Menju Katsusuke and Yamada Shosuke, from the series Newly Selected Records of the Taikō Hideyoshi (Shinsen Taikōki)

This 1883 print by Utagawa Toyonobu, held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (accession sc186222, object 254990), depicts the confrontation between Menju Katsusuke (Ietera) and Yamada Shōsuke within the Shinsen Taikōki. Menju Ietera was a retainer of Shibata Katsuie who famously died at the 1583 Battle of Shizugatake while defending his lord with valor that became one of the celebrated samurai narratives of the late Sengoku period, and his self-sacrifice is part of the dense tapestry of personal heroism the Shinsen Taikōki wove into its panoramic Hideyoshi biography. Toyonobu's composition uses the two-figure confrontation format characteristic of his Shinsen Taikōki contributions, with the antagonists tightly framed and rendered in the bright aniline reds and purples of the Meiji color register. The print exemplifies the way the series functioned as both historical narrative and gallery of celebrated samurai virtue: each sheet picks out a specific moment from the Sengoku unification corpus and stages it as a discrete dramatic scene for the Meiji popular audience.