Height: 31.70 centimetres

Width: 1655 centimetres

Clark 1992

The artist of this scroll, one 'Amano, ninth-generation Tachibana Sei'ei' of whom nothing else can be ascertained at present, explains that this is an old story of a jealous woman, which has been reworked in modern fashion by Kuniyoshi and then copied by himself, with a few additions to the text, over a period of almost fourteen years from 1849 to 1862 while living in Honjo. Certainly in several scenes the painting of the face of the woman protagonist is very close to Kuniyoshi's style of drawing beauties.

The eighteen painted scenes and minutely written text tell a story of increasing horror concerning the life and grisly death of a travelling actress, Okume. She specialises in roles of male heroes and is often called upon to act gorily realistic scenes of suicide and death, involving extensive use of fake blood in her makeup. Life comes to imitate art, however, when she becomes pregnant and is tortured to induce a miscarriage by a sinister woman referred to simply as 'the jealous wife'. When this fails, Okume is forced to commit suicide by ritual disembowelment and the hag stabs the unborn child. Her body is then shown in various stages of decomposition.

A taste for sadism and bloody murder is apparent in quite a significant segment of late Edo fiction, popular imagery and theatre, starting perhaps with the 'yomihon' of Bakin and Hokusai. Kuniyoshi's prints of the Hag of Hitotsuya and his pupils Yoshitoshi and Yoshiiku's series of 1867 on twenty-eight famous murders,' Eimei niju-hachi shuku', must be among some of the most horrific, if aestheticised, images ever produced. Most societies have a taste for such brutality, and the Ukiyo-e artists' exploration of such areas, though undoubtedly following that public taste, also had the concomitant result of extending the expressive range of their work.

Literature: Anderson, William, 'Descriptive and Historical Catalogue of Japanese and Chinese Paintings in the British Museum'. London, Trustees of the British Museum, 1886, no. 1767.