Tanzi (Enshi), from the series "Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety in China (Morokoshi nijushiko)"

Tanzi (Enshi), an 1843 sheet from Utagawa Kuniyoshi's series Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety in China (Morokoshi nijushiko), illustrates one of the most pictorial of the classical Confucian tales. According to the legend, Tanzi's elderly parents required deer's milk for their ailing eyes, so the devoted son disguised himself in a deerskin and crept among a herd to collect it, narrowly escaping a hunter's arrow when he revealed himself just in time. Kuniyoshi seizes on the visual paradox at the center of the story: a human figure half-transformed into a beast, occupying the threshold between filial sacrifice and physical danger. The composition places Tanzi in close relation to the wild animal whose skin he wears, with the hunter's bow either present or implied at the edge of the scene. As an Edo ukiyo-e artist trained in the Utagawa school under Toyokuni I, Kuniyoshi adapted the same narrative tools he used for warrior prints, dynamic diagonals, exaggerated musculature, and patterned grounds, to bring this Chinese exemplar to life for Japanese audiences. The Morokoshi nijushiko series was published during the Tenpo Reforms, when censors discouraged frivolous subjects, and its didactic Confucian framework gave Kuniyoshi and his publisher a legitimate way to continue producing colorful figure prints in a constrained market. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this impression (artworks/149901). It complements the museum's deep holdings of Kuniyoshi musha-e and underscores how Edo print publishers used moral storytelling to keep ambitious multi-block color projects in circulation during a period of cultural retrenchment.