Title unknown [Michiyuki]

"Michiyuki" — the lovers' journey, a standard scene in Kabuki and puppet theater in which two figures walk toward their shared fate — appears in this Taisho-era composition from Yumeji's "Title unknown" group of prints at the Boston Museum. The michiyuki tradition gave Yumeji a theatrical framework for his deepest preoccupation: the impossible love that ends in death, the beauty of a feeling so intense it cannot survive contact with the world. His michiyuki prints translate the theatrical convention into the intimate scale of his own visual language.