Inada Kyūzō Shinsuke

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi: Inada Kyūzō Shinsuke: woman suspended from rope, 1867, from the series, '28 Famous Murders with Verse' (1866 - 1867).  Museum purchase, Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts Endowment Fund    1986.1.86

Stories from the series ‘28 Famous Murders with Verse’ were once told in the kabuki play.  This print shows Yoshitoshi’s repetitive use of the scene hanging female body from the ceiling, along with Shibari and the ongoing torture and murder.  The female figure was suspended, the rope binded her all the way from her wrists to the ankles.  Wearing only pants, the woman’s upper body is naked, her other clothes seem to be on the ground behind the male figure on the right.  There is a huge wound on her butt, and there’s blood everywhere on her body and it’s still bleeding onto the ground.  From the woman’s facial expressions, the opened mouth and the struggling eyes, we could tell she is suffering from this torture.  The male figure is implementing this torture with his sword holding on his right hand.  His left hand is cinched with the bottom corner of his cloth.  The man looks enraged, it seems he was taking his revenge instead of purely trying to murder the woman.  The bloody effect in this print is also distinctive, featuring “orange” instead of the traditional “red” that we know of.  It makes this print more gruesome, and harder to stomach visually in a way.

Shibari, or Rope Binding, is an exclusive Japanese culture about the tensions between body (softness) and rope (hard and restrained).  Rope bondage was used as a punishment during the Edo period, later becoming stylized in kabuki play during the early 20th century.

Traditional Japanese prints first appeared as illustrations in books, images were served for texts.  As those images developed and popularized among the public, they derived themselves from the books and formed into an independent art print genre, the ukiyo-e.  Since then, the roles reversed, texts on ukiyo-e help narrate the images for the purpose of storytelling and spreading information.  The text at the top translates as follows:

Once a flower so proud in high spring

Now so sorrowful in autumn, the moon at Oi

The sound of an iron rod breaks the dream of a long night

The wind blows hard in the grasses on this evil day.

A dish of salmon cut in reverse is crimson

A kitchen knife cuts up a melon in mockery 

A requiem of the chopping-board by a henchman's hatred

It happened in a country house in Oyajuku. (Ing 1992, 40)