Wu Meng (Go Mo), from the series "Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety in China (Morokoshi nijushiko)"

Wu Meng (Go Mo), from Utagawa Kuniyoshi's 1843 series Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety in China (Morokoshi nijushiko), illustrates one of the most often-recited stories from the traditional Chinese compendium of filial exemplars. The boy Wu Meng, only eight years old and from a poor family that could not afford mosquito nets, would lie naked beside his parents at night so that the mosquitoes would feed on him and spare them. The story exemplifies the Confucian principle that filial devotion expresses itself in willing physical sacrifice, and the image of a young boy beset by insects to protect his sleeping parents became one of the iconic visual identifiers of the Twenty-four Paragons cycle. Kuniyoshi's nishiki-e composition follows the standard iconography, often setting Wu Meng in a domestic interior with the parents asleep nearby. Although Kuniyoshi is best known for warrior prints, his series of Chinese moral subjects reflects the broad cultural prestige of Confucian learning in late Edo Japan and the widespread use of the Twenty-four Paragons as instructional material. As Edo ukiyo-e of the late Tenpo era, the print employs color woodblock printing with characteristic attention to figure pose, costume detail, and domestic setting. The didactic function of the series is integrated with the visual pleasure of Kuniyoshi's draftsmanship. This impression is preserved in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, documenting the transmission of Chinese moral narrative through nineteenth-century Japanese popular print culture.