Tsuzoku Suikoden Goketsu Hyakuhachi-nin no Hitori (108 Heroes of 'The Water Margin' in Popular Translation)

This British Museum sheet, indexed through ukiyo-e.org, comes from Tsuzoku Suikoden Goketsu Hyakuhachi-nin no Hitori, the 108 Heroes of The Water Margin in Popular Translation. The series adapts characters from the Chinese vernacular novel Shuihu zhuan, whose Liangshan outlaws had been favorite subjects of Japanese printmakers since the early nineteenth century, most famously in Kuniyoshi's vast Suikoden cycle. Hashiguchi Goyo (1880-1921) is most often discussed in the context of the shin-hanga movement and his exacting bijin-ga, but his deep scholarly interest in earlier ukiyo-e led him to engage with warrior-print iconography as well. Trained at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts under Kuroda Seiki and active as a researcher of Harunobu, Utamaro, and other Edo masters, he brought both academic preparation and a historian's attention to attribute, costume, and pose when working in a heroic mode. The result in sheets of this kind is a print that reads as a respectful but disciplined modern restatement of an older formula rather than a pastiche. Goyo's later decision, beginning in 1915, to break with the standard publisher model and hire his own carvers and printers gave his mature bijin-ga their extraordinary technical polish. Looking back at Suikoden subjects such as this one clarifies how that polish was earned through long study of the print tradition. With only fourteen completed independent prints to his name, surviving sheets from earlier series like this offer valuable evidence of the practitioner who would soon transform shin-hanga's depiction of women.