Killing One Thousand People at Gojo Bridge (Gojo no hashi sennin kiri), from the series "Scenes from the Life of Yoshitsune (Ushiwaka zue)"

This 1844 print by Utagawa Hiroshige illustrates one of the most celebrated episodes from the legend of Minamoto no Yoshitsune, the youthful warrior whose adolescent name was Ushiwakamaru. According to the medieval Heike-cycle narratives, Ushiwaka stationed himself at Kyoto's Gojo Bridge and dueled passing travelers in order to collect a thousand swords, the climactic encounter coming with the warrior monk Benkei. Hiroshige depicts the bridge under a moonlit sky, with the slender Ushiwaka leaping above a cluster of armored opponents in a swirl of weapons and robes. The print belongs to the series Scenes from the Life of Yoshitsune (Ushiwaka zue), a narrative cycle that gave Hiroshige an unusual opportunity to apply his landscape skills to historical and legendary subject matter. Though best remembered for Edo ukiyo-e landscape print designs, Hiroshige worked in many genres, and his treatment here characteristically embeds figure action within a carefully observed environment: the river beneath the bridge, the willow on the embankment, and the architectural detail of the bridge railing all anchor the legendary action in a recognizable Kyoto setting. The composition uses dramatic contrasts of light and dark and a tightly controlled palette to heighten the theatricality of the encounter. This impression is preserved in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, where it documents the breadth of Hiroshige's narrative imagination and the appetite of mid-nineteenth-century viewers for ukiyo-e renderings of the heroes of medieval Japanese history.