January 2026 ukiyo-e delivery

One of these days I should do an ‘unboxing’ video but I actually tend to unbox deliveries in a few stages because the process can be quite lengthy. You have to plough your way through all the box wrapping, then through the inner lining and you get your first glipse of the individually wrapped prints. They are usually either in a folder/wrap and backed with a thick piece of card and inside another plastic bag or layer of bubble wrap. My main interest at this point is to discard as much wrapping as possible and just inspect the prints to check for condition. At a later stage I take each print, photograph them and put them into their individual archival paper folders and then move into longterm storage.

Yakusha-e triptychs

Yakusha-e triptychs are always the main focus of my collection and recently I have been just trying to buy images that stand out or particularly appeal to me – ones with unique compositional elements or things that just take my fancy.

I loved the colours in this one and it turns out to be one of the more interesting modern “cropped-hair plays” called “Ningen Banji Kane no Yo no Naka” (人間万事金世中, “In This World, Money Is Everything”), which in turn was based on a Western play called “Money” by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. It was first performed at the Shintomi-za on 18 March 1879.

and this one just intrigued me from the combination of Chinese-dressed characters and someone jumping through purple smoke … ? It’s not in great condition but it’s the only time I have seen this image.

Luckily it is listed on the Tokyo Metro Library site and is mentioned in this article. The title seems at least close to “Ki-ma-boshi and the Deer Flute of Hakone” (木間星箱根鹿笛, Ki-ma-boshi Hakone no Shikabue). I have a similarly named print which seemed to translate slightly differently so I need to investigate that later.

and the rest …

One of my favourite trick pictures by Chikayoshi

Trick pictures (komochi-e) are normal prints with additional elements pasted over the base image, usually revealing different faces. This image is from the play “The Snow-Bound Barrier of Love”, performed in 1879. More information here.

This is actually the left hand page of a diptych which looks like this

But this copy (also in my collection) is missing the “trick” elements – the extra faces pasted over each other.

Kunichika: “Okige no Kumo Harau Asagochi” (“The Morning East Wind Clearing the Clouds of the Southwest“, 西南雲晴朝東風)

As frequent readers of my blog will be aware, one of my collecting passions is for the prints relating to this particular kabuki play. So I was particularly excited to find this volume of an ehon (illustrated book) of the story. Sadly it was only the second volume but I’ll be on the lookout for the first volume in future searches 🙂

The eagle-eyed among you might also have spotted that this batch also includes 2 triptychs from the same play. I really need to update my page on this play since I acquired several more of the prints.