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Description
In the top panel two bats, one carrying an umbrella and a scarf and the other two swords, parody Act V from the play Chushingura, the murder of Yoichibei by Sadakuro during a thunderstorm. In the lower half, the monk Anchin hides in a bell to escape the attentions of the woman Kiyohime. A samurai in armor wearing a long sword (katana) and dagger (tanto) sits to the left, and a man holding a banner peeks around the edge of the bell while a red demon looks down from the top. Yoshitoshi shared the ambivalence of Meiji intellectuals fascinated by the West but profoundly nostalgic for much of what western culture was destroying. His caricatures of modern life could be very funny, but his concern was not to document change, the focus of most other print artists of the period. He wanted to transmit the quality of old Edo culture to a world that was being transformed. He saw himself as the last of a breed of popular ukiyo-e artists, doomed to vanish along with the culture he felt it was his destiny to depict. (Ref. John Stevenson, ""Yoshitoshi's Women,"" p.9)
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