Zeng Shen (So Shin), from the series "Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety in China (Morokoshi nijushiko)"

Zeng Shen (So Shin) is a sheet from Utagawa Kuniyoshi's 1843 Edo ukiyo-e series Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety in China (Morokoshi nijushiko), based on a Yuan-dynasty Confucian compendium that was widely circulated in Tokugawa Japan as a manual of moral instruction. Zeng Shen, a disciple of Confucius, is remembered for the legend in which he felt a sudden sharp pain in his finger while gathering firewood in the mountains, sensing immediately that his mother needed him at home; running back, he discovered that she had bitten her finger to summon him in the hope of greeting an arriving guest. Kuniyoshi distills this tale of telepathic filial attunement into a quietly active composition, often pairing the bent figure of the woodcutter with a glimpse of the distant home, so that the viewer reads the synchronous gestures across the page. As with his warrior prints, the artist relies on confident outline and richly patterned textiles to give weight to the figure, while subtle washes evoke the mountain setting. The Morokoshi nijushiko series, issued during the Tenpo Reforms, helped Kuniyoshi and his publisher continue making ambitious multi-color woodblock prints under censorship pressures that limited theater and pleasure-quarter subjects. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this impression (artworks/149905), placing it among the museum's important holdings of mid-nineteenth-century Japanese prints. The sheet shows how Kuniyoshi, often celebrated for ferocious samurai imagery, could also distill an interior moral drama into a single, legible visual moment in the Edo ukiyo-e idiom.