Widow and Widower (Futari yamome)

Widow and Widower (二人寡婦, futari yamome) is an 1899 [kuchi-e](/glossary/kuchi-e) woodblock-print frontispiece by Takeuchi Keishū, designed for volume 5, issue 14 of Bungei kurabu (文藝倶楽部), the Hakubunkan literary magazine that anchored late Meiji literary culture. It is held by the Honolulu Museum of Art (accession 27973); a closely related Met copy is also held under accession JP3286. The title refers to a literary subject of bereaved spouses meeting and forming a new bond, a motif common in late Meiji popular fiction's treatment of contemporary domestic and emotional life. Keishū's design, characteristic of his approach to kuchi-e at the end of the 1890s, places two figures in a domestic interior scene rendered with the precise drawing of costume, hairstyle, and accessory that the format demanded and that his training under Tsukioka Yoshitoshi had instilled. The soft mineral palette, multi-block color printing, and restrained graduated washes used for the print were the standard repertoire of Tokyo kuchi-e production in this period, and the print survives in good condition in the Honolulu set, a relatively complete record of late Meiji Bungei kurabu frontispieces assembled by James A. Michener and others and now central to the museum's collection of Japanese illustrated periodicals. Keishū's work in this period — alongside that of Kaburagi Kiyokata, Mizuno Toshikata, and Tomioka Eisen — established the kuchi-e as one of the most distinctive Japanese visual idioms of the late nineteenth century.