"Rosei's Dream"

This print illustrates the Chinese tale of Lu Sheng (Rosei in Japanese), a young man who falls asleep at an inn while waiting for millet to cook and dreams an entire lifetime—wealth, family, official rank, and death—only to wake and find the millet still not ready. The story, drawn from Tang dynasty literature and long popular in Japanese art and theater, became a recurring subject for Meiji artists exploring themes of the illusory nature of worldly ambition. Gekko's composition likely shows the dreaming figure in a recumbent pose with dream imagery—perhaps a palatial interior or symbolic cloud forms—appearing above or around him. The format may juxtapose the humble inn setting with the grandeur of the dreamed life using overlapping or nested compositional planes. This second version suggests Gekko returned to the subject more than once, exploring different aspects of the narrative or compositional approaches to depicting the dream state.