Samurai Disguised as Monks Playing Music in a Boat, from Ihara Saikaku's Budō denraiki

Yoshida Hambei's illustration of two samurai disguised as Buddhist monks playing music in a small boat is from Ihara Saikaku's Budō denraiki (Transmission of the Martial Arts), the 1687 collection of thirty-two short stories on samurai loyalty, revenge, and male love. The Budō denraiki tales drew on real historical incidents and on the period's florid imaginative literature alike, presenting samurai conduct in narrative form for an urban readership that no longer had direct experience of the martial life. Hambei's illustration depicts the moment in one of the stories in which the protagonists, disguised as monks and concealing their identity by means of the religious robes that would not have been questioned by the lord's retainers, approach a hermitage where their lord is undertaking ascetic religious training. The koto strings on which they play in the boat are intended to lure the lord from his meditation. The composition is set against a stylised landscape of pine trees on rocky outcrops, the foreground figures rendered with the supple contour line that Hambei had developed across his collaboration with Saikaku, and the background suggested by sparse vertical brush strokes representing reeds and rushes. Budō denraiki is one of the four or five most important works of the late seventeenth-century ukiyo-zōshi literary movement, and Hambei's illustrations across its eight volumes constitute one of the foundational visual records of late-Edo samurai narrative. The illustration is preserved in Wikimedia Commons in the public domain, taken from a complete digitisation of the 1687 first edition.