Lu Ji (Riku Seki), from the series "Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety in China (Morokoshi nijushiko)"

Lu Ji (Riku Seki) belongs to Utagawa Kuniyoshi's 1843 series Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety in China (Morokoshi nijushiko), a sequence of Edo ukiyo-e prints that translated a venerable Confucian moral compendium into vivid color woodblock images. Although Kuniyoshi is best remembered for warrior prints, this series shows how his narrative imagination extended naturally from battlefield heroics to the equally dramatic small-scale acts of devotion celebrated in Chinese tradition. Lu Ji, a young boy from the Three Kingdoms period, is famous for the story in which, having been given tangerines at a banquet, he secretly tucked two into his sleeve to bring home for his mother; when the fruit fell out and he was questioned, his answer revealed his quiet, instinctive filial love. Kuniyoshi composes the scene around this moment of charged exposure, focusing on the child's body language, the fall of his robes, and the surprised gaze of the adult host. The Chinese setting is rendered through architectural detail and patterned fabrics handled with the same care Kuniyoshi brought to musha-e samurai imagery, and the figure work has the firm contour drawing and bold drapery that distinguished his Utagawa training. Issued during the Tenpo Reforms, when shogunal censors restricted overt depictions of contemporary actors and courtesans, the Morokoshi nijushiko series gave artists and publishers a virtuous Chinese subject that satisfied the bakufu while still allowing colorful character studies. The print is held in the Art Institute of Chicago (artworks/149904), part of its substantial Kuniyoshi holdings, and it represents the artist's ability to balance moral instruction with the theatrical visual energy that defines mid-nineteenth-century Edo ukiyo-e.