Joriken riding his sword across water, section of a sheet from an untitled harimaze series

This 1858 fragment in the Art Institute of Chicago, a section of a sheet from an untitled harimaze series by Utagawa Toyokuni, depicts the legendary figure Joriken (Chinese: Zhang Yong) riding his sword across water, a feat drawn from the East Asian repertoire of Daoist immortals and martial legend. The harimaze format, in which multiple unrelated small compositions were printed on a single sheet for collectors to cut apart and rearrange, was a popular late Edo ukiyo-e marketing strategy that increased the value of a single print impression by giving the buyer several distinct images for the price of one. Toyokuni's contribution to this harimaze sheet shows the Utagawa workshop's flexibility, deploying the same compositional discipline that anchored their yakusha-e portraits in the much smaller format of a harimaze cell. The Joriken legend belongs to the broader cultural traffic between Chinese and Japanese imaginative traditions that Edo ukiyo-e drew on constantly, supplying subjects that ranged from kabuki to ghost stories to immortal lore. The figure's dynamic pose, sword rendered as a precarious surf board, and rippling water articulate the magical core of the story in a few confidently drawn lines. As a dated 1858 sheet, the work falls in the very late Edo period, just before the political transformation of the next decade. For researchers studying the harimaze format and the wider visual reach of the Utagawa school, this section is a small but particularly rewarding example of Utagawa Toyokuni's late practice.