The Monkey King Songokū, from the Chinese novel Journey to the West

Yashima Gakutei depicted the Monkey King Songokū in 1824, drawing his subject from the great Chinese vernacular novel Journey to the West (Xiyouji), which by the early nineteenth century had a sizeable Japanese readership through translation and adaptation. The print is preserved at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Songokū — known in Chinese as Sun Wukong — appears in the trickster guise that delighted East Asian audiences for centuries. Gakutei renders him in his distinctive monkey attributes, often shown wielding his iron staff and adopting an alert, agile posture. The figure occupies the sheet with characteristic dynamism, while the surimono's restrained color palette and accents of metallic pigment emphasize the mythical, almost talismanic quality of the hero.

Gakutei studied design in the Hokusai school under Totoya Hokkei, and the print reflects Katsushika Hokusai's broader interest in Chinese fiction and folklore. Hokusai illustrated tales from Suikoden and other Chinese sources, and his followers, including Gakutei, continued to mine that material for Edo audiences. Surimono provided a particularly congenial format because the privately commissioned medium encouraged literary cross-references that flattered the cosmopolitan tastes of kyōka poetry clubs.

The Metropolitan's example exhibits the impeccable craftsmanship typical of high-quality surimono: precise color registration, embossing, and selective use of metallic inks. Such prints were often paired with verses that played on the qualities of the hero, in this case Songokū's irrepressible cleverness, supernatural transformations, and journey alongside the monk Tripitaka. Yashima Gakutei's contribution to this iconography exemplifies how Hokusai school designers used the surimono format to translate Chinese narrative culture into a refined Japanese visual idiom prized by Edo connoisseurs.