Lonely House on Adachi Moor

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi: picture of the lonely house on Adachi Moor, 1885.  Los Angeles County Museum of Art, credited to Herbert R. Cole Collection

M.84.31.138a-b

The print is finished on ôban diptych (74.3 x 25.7 cm).  Set up in an deserted (green leafs at the back), dilapidated (the grubby wall with holes) house, two female figures each occupying the top half and bottom half of the scene.  The young female was trussed up with a rope and lifted upside down from the beam.  Her mouth was covered, and her arms were bundled behind.  She is topless, only wearing red pants, so we could clearly see the pregnancy of the young woman from the print.  The hag, usually referred to an ugly, wizened old woman, wearing brown pants only as well, is sitting at the bottom, polishing a knife and viciously looking at the hanging young woman.  The contrasts between their body features also help diagonally split the scene.  The old hag’s flaccid breasts and wrinkled, yellowish-brown color skin, while the pregnant woman’s white skin which shows young and healthy.  

The lonely house on Adachi Moor is considered to be one of the most shocking designs by Yoshitoshi, also the most notorious.  This is particularly due to the adoption of pregnancy, which the Japan society at that period remained conservative towards.  Even though there’s no blood in this print at all, it makes people feel disturbing by the murder attempt behind.  The foreseen of a murder that is going to be committed reflects imagination of the blood that is about to come out.  “More than any other design by Yoshitoshi this print has always evoked repugnance, probably because of its combination of helplessness and total evil.”(Ing 1992, 50)  The total evil, and the sadism towards the young and the unborn, makes this print so controversial at the time that the Japanese authorities had to suppress it when it was first released.

“Yoshitoshi seems to have been haunted by death his whole artistic life. He was rattled by the passing of his father and his master as well as the fading of the old order in Japan, beginning in the 1860s, and the violence that followed.”(Gihring 2018)  Lonely House on Adachi Moor was finished seven years before Yoshitoshi passed away, and it is said that Yoshitoshi had serious mental illnesses later in his life.  Sometimes art is another reflection of one’s mental health condition.