The Spirit of the Wine (Shuten Dōji), from Woodblock Print Supplements to the Complete Works of Chikamatsu

The Spirit of the Wine (Shuten Dōji) is a color woodblock print designed by Tamamura Hokuto around 1922-1923 as part of the Chikamatsu zenshū hanga furoku, a series of woodblock-print supplements commissioned to accompany the multi-volume Complete Works of Chikamatsu Monzaemon, the great Edo-period playwright of jōruri and kabuki. The print depicts Shuten Dōji, the wine-loving oni (demon) king of Mount Ōe whose defeat by Minamoto no Yorimitsu and his Four Heavenly Kings is one of the most famous tales of medieval Japanese folklore and a recurring subject of nō, kabuki, and ukiyo-e. Hokuto's design treats the demon-spirit motif with a flattened, stylized graphic vocabulary that reflects his contemporaneous engagement with European modernism and the Tokyo avant-garde groups Sanka and Tan'i Sanka. The block carving was executed by Yamagishi Kazue and the printing by Nishimura Kumakichi, two of the most accomplished craftsmen working on sōsaku hanga and limited-edition print projects in the 1920s. The print is one of Hokuto's most reproduced graphic works and a key document of how mid-1920s Tokyo print circles updated classical literary subjects with modernist design — Shuten Dōji as imagined by an artist who had moved from the Inten exhibition system into the Sanka avant-garde.