Shiranui, Minamoto-no-Tametomo's wife, taking revenge on Mutota,

Drawn from Takizawa Bakin's early-nineteenth-century novel Chinsetsu yumiharizuki (Strange Tales of the Crescent Moon), this print stages Shiranui-hime, the warrior-wife of the exiled Heian archer Minamoto no Tametomo, in the act of taking revenge on the villain Mutota. Bakin's epic supplied Yoshitoshi with several of his recurring subjects — armoured women, supernatural reversals, island settings — and is a key source for the artist's lifelong interest in female protagonists who act outside the conventions of classical [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga). The composition hinges on a single arrested gesture: weapon raised or just-struck, Shiranui's robes carrying the sweeping line that Yoshitoshi favoured for revenge scenes, with [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradations heightening the implied violence. Like much of his [musha-e](/glossary/musha-e), the design draws on kabuki staging conventions for posture and costume, translating the theatre's visual rhetoric into the concentrated rectangle of the ōban sheet.