Sakura Sôgorô taking leave of his family

The print shows the seventeenth-century peasant headman [Sakura](/glossary/sakura) Sōgorō parting from his wife and children before travelling to Edo to lodge a direct appeal to the shogun against the punitive levies imposed on his Shimōsa village — an act of jikiso for which Sōgorō and his family were executed in 1653. Yoshitoshi frames the farewell as a domestic-scale tragedy, in compositions of this kind placing the figures inside a thatched cottage with the children clustered at the parents' knees. The cherry blossoms cited in the tag operate on two registers: as the literal toponym of Sakura village and as the customary emblem of mortality folded into so much Edo-period narrative. The story had circulated through bunraku and kabuki for more than two centuries by the time Yoshitoshi took it up, and the design belongs to his sustained 1870s–80s interest in subjects of moral martyrdom rather than the celebrity actors and bijin of earlier [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) generations.