō shogunate; in revenge for his father's killing by the warden Honma Saburō, the child made his way through the warden's compound at night, stabbed him with a stolen blade, and escaped by climbing a bamboo stalk that bent under his weight and lowered him over the moat. Kokei chooses the most charged second of the narrative — the boy mid-step on the bamboo, body weightless and committed, a long sword at his hip, the dark moat below. The composition is built almost entirely from fine controlled line on silk in the manner of late-Edo historical painting, with colour limited to ground minerals on the costume and to the slow green of the bamboo. The work was a critical sensation at the time and is generally identified as the first painting in which Kokei's mature voice — gravely refined, archaising, deeply committed to drawing — can be heard intact. It belongs today to the Adachi Museum of Art in Yasugi, Shimane, and is one of the founding works of mature Taishō-period nihonga.