from the series Illustrated Tale of the Soga Brothers (Soga monogatari zue)

A sheet from the series Illustrated Tale of the Soga Brothers (Soga monogatari zue) belongs to one of Utagawa Hiroshige's incursions into narrative subject matter, illustrating episodes from the medieval revenge saga of the Soga Brothers. The story of Soga Goro and Soga Juro, who avenged the murder of their father against the powerful Kudo Suketsune in 1193 at the foot of Mount Fuji, was one of the most beloved narratives of premodern Japan, sustained on the kabuki stage and through countless print series. Hiroshige's contribution to the genre uses the same pictorial discipline he had honed on his celebrated landscape designs: figures are scaled carefully within their settings, the natural ground is given equal weight with the human action, and the palette is restrained so that the drama emerges through composition rather than through chromatic excess. The Harvard Art Museums sheet from the Soga monogatari zue series demonstrates that Hiroshige could carry narrative within the same pictorial vocabulary that made his Edo ukiyo-e landscape print work so celebrated. For collectors most familiar with the Tokaido and Edo meisho designs, the Soga series offers a useful complement, showing the artist working in the historical-tale genre that was a staple of nineteenth-century ukiyo-e production.