Mermaid Encounter at Sea, from Ihara Saikaku's Budō denraiki

An illustration by Yoshida Hambei from Ihara Saikaku's Budō denraiki (1687) showing the moment in one of the stories when boat passengers encounter a mermaid (ningyo) and one of the men aims a firearm at the creature. The ningyo - literally 'human fish' - was a recurring subject in Japanese folk belief and Edo-period popular literature, appearing as both an auspicious omen (eating the flesh of a ningyo was believed to confer immortality) and as a supernatural manifestation that threatened the order of the everyday world. The pictorial confrontation between a Tokugawa-era firearm and a legendary creature - the matchlock musket developed in Japan after Portuguese contact in 1543 had become a standard weapon by the late seventeenth century, and its appearance in this scene marks the encounter as a meeting of contemporary technology with the traditional supernatural - is one of the more arresting moments in Hambei's Saikaku illustrations. Saikaku's Budō denraiki used such moments to dramatise the place of martial readiness in everyday samurai conduct: even an unexpected encounter at sea required the warrior to assess threat and respond with measured violence. Hambei's illustration depicts the figures in the boat and the mermaid emerging from the water within a single horizontal compositional band, the curving boat hull and the figure of the mermaid balancing the right-hand third of the spread. The work is preserved in Wikimedia Commons in the public domain, taken from a complete digitisation of the 1687 first edition of Budō denraiki published by Okada Saburoemon.