Tengu Dance

Tengu Dance, dated 1898 and held in the Victoria and Albert Museum, draws on the long iconographic tradition of the tengu, the long-nosed and beaked mountain spirits of Japanese folklore. The subject was associated with martial training, with Yoshitsune's apprenticeship on Mount Kurama, and with the figure of Hojo Takatoki, whose legendary dance with tengu Migita Toshihide treated repeatedly. Toshihide, a Yoshitoshi student, had absorbed his teacher's interest in supernatural subjects pushed into vivid action, and Meiji prints in this idiom retained an audience well into the late 1890s. The V and A's record places the print in the late phase between Toshihide's Sino-Japanese War output and his Russo-Japanese subjects of the following decade, when he had room to return to legendary material. The composition typically arranges the dancing tengu in a circle or arc around a central human figure, the contrast between feathered and beaked masks and the courtly costume of the human protagonist providing the design's visual interest. Toshihide's draughtsmanship handles the rapid foreshortening of multiple bodies in motion, a problem his battle prints had taught him to solve. The print belongs to the strand of his output that engaged classical and folkloric subjects rather than current events, and its presence in a major museum collection underscores its quality among Meiji prints of this period.