Satō Masakiyo Hunting the Magic Two-Tailed Tiger (Satō Masakiyo no tora-gari no zu)

This 1860 triptych by Utagawa Kunitsuna I, recorded in the Art of Japan dealer inventory (item 09134385), depicts Satō Masakiyo — better known in popular legend as Katō Kiyomasa, the celebrated late-sixteenth-century daimyo and general of Toyotomi Hideyoshi — hunting the magic two-tailed tiger (myōkohaku) during his campaign on the Korean peninsula. The tiger-hunting episode was one of the most enduring legends attached to Kiyomasa: the story, drawn from the Toyotomi-era Korean campaigns, recounted his single-handed combat with a giant tiger that threatened his camp, an event that became emblematic of his fearless martial character and that supplied Edo-period popular literature, kabuki, and ukiyo-e with a recurring narrative subject.

The convention of naming Kiyomasa as 'Masakiyo' in late-Edo musha-e responded to Tokugawa-era restrictions on the direct depiction of historical samurai of the immediately preceding centuries: a transposed name allowed printmakers to depict recognizable historical episodes while nominally avoiding state censorship. Kunitsuna's triptych participates in this Bakumatsu-era tradition of disguised historical reference, alongside the work of contemporaries such as Kuniyoshi, Yoshitora, and Kunisada II.

The triptych format, the heroic single-combat subject, and the 1860 publication date together place the print at the apex of the late-Edo musha-e revival, in which the Utagawa school's warrior compositions reached their highest level of dramatic intensity. Kunitsuna's handling of the tiger-hunt episode draws on the well-established compositional repertoire that Kuniyoshi had established in his Suikoden warrior prints of the previous generation, while contributing to the broader Bakumatsu visual response to the destabilizing political moment of the late 1850s and 1860s.