The print belongs to Eimei nijūhasshūku (Twenty-Eight Famous Murders with Verse, 1866–67), the series Yoshitoshi produced jointly with Ochiai Yoshiiku in which each sheet illustrates a notorious historical or theatrical killing accompanied by a kyōka verse cartouche. The episode treats the murder of the young woman Umegae at the hands of the priest Dainin, a subject drawn from the circulated repertoire of jōruri and kabuki tragedies in which a transgressing cleric figures as a stock motif of moral inversion. The Murders series is technically distinguished by heavy use of beni pigment for blood, in some impressions glossed with nikawa animal glue so that the printed surface read as physically wet. Within Yoshitoshi's biography it is read as a response to the disorder of the bakumatsu years that culminated in the Boshin War of 1868–69, and as the work in which his graphic vocabulary for violence was first formed.
1888
Color woodblock print; oban
n.d.
Color woodblock print
Kamakura Daibutsu
1930
Color woodblock print
1950
Color woodblock print
大仏
Woodblock print
1926
Color woodblock print; oban
Picture of the priest Dainin killing the girl Umegae was created by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (月岡芳年).
Picture of the priest Dainin killing the girl Umegae depicts religious and children.