Guo Ju (Kaku Kyo), from the series "Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety in China (Morokoshi nijushiko)"

Guo Ju (Kaku Kyo), from Utagawa Kuniyoshi's 1843 series Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety in China (Morokoshi nijushiko), illustrates one of the most morally fraught stories in the traditional Chinese compendium of filial exemplars. According to the standard account, the poor Guo Ju and his wife found that their child was consuming food that should have gone to Guo Ju's elderly mother, and they decided to bury the child rather than allow his mother to go hungry. When Guo Ju began digging the grave, however, he uncovered a pot of gold inscribed as a heavenly reward for his filial piety, allowing him to provide for both his mother and his child. The story became one of the iconic instances in which filial devotion is rewarded by miraculous intervention. Although the moral logic is uncomfortable to many modern readers, the narrative was a fixture of the Twenty-four Paragons cycle and was widely transmitted in Tokugawa Japan as instructional material. Kuniyoshi, the master of warrior prints, here turns his draftsmanship to a domestic but supernaturally charged subject, typically depicting the moment of revelation when the pot of gold is unearthed. As Edo ukiyo-e of the late Tenpo era, the print uses nishiki-e color woodblock techniques. This impression is preserved in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, documenting Kuniyoshi's contribution to the transmission of Chinese moral narrative in Edo print culture.