Sanô Jirôzaemon murdering a courtesan

The print depicts the 1696 murder at the Yoshiwara pleasure quarter, in which Sano Jirōzaemon — a silk merchant from Sano in Shimotsuke province, disfigured by smallpox and rejected by the courtesan Yatsuhashi — killed her with the heirloom sword that later gave the kabuki dramatisation its title. The composition typically lays the courtesan across the picture plane in a heavy uchikake, her layered textiles printed in the dense, multi-block nishiki-e palette reserved for the depiction of high-ranking oiran; the Bijin-ga tag follows from this treatment of the victim's dress and bearing even as the subject is homicide. The image belongs to Eimei nijūhasshūku (Twenty-Eight Famous Murders with Verse), the 1866–67 series Yoshitoshi produced jointly with Ochiai Yoshiiku, each sheet pairing a notorious killing with a kyōka cartouche. Within Yoshitoshi's career it sits in the violent bakumatsu phase preceding the more restrained Meiji work of the 1880s.