Oshichi and Kichisaburô in Hototogisu Yumeji no Koi, from an untitled series of jôruri libretti

This print depicts Oshichi and Kichisaburo, the doomed young lovers of the Hototogisu Yumeji no Koi episode, from an untitled series of joruri libretti designed by Takehisa Yumeji. Oshichi, the so-called Greengrocer's Daughter, is one of the most enduring figures in Edo-period popular drama: her real-life arson and execution in 1683 inspired generations of kabuki, bunraku, and ukiyo-e treatments, while Kichisaburo, the temple page she loved, became a stock image of fragile beauty. Yumeji reimagines this classical material through the lens of Taisho roman, replacing the bravura theatricality of nineteenth-century actor prints with the softer, more interior mode he had developed for his modern Japanese bijin compositions. The figures are slender, almost weightless, their elongated necks and slanting eyes typical of yumeji-shiki style, and the staging is closer to a poetic illustration than to a stage portrait. By aligning his series with joruri libretti, Yumeji situates himself within a long tradition of woodblock artists who designed printed booklets and frontispieces for narrative music drama, while signaling his own departure from that lineage through a graphic vocabulary indebted to Art Nouveau and Symbolist illustration. Held in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and recorded on ukiyo-e.org, the print exemplifies how Yumeji used a familiar literary subject to build a bridge between classical Japanese narrative and the literary-romantic mood of 1910s and 1920s Tokyo, making it a strong choice for collectors who want to see how Taisho-era artists rethought Edo legend.