The greedy woman leaving the three sparrows

The print illustrates an episode from "Shita-kiri Suzume" (The Tongue-Cut Sparrow), a Japanese folktale in which a kindly old man's pet sparrow is maimed by his greedy wife; when the woman later visits the sparrows' bamboo grove and chooses the larger of two offered baskets, she finds it filled with monsters and snakes rather than treasure. Yoshitoshi shows the greedy woman departing the sparrows' realm, the moment before her punishment is revealed — a composition that exploits [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e)'s narrative economy by suspending the moral outcome at its sharpest dramatic point. The print likely employs the greens and vermilion of late-Meiji [nishiki-e](/glossary/nishiki-e) for the bamboo forest, while the woman's strained posture under the basket's weight introduces the comic-grotesque physicality characteristic of Yoshitoshi's folktale subjects. Moralising folk-narrative prints of this kind fit the educational frame of his late series, in which children's tales were elevated to instructive imagery alongside historical episodes. The subject also draws on a long tradition of comic monster prints (bakemono-e), to which Yoshitoshi contributed through works such as the "New Forms of Thirty-Six Ghosts" series.