The Demon Gold (Konjiki yasha)

The Demon Gold (Konjiki yasha) is a 1893 print by Mizuno Toshikata held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession reference at metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/55187). The title Konjiki yasha refers to the famous novel by Ozaki Koyo, published serially in the Yomiuri Shimbun beginning in 1897 and later staged and filmed many times; however, the Met's 1893 dating implies that Toshikata's design predates Ozaki's novel and likely refers either to an earlier literary or theatrical source using the same evocative phrase, or that the catalog date should be reviewed. Either way, the subject — a 'gold demon,' or the personification of avarice — gave the artist an unusually rich opportunity for psychological characterization. As a Yoshitoshi student, Toshikata had absorbed his teacher's appetite for representing extreme states, and the topic of greed allowed him to bring that interest into a contemporary Meiji-period moral landscape in which the social rise of money was a recurring subject of literary anxiety. Among Mizuno Toshikata's literary illustrations, this print belongs with his other late-career kuchie and book-related work, where he extended ukiyo-e conventions into the new medium of the illustrated novel. The Met's accession record provides the firm provenance for the impression. For collectors, prints of this kind — drawn from contemporary fiction or theater rather than classical history — show how Meiji prints sat alongside, and contributed to, the rising fiction culture of the period.