Wood: Lu Zhishen (Moku, Rochishin), from the series "The Five Elements of The Water Margin (Suiko gogyo)"

This surimono by Totoya Hokkei comes from his series "The Five Elements of The Water Margin (Suiko gogyo)," produced around 1830 and pairing five heroes of the Chinese novel Shuihuzhuan (in Japanese, Suikoden) with the five elements of Chinese cosmology. This sheet depicts Lu Zhishen (in Japanese, Rochishin) corresponding to the element Wood (Moku). Lu Zhishen, known in the novel as the "Flowery Monk" for the tattoos that covered his body, became a monk after killing a butcher in defense of an oppressed girl, but his prodigious strength and love of wine made him a thoroughly unmonkish monk. He was famed for uprooting a willow tree barehanded, making the element Wood particularly fitting for his character. Hokkei renders the hero with the dramatic figural concentration characteristic of the Hokusai school. The Suikoden boom in early nineteenth-century Japan, sparked by translations and by his teacher Katsushika Hokusai's own influential illustrations of the novel, transformed these Chinese outlaw figures into popular icons of Edo culture. As a senior pupil of Hokusai, Totoya Hokkei specialized in surimono throughout his career. These privately commissioned deluxe prints were used by kyoka poetry clubs to mark seasonal occasions, combining striking imagery with kyoka comic verses on heavy paper enriched with metallic pigments and embossing. The Art Institute of Chicago, which preserves this impression, holds substantial strength in early nineteenth-century Japanese surimono. The technical refinements visible in the work, the careful figure drawing of the formidable monk, the embossed details on robes and weapons, and the metallic pigments, all reflect the heightened production standards characteristic of the surimono tradition.