Complete Works of Chikamatsu: The Heroine Yugiri (Dai Chikamatsu zenshu furoku mokuhan: 'Yugiri Awa no Naruto' no Yugiri)

The Heroine Yugiri is a woodblock print by Shima Seien produced as a furoku mokuhan (supplementary woodblock illustration) for the Dai Chikamatsu zenshu, the Complete Works of Chikamatsu published in the Taisho period. Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1725) is one of the towering figures of Japanese dramatic literature, and his Yugiri Awa no Naruto centres on the courtesan Yugiri of the Ogiya house in Osaka's Shimabara, whose tragic romance with the merchant Fujiya Izaemon became one of the most beloved love stories of the puppet and kabuki stage. As a Taisho-Showa woodblock artist working at the intersection of literary scholarship and traditional printmaking, Shima Seien gave this canonical heroine a measured bijin-ga treatment, modelling her not as a stage actor in role but as a literary archetype whose elegance and pathos belong to the world of classical fiction. The print exemplifies how Taisho-period publishing houses harnessed traditional hanga production - cherry-wood carving, hand-burnished colour blocks, and washi paper - to give scholarly editions of pre-modern Japanese literature an authentically inflected visual companion piece, rather than turning to photo-mechanical reproduction. The impression catalogued here is held in the Scholten Japanese Art reference set on ukiyo-e.org (record 266f0acad4904088df6cef635767e506), which preserves a reference image and the print's bilingual title; the specific date, edition number, and printer of this particular furoku impression are not asserted in that source and are not invented here. The work demonstrates Seien's role within the early-twentieth-century revival of bijin-ga as a vehicle for engaging with Japan's classical theatrical heritage.