The Illustrated Tale of Oishi Hyōroku (1700s): Art, History and Details

The Illustrated Tale of Oishi Hyōroku (1700s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This incomplete handscroll illustrates part of the story of Oishi Hyoroku, a young man tasked with battling fox apparitions who were creating problems in his town. In other extant versions of the scroll, the story is set in the fall of 1624 in Kagoshima in southern Japan. Throughout the story, Hyoroku is tricked and terrified by the foxes that shift their shapes into a variety of monstrous phantoms. After repeated humiliations, he eventually captures two of the foxes. In this version, colloquial texts that function like text blurbs in comics appear throughout the scroll, but the main text is missing.

Object facts

• Title: The Illustrated Tale of Oishi Hyōroku
• Date: 1700s
• Culture: Japan, Edo period (1615–1868)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: handscroll; ink and color on paper
• Dimensions: Overall: 25.7 x 977.4 cm (10 1/8 x 384 13/16 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Handscroll
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1983.80

Collection credit

Edward L. Whittemore Fund

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.