The Military Tales of Han and Chu: Fan Kuai of the Han

The Military Tales of Han and Chu: Fan Kuai of the Han, an 1825 Edo ukiyo-e by Utagawa Kunisada in the Cleveland Museum of Art, is a musha-e (warrior print) drawing on the Chinese historical narrative of the founding of the Han dynasty. Fan Kuai was a brigadier of the future emperor Liu Bang and figures in the canonical episode of the Banquet at Hong Gate, where he forced his way into Xiang Yu's tent to defend his lord. Kunisada's warrior prints are less numerous than those of his Utagawa-school colleague Kuniyoshi, who would soon dominate the musha-e market with his Suikoden series, but his Bunsei-era contributions show that he engaged with the genre when commissions allowed. The figure in this print is rendered with broad shoulders and a powerful stance, dressed in approximated Chinese armor and grasping a weapon, with calligraphic identification of the role inset in a cartouche. The 1825 dating places the print just before the great Suikoden boom of 1827-30, suggesting that Kunisada was already participating in the Edo audience's appetite for Chinese historical heroism. Stylistically the print sits between his early bijinga and the mature actor portraiture that would soon define his career, and its survival in Cleveland offers a relatively rare opportunity to study Kunisada's handling of the warrior subject. The print also documents the wider Japanese fascination with Han-Chu narratives, which fed into both kabuki dramatizations and the popular illustrated histories that were a staple of Edo publishing.