Qin Ming (Shinmei)

Qin Ming (Shinmei), a surimono of 1822 by Yashima Gakutei in the Art Institute of Chicago, draws on the Chinese vernacular novel The Water Margin for its subject. Qin Ming, known in Japanese as Shinmei, is one of the 108 bandit-heroes of Liangshan Marsh; he is celebrated in the novel as a fiery, impulsive general nicknamed the Thunderbolt who wields a wolf-tooth cudgel. By the 1820s, Suikoden imagery had become a craze in Japan, fueled by Bakin's serialized novel and especially by Katsushika Hokusai's and Utagawa Kuniyoshi's print series, and surimono circles eagerly took up the cast of characters for their own kyoka-e. Gakutei, working in the Hokusai school under Hokusai himself, here adapts the heroic vocabulary of warrior prints to the more intimate surimono format: the figure stands in dramatic pose against a calibrated background, but the sheet is small, the paper thick, and the printing layered with blind embossing and burnished metallic accents that show off the genre's deluxe character. The kyoka verses that would have been printed alongside Qin Ming likely played his ferocity against the more reflective tone of contemporary Edo poetry. As a Yashima Gakutei surimono on a Suikoden subject, Qin Ming exemplifies how the kyoka-e tradition absorbed the most fashionable warrior iconography of the 1820s and refitted it for private literary use.