The Battles of Coxinga, Newly Published, a Triptych (Shinpan Kokusenya kassen sanmai tsuzuki)

This Museum of Fine Arts triptych by Sadatora, titled Shinpan Kokusenya kassen sanmai tsuzuki ('The Battles of Coxinga, Newly Published, in Three Sheets'), draws on one of the most enduring narrative cycles in the late-Edo theatrical and printmaking imagination: the saga of Coxinga (Zheng Chenggong, 1624-1662), the Ming loyalist general of mixed Chinese and Japanese parentage who waged the long resistance against the Manchu Qing conquest in seventeenth-century southern China. Coxinga's biography had been transformed into one of the most influential works of Japanese puppet theater (jōruri) by Chikamatsu Monzaemon in his 1715 masterpiece Kokusen'ya kassen (The Battles of Coxinga), which became a foundational text of the Edo theatrical canon and provided a recurring subject for ukiyo-e from the eighteenth century onward. Sadatora's triptych belongs to the warrior-print (musha-e) genre that experienced a major commercial expansion during the 1830s under Kuniyoshi's influence, but the 'Newly Published' designation in the title suggests it was issued to capitalize on a specific contemporary kabuki revival of the Chikamatsu material. The three-sheet horizontal format allowed for the elaborate battle composition that the Coxinga cycle demanded, with armored warriors, exotic Chinese setting, and the kind of dynamic figural arrangement that the Utagawa school was developing in parallel with Kuniyoshi's Suikoden series of the early 1830s. The MFA example documents Sadatora's engagement with the warrior genre and contributes to the broader picture of late-Edo musha-e production beyond the dominant Kuniyoshi workshop.