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Description
A woman, slightly bent over, grasps her hair at the river's edge. Kiyohime was the daughter of an innkeeper at the village of Masago. Anchin was a devout monk at Dojo Temple on the banks of the Hidaka river. Each year Anchin stayed at Kiyohime's father's inn during his annual pilgrimage to Kumano Shrine. Each year the little girl to whom Anchin had been kind and given small presents grew older. One year (928), she suddenly declared a passionate love for him. Appalled, he explained that as a monk he could not possibly return her love. She insisted; he fled to his monastery. A few days later she set off in pursuit but was halted by the Hidaka river, which was in a flood. In the throes of her uncontrollable emotions, Kiyohime began to change into a serpent and swam over to the other side. Anchin tried to hide under the bronze temple bell, ten feet high and weighing many tons. Kiyohime, now completely transformed, found him and coiled herself around the bell. So intense was the heat of her fury that the huge bell melted, killing them both. The fifteenth-century emperor Go-Komatsu had this story recorded on scrolls, which are still preserved at the temple. The story forms the basis of the Noh play Dojo-ji, from which the Kabuki play Masume Dojo-ji, or The Maiden of Dojo Temple, was adapted in 1753. This includes a famous and still-popular dance in which Kiyohime's serpent-spirit attempts to damage a newly dedicated bell at the temple. In the print a partially transformed Kiyohime emerges dripping from the river. She wrings the water out of her hair, gripping it in a gesture of determination. Her back is bowed, and the patterns of her kimono suggest a serpent's scales. The falling cherry blossoms denote spring (the time of Anchin's pilgrimage) besides, as we have seen in the print of Sakurahime (5), the fragility of life. This is an almost exact reproduction of a design that Yoshitoshi drew at the beginning of his career for the series One Hundred Ghost Stories of Japan and China, dating from 1865. It is significant that both his first and last major series were devoted to supernatural themes. There was always a good deal of borrowing of design ideas and subject matter among print artists in Japan, and it was not unusual for an artist to draw on his own earlier work. In this later design, Kiyohime's robes are more scaly, the figure more bent, and a moon obscured by stormy black clouds has been introduced - but the warped passion of the young girl remains. (Stevenson, John. Thirty-Six Ghosts. Hong Kong: Blue Tiger Books, 1992.)
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