The Heroine Yûgiri, from the Chikamatsu play Yûgiri Awa no Naruto (published in The Complete Works of Chikamatsu [Dai Chikamatsu zenshû]), Taishô period, published 1923

This Harvard Art Museums impression preserves Shima Seien's Taisho-period woodblock portrait of the heroine Yugiri from Chikamatsu Monzaemon's puppet play Yugiri Awa no Naruto, published in 1923 as part of the Dai Chikamatsu zenshu (Complete Works of Chikamatsu). The Yugiri narrative, which sets the celebrated Osaka courtesan against the social pressures bearing down on her merchant lover Fujiya Izaemon, was among the most influential love-suicide and tragic-romance stories in the joruri (puppet) and kabuki repertoires; by the early twentieth century, scholarly publishers were assembling complete editions of Chikamatsu's works as part of a wider Taisho-era project of canonising pre-modern Japanese literature. Shima Seien, a Taisho-Showa woodblock artist working primarily in bijin-ga, supplied a furoku mokuhan - a supplementary woodblock illustration - in which Yugiri is realised as an iconic figure rather than as a stage performer in a specific scene, costumed and posed to evoke the literary character's grace and sorrow. The print exemplifies how shin-hanga era bijin-ga drew on both classical ukiyo-e prototypes and the more psychologically modulated figural drawing of Taisho painting. The Harvard impression (Arthur M. Sackler Museum / Harvard Art Museums, object HUAM-CARP07179, as referenced via ukiyo-e.org) carries the dating 1923 and the descriptive metadata for the print's publication context. Block-cutter, printer, edition size, and any pencil annotations on the present sheet are not stated in the source record consulted here and are therefore not asserted; the description draws only on the museum cataloguing already attached to the image.