Five Men Doing the Work of Ten Bodies (Gonin jushin no hataraki)

This 1861 color woodblock print ([nishiki-e](/glossary/nishiki-e)) in vertical ōban format, held by the Art Institute of Chicago (accession number 1926.1677, gift of Emily Crane Chadbourne), is one of the most celebrated examples of Utagawa Yoshifuji's signature visual-puzzle compositions and a defining work of the omocha-e (toy print) tradition for which he is best remembered. The title, "Gonin jūshin no hataraki," literally "the work of five men doing ten bodies," refers to the print's optical conceit: five entwined male figures have been arranged so that their combined arms, legs, and torsos suggest ten distinct workers, depending on how the viewer reads the composition. The print belongs to a long Japanese tradition of yose-e ("gathered pictures"), in which multiple figures combine into a larger image or in which a single image resolves on second viewing into many smaller ones. Yoshifuji designed numerous prints of this kind across his career, and the genre formed a substantial part of the imaginative repertoire of nineteenth-century Japanese children's prints. The print is dated to 1861, the third month, placing it at the height of Yoshifuji's productivity in the final years of the Tokugawa period, when the children's print market in Edo was at its most vigorous. The sheet is held in the Art Institute of Chicago's Japanese print collection and remains one of the canonical visual riddles of the mid-nineteenth-century [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) tradition.