Eight Dogs, or "Hakkenden": Part Two—His Master's Blade

By Kyokutei Bakin

Kyokutei Bakin's Nansō Satomi Hakkenden is one of the monuments of Japanese literature. This multigenerational samurai saga was one of the most popular and influential books of the nineteenth century and has been adapted many times into film, television, fiction, and comics.

His Master's Blade, the second part of Hakkenden, begins the story of the eight Dog Warriors created from the mystic union between Princess Fuse and the dog Yatsufusa and born into eight different samurai families in fifteenth-century Japan. The first is Inuzuka Shino, orphaned descendent of proud warriors. Left with nothing save a magical sword and the bead that marks him as a Dog Warrior, young Shino escapes his evil aunt and uncle and sets out to restore his family name. Unaware of their karmic bond, Shino and the other Dog Warriors are drawn into a world of vendettas and quests, gallants, and rogues, as each strives to learn his true nature and find his place in the eight-man fraternity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell East Asia Series
• Release date: Feb 15, 2024
• ISBN: 9781501773914

Book preview

Eight Dogs, or Hakkenden

Part Two—His Master’s Blade

Chapters XV through XXXVIII of Nansō Satomi hakkenden by Kyokutei Bakin

Translated by

Glynne Walley

Cornell East Asia Series

An imprint of

Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

Contents

List of Illustrations

Translator’s Introduction

Volume II, Continued

Chapter XV

Chapter XVI

Chapter XVII

Chapter XVIII

Chapter XIX

Chapter XX

Colophon

Volume III

Covers and Endpaper

Preface

Table of Contents

Frontispieces

Chapter XXI

Chapter XXII

Chapter XXIII

Chapter XXIV

Chapter XXV

Chapter XXVI

Chapter XXVII

Chapter XXVIII

Chapter XXIX

Chapter XXX

Colophon

Volume IV

Covers and Endpaper

Preface

Table of Contents

Frontispieces

Chapter XXXI

Chapter XXXII

Chapter XXXIII

Chapter XXXIV

Chapter XXXV

Chapter XXXVI

Chapter XXXVII

Chapter XXXVIII

Colophon

Appendix: Characters in Eight Dogs, Chapters I–XXXVIII

Illustrations

Translator’s Introduction

Bakin’s draft of the endpaper for Volume IV

Bakin’s draft of the second frontispiece for Volume IV

Bakin’s draft of the first frontispiece for Volume IV

Bakin’s draft of the illustration for Chapter XXXI

Volume II, continued

Chapter XV illustration Bansaku rewards his enemies and takes his lords’ and father’s heads into hiding.

Chapter XVI illustration I Lodged in a mountain cloister, Bansaku suspects Tatsuka.

Chapter XVI illustration II At Metal-Monkey Barrow, Tatsuka sets eyes on the Divine Lady.

Chapter XVII illustration The dog / his master knows, / since, sadly, / there is no one else at all / to sympathize with him.

Chapter XVIII illustration I Chasing a she-cat, Kijirō ventures onto Nukasuke’s rooftop.

Chapter XVIII illustration II Hikiroku thanks his menials for carrying out his errand of resentment.

Chapter XIX illustration I In the night, Bansaku delivers his final teaching to his son and gives him the longsword Rainmaker.

Chapter XIX illustration II Having decided to commit suicide, Shino kills Yoshirō.

Chapter XX illustration A small child of seven loses his mother on a journey.

Colophon Seals of Kyokutei Bakin and Yanagawa Shigenobu

Volume III

The covers of Hakkenden, Volume III

Endpaper/title page

Preface to the Lives of the Eight Dog Warriors, Collection III seals of Kyokutei Bakin

Frontispiece 1

Frontispiece 2

Frontispiece 3

Chapter XXI Illustration I Kamezasa arrives at the Inuzuka residence, Gakuzō in tow.

Chapter XXI Illustration II The green plum’s / fragrance far outgraces / its flowers

Chapter XXII Illustration I The Toshima family battles the three generals of the Overseers’ Houses at Ikebukuro.

Chapter XXII Illustration II Though ne’er more blow / the wintry wind / when thee I see / I’m stripped of words / like leaves from shamefaced trees

Chapter XXIII Illustration I Nukasuke’s confession: A desperate traveler, clutching an infant, prepares to throw himself from a bridge.

Chapter XXIII Illustration II Hikiroku entertains the authorities by arranging for risqué songs.

Chapter XXIV Illustration Hikiroku falls into the Kaniwa River, as part of his painstaking plan.

Chapter XXV Illustration I ’Tis its cries / make parting bitter— / O for a place / where no cock is heard / at break of day

Chapter XXV Illustration II A child’s sense of filial piety enshrines the soul of a traveler.

Chapter XXVI Illustration Hikiroku persuades Hamaji by a display of suicide.

Chapter XXVII Illustration I Displaying his fervor for nirvana, Jakumaku immolates himself in a crematory pit.

Chapter XXVII Illustration II On a dark night before a mountain, four rogues meet in battle.

>Chapter XXVIII Illustration A famous sword and the life and death of a beautiful woman; an encounter between loyalty and integrity.

Bunkeidō version of Chapter XXVIII Illustration.

Chapter XXIX Illustration I Redeemed / and vested in the grass: / the bead of dew

Chapter XXIX Illustration II Hidden evil is recompensed: Hikiroku and Kamezasa die violently.

Chapter XXIX Illustration III On the night of his homecoming, he kills his enemy without planning to.

Chapter XXX Illustration On his lord’s orders, Kenpachi tries to capture Shino.

Colophon Seals of Kyokutei Bakin, Chigata Nakamichi, Yanagawa Shigenobu.

Volume IV

The covers of Hakkenden, Volume IV

Endpaper/title page

Preface to the Lives of the Eight Dogs, Collection IV Seals of Kyokutei Bakin

Frontispiece 1

Frontispiece 2

Frontispiece 3

Frontispiece 4

Chapter XXXI Illustration Felled by / a well-beaten drum: / one paulownia leaf

Bunkeidō version of Chapter XXXI Illustration.

Chapter XXXII Illustration I The gallant Kobungo crushes Inuta.

Chapter XXXII Illustration II The two ascetics conduct a trial by wrestling in front of the Yawata Shrine.

Chapter XXXIII Illustration On a dark night an enemy detains Kobungo in a reed bed.

Chapter XXXIV Illustration I Obeying homely lessons, Kobungo endures wanton abuse.

Chapter XXXIV Illustration II Hodayū tries to arrest Kobungo in the road.

Chapter XXXV Illustration I Three fellows are floored; Myōshin comes to visit.

Chapter XXXV Illustration II Sad parting of a mother- in-law and daughter-in-law; a flute in the night multiplies sorrow.

Chapter XXXVI Illustration As blades are crossed an infant is kicked to death by mistake.

Chapter XXXVII Illustration I The effects of a wonder cure: Shino revives.

Chapter XXXVII Illustration II Bungobei investigates a light in the water at night.

Chapter XXXVIII Illustration Genpachi in the strength of his courage slaughters three spies.

Colophon Seals of Kyokutei Bakin and Yanagawa Shigenobu

Translator’s Introduction

About Part Two—His Master’s Blade

This is the second volume of what is intended to be a complete translation of Kyokutei Bakin’s Hakkenden, a title I translate as Eight Dogs. The full title of the original is Nansō Satomi hakkenden, or The Lives of the Eight Dogs of the Satomi of Southern Fusa. The first fourteen chapters have already been published as Part One—An Ill-Considered Jest; they introduced the Satomi family, samurai lords of Southern Fusa. But while a single dog featured prominently in those chapters, the Eight Dogs of the title did not. Only here, in Part Two, do we begin to meet them.

Part Two—His Master’s Blade resumes a story that is very much already in progress. Indeed, this volume of the translation picks up in the middle of the second installment of this serialized novel. In 1816, when the second installment first appeared, a reader would have been able to turn right from the death of Princess Fuse (Chapter XIV, which concludes Part One) to the introduction of the first of her progeny, the Dog Warriors.

One thing the foregoing makes clear is that this translation is being presented in units that do not correspond to the installments in which the novel originally appeared. Part One contains the first original installment and part of the second (i.e., the original’s Inaugural Volume and part of its Volume II). Part Two contains the rest of Volume II along with the original’s third and fourth installments, its Volumes III and IV. Hakkenden is a single sustained narrative: its author seems to have made no effort to ensure that any of its many overlapping story arcs truly conclude with the end of an installment, and in fact many installments end with what can only be described as cliffhangers. Some of this is preserved in the translation—Part Two ends with a scene that offers some degree of resolution to the ever-more-complicated plot, but a great deal of irresolution, too. That said, the translation attempts to divide the story up into segments that have some sort of internal logic and pacing, while offering the reader more chapters at once than original readers would have received. Part Two presents in one volume chapters that were originally issued over a period of five years, and that cover not only the introduction of the first few Dog Warriors, but the first stages in their discovery of who they are—of what, in fact, a Dog Warrior is.

Part One and Part Two of the translation, then, reorganize the original’s cliffhanger-heavy installments into narrative arcs that work on their own terms (even if they are best read in light of what comes before and/or after). For this reason I have felt it appropriate to give each part of the translation an original subtitle. In other words—and in case it was not already clear—the subtitle An Ill-Considered Jest does not correspond to any title Bakin gave any part of the work. It was chosen to give the English reader a sense of the themes of the chapters contained in Part One, which concern (among other things) hasty promises and their dire consequences. It is also intended to hint at the playful undercurrents that lurk beneath the surface of this self-serious story. (Is the novel itself a jest? On one level, yes! Is it ill-considered? That’s for the reader to decide.) Similarly, His Master’s Blade gestures toward the heirloom sword that looms so large in the plot of Part Two. It may also conjure up the image of the dog Nipper, the old RCA Victor mascot, listening to his master’s voice coming out of a phonograph—not an entirely inappropriate association for a story about dogs (or dog warriors) yearning for masters.

About the Translator’s Introductions

In general, translators’ introductions try to give readers enough information to understand the work being translated and introduced, along with enough analysis and context to begin to appreciate it. Such introductions typically address topics such as the life of the author, the genre of the work, the style in which it is written, its reception and place in literary history, the nature of the society that produced the author and the work, and perhaps even the translator’s own aims and guiding principles. Interestingly, these conventions appear in widely separated times and places: when Kyokutei Bakin embarked on a translation of The Water Margin (Shuihu zhuan; J. Suikoden), the circa-sixteenth-century Chinese vernacular novel that would later serve as one of his principal sources for Hakkenden, he started with a translator’s introduction that touches on many of these same topics.¹

Hakkenden is a very long novel, impossible to publish under one set of covers. The modern Japanese edition on which this translation is largely based comprises twelve volumes.² Japanese scholarly editions of classic works often include essays that function much like the translator’s introduction, giving basic information about a work to enable readers to appreciate it. Hamada Keisuke, editor of the aforementioned modern edition of Hakkenden, elected to spread this information out across all twelve volumes. That is, each volume of his edition comes with an afterword that addresses a different aspect of the book: its genre; the author’s biography; plot and structure; the author’s oeuvre; how Hakkenden reflects the life of its author; Hakkenden’s historical underpinnings; its geography; its illustrations; its style; the author’s correspondence with avid readers; the work’s modern reception; and bibliographical data about the work’s original publication.

Inspired by Hamada’s immensely valuable treatments, and convinced that not enough has been written about Hakkenden in English, I have decided to give each part of the translation its own separate introduction. I do not follow Hamada’s model very closely, as my introductions are not as tightly focused as his. But in addition to offering a few observations germane to each volume, I do hope to explore one topic in some depth in each introduction, without recapitulating information found in previous ones.

Thus the Translator’s Introduction to Part One gave some general background information on the work and its author, then moved on to an extended discussion of the style (or styles) in which Hakkenden is written, and how the translation seeks to evoke it (or them). This introduction to Part Two will focus on issues particularly relevant to this section of the novel—the question of serialization and the notion of a dog warrior—before delving into the question of the illustrations: who was responsible for them, how we should read them, and why they matter.

About Serialization and Structure

Hakkenden was published in installments between 1814 and 1842. It was a serialized novel, in other words, much like Western contemporaries such as Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837–1839) or Alexandre Dumas’s Les trois mousquetaires (The Three Musketeers, 1844). But whereas Dumas’s and Dickens’s novels appeared in periodicals over a relatively short period of time (a monthly magazine in the case of Dickens, a daily newspaper in the case of Dumas), Hakkenden appeared in self-contained installments. That is to say, a reader would have bought from a bookseller (or rented from a booklender) an installment that was separately bound, containing no material by other authors, nor indeed any material (except perhaps the advertisements) that did not pertain directly to Hakkenden.

These installments typically appeared once a year, although frequently more than a year would pass between installments of a single work, while occasionally two installments would appear in a single calendar year. In the case of Hakkenden, the first installment (Chapters I through X) was published in Bunka 11 (1814), and the second installment (Chapters XI through XX) was published in Bunka 13 (1816). The third installment (Chapters XXI through XXX) appeared in Bunsei 2 (1819), and the fourth (Chapters XXXI through XXXVIII) in Bunsei 3 (1820). Incidentally, this was fairly leisurely progress for a novel—the five installments and sixty-eight chapters of The Bow-Crescent Moon: An Outlandish Tale (Chinsetsu yumiharizuki), Bakin’s second most famous novel, all appeared between 1807 and 1811.

As this summary makes clear, a contemporary reader of Hakkenden would have experienced its serialization very differently than a contemporary follower of, say, The Three Musketeers. She would have had to wait much longer between installments; and yet, when those installments did appear, they would be much more substantial than what appeared at one time before a reader of Dumas. Indeed, a single installment of Hakkenden was equivalent in length to many of Bakin’s shorter, non- serialized novels. That being said, Hakkenden is a single integrated story, not a book and several sequels (which is how The Bow-Crescent Moon started its life). None of its installments make any effort to conclude the story, and several culminate in outright cliffhangers.

To reiterate, then, by Chapter XV, where this volume of the translation begins, the story is well underway. And yet, in many ways, Chapter XV represents a new beginning for the story. As the author himself noted at the end of Chapter XIV, the first fourteen chapters represented a discrete opening stage of the whole, what a modern reader might think of as a prologue. Chapter XV begins the next stage, and in many ways it brings us into the story proper (i.e., the serial biographies [retsuden] of the titular Eight Dogs—most of which take place many years after the death of Princess Fuse). Underscoring this, Chapter XV paradoxically begins by jumping back in time to the Siege of Yūki in 1441, where Chapter I began. As the first of the Dog Warriors to be introduced to the reader, Inuzuka Shino’s story begins where Fuse’s ends; but in another way it begins where Fuse’s began, with a father and a grandfather who find themselves on the losing side of a battle.

This double beginning neatly encapsulates the dual identity, and dueling sets of duties, that will characterize each Dog Warrior in turn. Shino is the spiritual descendant of Fuse and the dog Yatsufusa; but he is also the son of Inuzuka Bansaku. He has debts and responsibilities to both the Satomi and Inuzuka/Ōtsuka families; these duties will sometimes complement each other and sometimes conflict, and will not be resolved until the very end of the book.

About the Dog Warriors

Each of the Dog Warriors finds himself hopelessly enmeshed in a web of overlapping obligations arising from this double identity. Each has what might be thought of as the normal set of duties incurred by being a male child of samurai lineage in medieval Japan (as seen through early modern eyes)—duties to parents, siblings, teachers, and lords. These normal obligations are exacerbated by the instability that Bakin writes into each man’s situation—each of them is orphaned, some of them multiple times, complicating their duties as sons and brothers, and most of them find their duties as samurai heartily confused by the ever-treacherous, ever-shifting political landscape of the day. This kind of complication was standard for early modern fiction, of course— conflicting duties were meat and drink to contemporary audiences—and each Dog Warrior’s personal set of obligations would be enough to generate a novel in its own right.

But as each of our heroes comes to realize his identity as a descendant of Fuse, and therefore as a Dog Warrior, he becomes conscious of another set of ties, binding him in duty to the Satomi, to their holdings in Awa and Kazusa (where none of the Dog Warriors has ever been), and to the other Dog Warriors. It is these ties, and how they interact with those generated by the Inuzuka, Inukawa, and other identities, that constitute the peculiar character of the Dog Warriors.

But what is a Dog Warrior? We can answer this question in (at least) three ways.

First, a dog warrior is a bit of wordplay, a combination of riddle, neologism, and pun. The Japanese term translated herein as dog warrior is kenshi, made up of the elements ken (also read inu), or dog, and shi, warrior. As he himself acknowledges in his kanbun preface to Volume I of Hakkenden, Bakin found the term in the 1717 dictionary Shogenji kō setsuyōshū, compiled by Makishima Terutake; this source lists the eight dog warriors (hakkenshi) of the Satomi, eight retainers with the element dog in their surnames, but gives no further information about them. On one level, Hakkenden is an elaborate imaginary explanation for why the Satomi had these retainers, and who or what they might have been. Bakin takes the dictionary entry as a riddle and provides a fantastic (and delightful) solution.³

Part of that solution involves imagining that there could be such a thing as a kenshi, or dog warrior. The dictionary only deals with the concept as a function of a peculiar coincidence of surnames, but Hakkenden invents dog warrior as a class of being of which surname is only the most superficial of indices. In the course of the story the reader meets several characters who wish they could be Dog Warriors, the first of whom is Inue Fusahachi—father of one Dog Warrior (Inue Shinbei) and brother-in-law of another (Inuta Kobungo). Since Fusahachi himself is an Inue, and is of samurai lineage, he is arguably already a dog warrior by the dictionary’s definition, but not by the story’s (see Chapters XXXVII– XXXVIII). In Bakin’s neologistic use of the term, a Dog Warrior is a spiritual descendant of Fuse and Yatsufusa. This is indicated by each kenshi’s possession of one of the eight large beads from Fuse’s rosary, each one of which bears the character for one of eight Confucian cardinal virtues; each kenshi’s identity as a Dog Warrior is further marked on his body by a peony-shaped spot thought to have been derived from the markings on the dog Yatsufusa’s coat. Fusahachi is not a descendant of Fuse (although paradoxically his son is), and so he is no Dog Warrior.

Kenshi, dog warrior, may have been an unfamiliar term, an obscure formulation found in an old dictionary given new life by an author of imaginative fiction, but it echoed a familiar one. Written with characters meaning sword and warrior, kenshi was a word denoting a swordsman, that is, a warrior who specialized in swordplay as opposed to other skills appropriate to a samurai (such as archery or book learning). Found in Japanese writing at least as early as the fourteenth century, in Chinese it goes back at least to the Warring States–era Daoist classic Zhuangzi, Chapter 30 of which concerns a king’s unhealthy obsession with watching kenshi (jianshi) at work. In the popular imagination a kenshi might be simply a specialist, or might be a wanderer who lived by his sword: a duelist or mercenary. Given that all the Dog Warriors are (at one point or another) rōnin, drifters or masterless samurai, we are justified in seeing them as kenshi in both homophonous senses. The swordsman dimension of the kenshi involves a further pun, since it may also be written with characters meaning wise and warrior, a nod to early modern expectations (clearly at work in the novel) that a samurai should be a moral exemplar.

Bakin’s semi-neologism is also a signifying pun. Thus the first answer to the question What is a Dog Warrior? has to do with both wordplay and swordplay.

The second answer to this question has to do with brotherhood. Above we noted that the Dog Warriors are born as the descendants of Inu- surnamed families, but as the spiritual descendants of Fuse and Yatsufusa. We might say they are born Dog Warriors—and this involves a further pun, because Bakin sometimes writes kenshi with characters meaning dog and clan or kinship group, particularly in the later chapters when the Dog Warriors’ lineages become an issue in the plot. Depending on how it is written, in other words, the word kenshi may be read as emphasizing either the Dog Warriors’ part-canine heritage or their birth bloodlines—Inuzuka, Inuyama, and so on. But karma’s shaping of their identities continues after birth—take Inuta Kobungo, whose surname is not originally his, but rather that of a bully he bests in a fight, whose name is given to Kobungo by the townspeople as a mark of honor. Or take Inuzuka Shino, whose peony mark is not a birthmark, as in the case of some of the other Dog Warriors, but instead a bruise left by an incident later in life. Nature and nurture both contribute to the Dog Warriors’ identity.

But just as important as either of those factors is a third: choice. Each Dog Warrior goes through a process of self-discovery in which he learns of his true nature and of the existence of his seven brothers. While the nature of this process varies each time, the endpoint of it is that the Dog Warrior chooses to embrace the brotherhood, dedicating himself to finding and defending the other seven. This is most vividly depicted in Chapter XXXIII, when Inukai Kenpachi (soon to rename himself Genpachi), Shino, and Kobungo bind themselves as brothers:

Thus it was that Kenpachi picked up the cup that sat next to him and offered it anew to Shino and Kobungo. Rejoicing, they bound themselves in righteousness, vowing that though we share not each other’s pleasures, we shall share each other’s sorrows. Though we were not born on the same day, we shall die on the same day.

The language of their oath closely echoes a famous scene in the beginning of the influential Chinese vernacular novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguo yanyi; J. Sangoku engi), where the three heroes at the heart of the story gather in a peach grove and pledge themselves to each other as brothers. As the reader of Hakkenden will discover, the Dog Warriors’ oath even has its own associations with tree fruit, although in their case it is plums rather than peaches that are significant.

The point is that the Dog Warriors are not merely eight warriors with dog in their surnames, and not even just spiritual descendants of Fuse and her dog; they are also members of an eight-man league, sworn to mutual loyalty. It is this, more than anything else, that Fusahachi yearns for; it is this that truly constitutes the Dog Warriors. And thus it is crucial to note that this is a voluntary association—the kenshi are born Dog Warriors and made Dog Warriors, but they also choose to be Dog Warriors. To the many obligations their karma has laid upon them they add new ones willingly assumed as they embrace their newfound brotherhood.

The terminology used to express this brotherhood is both more and less specific than the translation is able to convey, and so the original language is worth discussing here. Repeatedly Bakin has the Dog Warriors refer to each other as gikyōdai or variants thereof. Kyōdai is straightforward: it means brother or brothers. Gi is the problem. The basic meaning is righteousness or justice; it is, incidentally, the character on Inukawa Sōsuke’s bead. In the context of naming family relations it is used as a prefix, short for giri or obligation, and denotes relationships covered both by the English concepts of step and in-law. In other words, an adopted son might call his adoptive father his gifu; when he marries he might also call his wife’s father by the same term. Thus by calling each other gikyōdai the Dog Warriors are patterning their relationship after ordinary ones of familial duty—they are step-brothers or brothers-in-law. But the reader is aware that they are not actually step-brothers or brothers-in-law, not being bound to one another by birth, adoption, or marriage; their duties to one another are not laid upon them by biological or legal arrangement, but are voluntarily assumed, out of a devotion to correct principles. Therefore in translating the appellation it seemed advisable to preserve the original sense of the term gi and call them brothers in righteousness.

I have already noted that this band-of-brothers dimension of the Dog Warriors echoes the pact that begins Romance of the Three Kingdoms. But it is probably another work of Chinese vernacular fiction, The Water Margin, that Bakin had in mind when he decided to foreground gi as both the principle that bonds the brothers and the metaphor for the bond itself. As I have noted in the Translator’s Introduction to Part One (and elsewhere), one way to read Hakkenden is as a long, convoluted, endlessly inventive, and staunchly critical adaptation of The Water Margin.⁴ In this reading, the eight Dog Warriors correspond to the 108 outlaws of the Liangshan marshes, and in this light it is unsurprising to note that the Liangshan heroes, too, describe themselves as united by ties of gi (or yi, in the Chinese pronunciation of the character). However, the heroes of The Water Margin act in ways that scholars and critics have long found difficult to reconcile with the conventional understanding of gi or yi as righteousness. That is, the 108 outlaws engage in banditry, murder, and even occasional acts of cannibalism in the course of their derring-do. David Hazard has recently argued that yi in The Water Margin should be understood less as righteousness tout court and more as honor, being concerned with recognition from a social world made up of the Liangshan outlaws and kindred spirits. Principles such as justice and generosity certainly concern the heroes, but yi for them is about being worthy of, and receiving, the recognition of those who share similar principles.⁵ Part of Hakkenden’s critique of The Water Margin is a rectification of its heroes’ actions with traditional notions of righteousness, so we need not translate gi in Bakin’s novel as honor. But readers are likely to detect in the Dog Warriors’ fraternity echoes of the mutually constituted honor world Hazard identifies in the heroes of Liangshan.

The second way, then, to answer the question What is a Dog Warrior? is this: a member of a league of warriors who have banded together as brothers in arms in the cause of righteousness.

The third way to answer the question is the most literal: a Dog Warrior is a warrior dog. But this answer immediately raises another question: are the Dog Warriors dogs? And this question is not easy to answer. In a narrowly literal way, the answer is no. But in other ways—perhaps more important ways—the answer is yes.⁶

The Dog Warriors are the spiritual descendants of the dog Yatsufusa and his master Princess Fuse of the Satomi. That much is clear in the text. But the Dog Warriors are only ever presented as humans in the course of the story. Hakkenden contains shapeshifters, but the Dog Warriors are not among them. Their surnames name them dog, but both text and illustration only ever depict them as humans, indistinguishable from any others.

And yet, the reader is never allowed to forget that they are, in fact, the spiritual descendants of a dog. What is more, each has that peony-shaped mark, said to be somehow related to Yatsufusa’s spots—their skins are marked like/by/as a dog’s coat. Perhaps most importantly, the book’s visual scheme consistently, if obliquely, associates them with dogs. Each installment came with a different cover design, and most of them depict dogs; endpapers (mikaeshi), too, often incorporate dogs into their design. What the story proper denies, the rest of the presentation affirms: the Dog Warriors are, even if only on an iconographic level, warrior dogs. There is something canine about them, even if they are not described as anthropomorphized hounds.

No doubt the most iconic demonstration of this yes-they-are/no-they-aren’t aspect of the Dog Warriors’ dogginess comes in the endpaper for Volume IV, contained in this volume of the translation. It shows a dog-headed human, or anthropomorphized hound, dressed in Tang-style Chinese armor and holding a bow and arrows; the figure is labeled Dog General. The image seems to be drawn from popular depictions of the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac as generals, related to their conflation with the twelve heavenly generals associated with the buddha Bhaisajyaguru (J. Yakushi). But in the context of Hakkenden, the figure appears to be a playful visualization of what the Dog Warriors could be but what the story says they are not.⁷

The Dog Warriors are, in short, sterling examples of the complicated wordplay endemic to early modern Japanese fiction; exemplars of friendship and voluntary devotion amid myriad social obligations; and, just maybe, samurai dogs. They are also some of the most memorable heroes in all of Japanese fiction. Their stories start here.

About the Illustrations

The Dog General endpaper to Volume IV points up a crucial aspect of appreciating Hakkenden: the place of the illustrations. They are not simply decorations, or visualizations of key moments in the story. They are an integral part of the book’s narrative scheme. They were conceived of as such by Bakin himself, although they were executed by men more talented at drawing than he. The remainder of this introduction will suggest some ways to approach this aspect of Hakkenden’s art.

Hakkenden contains nearly 400 illustrations. Each of the novel’s 180 chapters (some of which are divided into two or more chapter-length parts) contains one or two illustrations, usually two-page spreads; these chapter illustrations present, as one might expect, scenes from the story. There are 304 of these in total. In addition, each installment began with frontispieces, usually two to four; these too were two-page spreads, but rather than illustrating scenes from the story they depict characters singly or in groups in original tableaux that reference, but do not literally depict, events in the story. These frontispieces are reminiscent of the signboards found on kabuki marquees in that they emphasize the persons of the characters rather than excerpts from the narrative. Some frontispieces present, rather than pictures, calligraphy with decorative borders, engaging the illustrators’ skills in different ways than the typical chapter or frontispiece illustration (see for example the third frontispiece to Volume III, contained in this volume). In addition, later installments add decorative borders to the tables of contents; these borders typically contain various iconographical references to characters or motifs in other illustrations. The frontispieces (including calligraphic pages) and illustrated tables of contents total 71 illustrations.

Each installment also came with an endpaper inside the front cover of the first fascicle of the installment; these endpapers were dominated by writing (title, volume number, and names of author, illustrator, and publisher) but usually contained some sort of pictorial element. As the Dog General discussed above shows—Bakin’s original draft of it survives (Figure 1)—these endpapers were as much part of Bakin’s pictorial scheme for the work as the internal illustrations. However, because they contained the publisher’s name, when a new publisher took over serialization and reissued earlier installments, he would change the endpaper. Finally, each installment came with its own unique illustrated cover design; these, too, changed when a new publisher reissued earlier installments. Unlike most modern editions of Hakkenden in Japanese, which tend to include chapter illustrations and frontispieces but leave out endpapers, calligraphic borders, and/or other incidental artwork, this translation reproduces all pictorial matter associated with each installment as it first appeared, as near as can be determined.

We know who drew each chapter illustration and frontispiece; credit for endpapers and decorative borders is unclear, but they were presumably the work of the artists otherwise responsible for the illustrations for that installment. Cover artists are unknown. In any case, and however one totals or classifies them, the illustrations found in Hakkenden amount to a massive sampling of the woodblock print designer’s art.

A total of five artists (not counting unknown cover artists) worked on Hakkenden over the course of its serialization. Yanagawa Shigenobu I (ca. 1787–1832) did around 150 illustrations; his disciple Yanagawa Shigenobu II (n.d.) did around 170. Keisai Eisen (1791–1848) did around sixty, stepping in when Shigenobu I or II was unable to complete work on an installment. Similarly, Gyokuransai (Utagawa) Sadahide (1807–ca. 1879) stepped in for around twenty illustrations late in the work’s serialization. Finally, Kōchōrō (Utagawa) Kunisada (1786–1865) made a special guest appearance in the final installment, contributing a portrait of the author.⁸

The publishing world in Bakin’s day encompassed prints as well as books. The famous ukiyo-e or pictures of the floating world—woodblock prints depicting popular subjects, including kabuki actors, courtesans, sumo wrestlers, heroes of Japanese and Chinese legends, and spectacular landscapes—were produced by the same teams of designers, block carvers, printers, and publishers who produced popular fiction like Hakkenden. All fiction was illustrated, and pictures from a celebrated ukiyo-e artist could help sell a book. Meanwhile, over the course of the nineteenth century standalone prints came to feature blocks of narrative and/or playful writing, which enlisted the talents of popular authors. Consumers of both books and prints, in short, came to expect a collaboration between text and image.

All fiction was illustrated, but some forms were more heavily illustrated than others. The most widely read form of fiction from the late eighteenth into the late nineteenth century was the kusazōshi or grass booklet, wherein grass denotes informality. In kusazōshi, textual narrative and dialogue were embedded within illustrations in a manner similar to the modern comic book. Bakin had begun his career as a writer of kusazōshi, meaning he had grown accustomed early on to melding his work as a writer to that of an illustrator. It was in the yomihon or book for reading that Bakin found his true métier, and he rejoiced in the genre’s freedom from subordination to the image; but he never stopped producing kusazōshi, meaning he never stopped collaborating with illustrators.

And as Hakkenden’s nearly 400 illustrations show, writing yomihon still meant working with artists. In fact, in some ways it might be best to think of Hakkenden as a collaboration between an author and five illustrators. The book’s illustrations were not simply decorations added as afterthoughts.

How did this collaboration work? In both kusazōshi and yomihon it seems to have been standard for authors to turn in rough sketches for the illustrations along with the draft of the text. This was certainly Bakin’s practice, as is evidenced by the survival of several sections of Hakkenden in manuscript form, complete with the author’s rough drafts of frontispieces, chapter illustrations, and even endpapers.⁹ Bakin’s art is fairly amateurish, and his compositions were inevitably improved in being rendered by professional artists, but the drafts reveal that the basic pictorial content and layouts originated with him. And despite the cursory nature of these sketches, close examination reveals the surprising degree of thought Bakin put into the details. His draft illustrations account for things like decorative borders—clearly it mattered to him that the Volume IV frontispiece depicting Nui and Daihachi be bordered with hōju, or jewels of the Law, a common Buddhist motif, while the facing page depicting Myōshin and Nengyoku be bordered with clamshells. His illustrations also include notes to the illustrator (written in red, so as to distinguish them from the captions and labels to be included in the final renditions). These notes tell Shigenobu that, for example, Daihachi’s left hand must be drawn as a clenched fist, that Nui is nineteen and should look young, while Myōshin is an older woman (ōdoshima, see Figure 2 below and compare to the published version as reproduced herein).

Shinoda Jun’ichi, who has written exhaustively about Hakkenden’s illustrations as part of Bakin’s authorial intent, provides further evidence of the writer’s close engagement with the illustrations. This comes in the form of journal entries and letters that show Bakin planning illustrations, negotiating over them with illustrators and publishers, and (as he even does within the pages of his fiction) complaining about illustrators who fail to follow his instructions.¹⁰ The inevitable conclusion is that Bakin intended his readers to pay just as much attention to the pictures as to the words. Even something as small as a decorative border was an opportunity to lade the book with one more riddle, one more elegant reference to the literary or artistic tradition—in short, one more layer of signification. Hakkenden demands visual literacy of its readers, in addition to textual literacy.

The first pair of kuchie in Volume IV provide a good example of the complicated play that Bakin embeds in the illustrations (see Figure 3 below and compare to the published version reproduced herein). The image on the right shows Inuta Kobungo standing immovably, arms folded and legs firmly planted, gazing off into the distance, while three half-naked men try to grapple with him. At first glance the three men appear to be sumo wrestlers; the leftmost one of the three (Mōroku) is even wearing a wrestler’s apron. But the one in front (Karashirō) is wearing a robe, or perhaps a rag, tied informally around his waist, suggesting a street tough more than a wrestler. As the reader will soon discover, both are true: Kobungo is the leader of a street gang and an amateur wrestler (note the apron peeking out from beneath the hem of his robe), and these three men are part of his gang. As a group, their pose is ambiguous—are they holding him back, trying to move him, or attacking him? Of course this configuration never appears in the story, but their relationship does move from alliance through suspicion to antagonism, making this an effective bit of foreshadowing.

The kuchie on the left shows Yamabayashi Fusahachirō to the left, holding an oar, and an ascetic named Kantoku crouched on the right, holding a folding fan in one hand and a Buddhist ceremonial object in the other (a ringed finial of the type often seen on the end of mendicants’ staves). Kantoku’s fan shows a wrestling ring, and he holds it somewhat in the manner of a sumō referee officiating a bout—appropriate, since Kantoku helps arrange a sumō match with Fusahachirō as his champion. Fusahachirō, meanwhile, holds an oar in one hand and a lock of hair in the other. The oar is a reference to his profession as the owner and captain of a boat, but this oar is inscribed with a Buddhist mantra and a Sanskrit character that make it appear at first glance to be, not an oar, but a wooden stupa of the type found in graveyards—a clear foreshadowing of Fusahachirō’s death. The lock of hair is probably a reference to a detail Fusahachirō gives in Chapter XXXIV—after losing the wrestling match he cut his forelocks in disgust.

As is often the case, the two pictures are divided by decorative borders but arranged into complementary compositions—the viewer is invited to see them simultaneously as discrete images and as one large tableau. Seen separately each functions as a tantalizing introduction to the characters depicted, hinting at their personalities and places in the narrative. But seen together they seem to tell another story. Separately, Kobungo and Fusahachirō could be gazing at objects beyond the frames of their portraits—but seen together, they appear to be glaring at each other. This is only appropriate, since they were rivals in the pivotal sumō bout being referenced by elements in each picture. The temptation to read these two frames as one image is heightened by the way Kantoku’s fan is placed across the two borders and the intervening space. But reading the frames together, and in light of future events in the story, puts Kantoku’s placement here in a different light. Partly this is because his role in the sumō match in the story is not that of impartial referee, but of partisan sponsor of Fusahachirō. But once Kantoku is revealed to be the Satomi retainer Amasaki Terubumi, his relationship to both Kobungo and Fusahachirō changes; he is much more like the uniting figure he appears to be here.

And what of those borders? Kobungo’s portrait is framed by plum blossoms and Fusahachirō’s by large snowflakes. That pairing alone is an attractive and conventional one, frequently appearing in poetry and art; but there might be a deeper layer of meaning. Plum blossoms, as we have already seen, are significant for the Eight Dog Warriors due to the oath Shino and Sōsuke exchange beneath the plum tree, so the iconography here could be telling us that one of these men is a Dog Warrior and the other is not. Meanwhile, particularly large snowflakes are sometimes known as botan yuki, or peony snow, after the large, heavy petals of the peony. Given the peony-shaped marks each Dog Warrior has on his body, this association may be in play here, in turn reminding us that while Fusahachirō is not a Dog Warrior, he is not entirely separate from them either, karmically speaking.

This is not a full accounting of the layers of signification in this pair of kuchie—I have not even mentioned the poetry inscribed in each image, for example. But it does give an indication of how much there is to read in each of these images, and how carefully each was written as well as drawn. We may note (since Bakin’s draft of this image survives) that almost all the details discussed above originate with the author’s original sketch. In terms of our discussion, the only significant difference is in Kobungo’s henchmen’s clothing; in the original, they are dressed simply in loincloths. Other than that, all the signifying details are present from the beginning.

But if the intentionality in the illustrations was (largely) Bakin’s, the reader’s reception of them rests (almost) entirely on the expertise of the illustrations who realized those intentions. Bakin clearly took a great deal of care with his draft illustrations, but they remain drafts—ideas for pictures, more than pictures in their own right. Any readers who find themselves entranced by the energy, stylishness, and humor of Hakkenden’s pictures are responding to the skilled brushwork of Yanagawa Shigenobu, et al.

A comparison of Bakin’s original sketch for the illustration in Chapter XXXI with Shigenobu’s final version reveals this (see Figure 4 below and compare to the published version reproduced herein). While Bakin’s sketches have a rough charm, they cannot hope (and of course do not try) to match the energy and polish of the professional artist’s work. The struggle between Shino and Kenpachi (the future Genpachi) in the right part of the illustration is particularly well realized in Shigenobu’s version. Bakin’s sketch has the key elements in place—two warriors locked in hand-to-hand combat on a rooftop, with birds in the background to emphasize how high they are (Bakin takes care to label the birds gulls, in case his intent is unclear to Shigenobu). But the attitudes and arrangements of the two figures are entirely different. Bakin places the two in a nearly symmetrical arrangement, looking away from each other, each man pulling at the other’s hair. Shigenobu retains the general mirror-image effect but places them somewhat farther apart and in much more animated poses; the effect is of movement and action rather than close struggle, and well fits the dynamic energy conveyed by the narration. Crucially, Shigenobu reverses them, placing Kenpachi to the right and slightly above Shino; since at this point the reader still sees Kenpachi as a threat to Shino rather than a brother, this increases our sense that our hero Shino is in danger.

All this is possible not only because Shigenobu is a better artist than Bakin, but because Bakin knew that, and trusted his artist to improve on his own vision. Bakin’s instructions to Shigenobu, written in red near the left edge of the picture, read: The patterns on the clothing of these two should be as in the illustration at the end of Book V of the IIIrd installment. As for their struggle, please draw it as you see fit.¹¹ Intriguingly, a comparison of Bakin’s original for this image, Shigenobu’s final version, and the Shigenobu illustration from Chapter XXX (reproduced herein) shows that while Bakin’s Chapter XXXI sketch gives Kenpachi’s robe the same motif as in Shigenobu’s Chapter XXX illustration, Shigenobu gives Kenpachi’s robe a different motif in his version of the Chapter XXXI illustration. That aside, Bakin’s trust was well placed, since Shigenobu’s rendering of this fight is one of his finest contributions to the book; this proved to be one of the most iconic scenes in all of Hakkenden, and Shigenobu’s two illustrations of it were echoed in numerous ukiyo-e depictions by other artists.

Modern scholars’ insistence that Bakin intended for the illustrations to be read as texts in their own right, i.e. as an integral part of the overall presentation of Hakkenden, seems to conform to the spirit of Bakin’s own pronouncements in the pages of the work. Nearly every installment came with a preface, often two (one in Chinese and one in Japanese), and Bakin often used them to comment on his own story and ways readers might approach it. This was part of his overall project of cultivating a sophisticated readership for popular fiction, one that could appreciate both fine craftsmanship and deep meaning.

The best-known example of his instructions for reading is the seven principles (hōsoku) of the novel, which he discusses in his preface to the second installment of Volume IX.¹² Drawn from Chinese vernacular classics and the commentaries on them, these principles mostly deal with structure (parallelism, foreshadowing, etc.), but the seventh opens the reader up to a world of tantalizing possibilities. This is the principle of inbi, subtlety or hidden intent; of it Bakin says:

As for subtlety, the author’s deepest intent is found outside his text. He awaits a kindred spirit who shall arise a hundred years hence, that he might be comprehended by him.

The term here translated as text is bun, which means writing—text in the narrow sense. Bakin is clearly suggesting that readers need to move beyond the writing. Scholars have taken a wide range of positions as to what he might have meant by this. Some argue for deeper meanings that come in the form of subtext (i.e., meanings submerged within the text, generated by the words but not spelled out by them). Others, such as Takada Mamoru and Shinoda Jun’ichi, look to the illustrations, arguing that we should view them as texts in the broader sense, beyond the text as conventionally defined. Whether or not Bakin had the illustrations in mind when discussing inbi, the care he put into planning them surely qualifies them as expressions of authorial intent, and therefore as texts (outside his text) to be read.

That being said, readers of Hakkenden are frequently confronted with expressions of the author’s frustration with his illustrators. He repeatedly gripes that they have gotten details wrong or depicted characters inappropriately. Perhaps the most involved such critique comes in his preface to the fifth installment of Volume IX.¹³ After an extensive discussion of how certain characters (notably Chudai) are habitually depicted either older or younger than the story indicates, he remarks, with a mixture of bitterness and resignation, Nor are these the only mistakes, for things seldom go as one wishes when one assigns a task to someone else.

Perhaps it was inevitable that an author so concerned with authorial intent—both with filling every nook and cranny of the book with his voluminous vision for the story and with encouraging readers to appreciate that vision in all its complexity—would be frustrated by collaboration and the surrender of control it required. He goes on to write:

After all, this story has employed more than one illustrator. Each of them has sought to take the Author’s draft and enhance it, thus winning praise for himself. For this reason even maidservants are drawn, without exception, as beauties. From this one may easily see how the illustrator’s concerns diverge from the Author’s. Ultimately illustrations are purely for amusement, and are meant for the women and children—they are the flowers of the storybook, the petty histories of Japan and China … Those charmed by the flowers may not think of the fruit, while those who enjoy the fruit also, it would seem, gaze upon the flowers.

Hakkenden’s illustrators were tasked with realizing the author’s vision, and the reader may feel they did this with virtuoso skill. But Bakin, the professional, points out that they have motives of their own—and a monetary imperative is surely implied here, as winning praise would no doubt lead to further commissions. His response to this seems to be a devaluation of the illustrations, insisting that they are purely for amusement. But anyone aware of the care Bakin put into the illustrations (and this passage comes after three pages of detailed discussion of the illustrations, demonstrating that care) can hardly accept this remark at face value.

A truer index of his expectations comes in his metaphor of the fruit and the flowers. There may be readers who gravitate to the illustrations and neglect a careful consideration of the text; but there cannot be many readers who concentrate on the text to the exclusion of the illustrations. This is in fact an affirmation—a somewhat curmudgeonly one, to be sure—of the importance of the illustrations. Everyone pays attention to them.

About the Illustrators

Accordingly, and regardless of the frustrations they may have posed to authors, collaborations with illustrators were assumed in early modern fiction. Indeed, they were a feature, and publicized as such. As early as 1812, Hakkenden was being advertised as a coming attraction with illustrations by Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849).¹⁴

Anyone familiar with Hokusai’s work, then and now, may feel a bit wistful upon learning that he was almost tapped to do Hakkenden’s illustrations, but that in the end the job went to someone less accomplished. Hokusai is, after all, a giant of ukiyo-e, justifiably one of the most famous artists Japan has ever produced. And he and Bakin had worked together successfully before. Two titles are worth singling out. Hokusai had provided the illustrations to Bakin’s aborted translation of Shuihu zhuan, entitled The New Illustrated Water Margin (Shinpen Suiko gaden), in 1806. Problems with the publisher led Bakin to drop out of the project early, but Hokusai stayed on until the end in 1838 with Bakin’s replacement, Takai Ranzan (1762–1839), in the process visually defining the world of The Water Margin for Japanese readers and laying the groundwork for its vogue in mid-nineteenth-century Japan.

Hokusai also illustrated Bakin’s The Bow-Crescent Moon: An Outlandish Tale (Chinsetsu yumiharizuki), serialized from 1807 to 1811. This had been Bakin’s biggest hit prior to Hakkenden, and is still considered one of his masterpieces.¹⁵ The story follows the twelfth-century warrior Minamoto no Tametomo on a journey of exile through various South Seas islands, both mythical and real, before landing him in the Ryukyu Kingdom (modern-day Okinawa). Tametomo’s adventures with the Okinawan royal house provide Hokusai another chance to display his mastery of exoticism and drama. Together The New Illustrated Water Margin and The Bow-Crescent Moon suggest that a Hokusai Hakkenden was a very real, not to mention tantalizing, possibility.

So why did Hokusai not illustrate Hakkenden? Given how famously proud and prickly both author and artist were, later generations have enjoyed imagining a great falling-out between them, but the truth seems to have been somewhat less titillating. Suzuki Jūzō suggests a combination of several factors. One was that Hokusai was increasingly busy with work for which he took top-line credit: picture books (ehon) and illustration manuals (etehon), including his own magnum opus Hokusai manga (Hokusai’s sketches), the first volume of which appeared in 1814—the same year as Volume I of Hakkenden. Another was that Bakin seems to have begun to find Hokusai less than perfectly amenable to his instructions. As seen above, Bakin disliked it when illustrators took too many liberties with his drafts, which Hokusai seemed to have been prone to do. There is no evidence that it led to a rupture between them, but it may still partially explain why Bakin and Hokusai did not work together after 1815.¹⁶

Instead, Bakin began Hakkenden in collaboration with what may have been the next best thing to Hokusai: the artist’s son-in-law Yanagawa Shigenobu. Shigenobu was mostly likely born in 1787 in the Yanagawa neighborhood of either Fukagawa or Honjo in Edo; he may have taken his professional surname from this neighborhood. Another source says he took the name, which means Willow River, in deference to Ryūtei or Willow Pavilion Tanehiko (1783–1842), with whom he collaborated early in his career. Shigenobu produced ukiyo-e but seems to have worked mostly in book illustration (including several works of erotica). In addition to Bakin he collaborated with two of the other most popular writers of the mid-nineteenth century. One was Tanehiko, whose gōkan (bound volume, the variety of kusazōshi that prevailed for most of the nineteenth century) A Rustic Genji by a Fake Murasaki (Nise Murasaki inaka Genji, 1829–42), with illustrations by Kunisada, was the most influential example of the genre. The other was Tamenaga Shunsui (1790–1844), whose ninjōbon (book of feelings or romantic novel) Spring Hues: The Plum Calendar (Shunshoku umegoyomi, 1832–33), partially illustrated by Shigenobu himself, virtually defined that genre of romantic fiction.¹⁷

Shigenobu married Hokusai’s daughter Miyo, perhaps in 1808; although he may have been working as an illustrator before this, he does not seem to have become well-known until he formed this connection with Hokusai. The close identification between Shigenobu’s work and Hokusai’s style can be seen in an anecdote included in an early biographical sketch of Shigenobu. The story goes that that one day a lewd picture appeared on a hairdresser’s door in Honjo: it depicted a woman on a midnight pilgrimage (a practice associated with black magic) being violated by a beggar priest. The picture caught the attention of Totoya Hokkei (1780–1850), one of Hokusai’s disciples. Hokkei recognized the style as that of his master’s school, and asked who the artist was. It was Shigenobu; Hokkei introduced him to Hokusai, who took him on as a disciple.¹⁸ The anecdote is perhaps too good to be true (particularly given Shigenobu’s work in erotica), but it at least demonstrates the stylistic affinities viewers found in Shigenobu’s and Hokusai’s art. Shigenobu’s and Miyo’s marriage failed, though, and they divorced circa 1820; this also seems to have been the end of Shigenobu’s relationship with his mentor. Shigenobu died in 1832, having illustrated nearly half of Hakkenden.

His successor was his disciple Yanagawa Shigenobu II. Less biographical information is available about him than about Shigenobu I; even his birth and death dates are uncertain.¹⁹ He was the son of a samurai and scholar, Shiga Risai (1762–1840); Shigenobu I may also have been born into the samurai class, and seems to have married into a samurai family after divorcing Miyo, although he never held an official post. Shigenobu II is best remembered as the main illustrator for the second half of Hakkenden, but he also worked with Bakin on a yomihon titled Lives of the Gallants: Read Them and Wonder (Kaikan kyōki kyōkaku den, 1830–35). Like his mentor, Shigenobu II worked in erotica; in a letter, Bakin notes that this should have gotten Shigenobu II into trouble during the Tenpō reforms of 1842, but his status as the son of a samurai seems to have saved him.²⁰ Bakin seems to have been less pleased with his work overall than with his predecessor’s, but Shigenobu II ended up producing more illustrations for Hakkenden than anyone, suggesting at the very least a professional competence in satisfying the demands of readers and publisher, as well as author.

Of Hakkenden’s main illustrators, Keisai Eisen is by far the most famous, being particularly well-known for his beauty prints. Eisen, too, was born into the samurai class, but (like Bakin) found his prospects ruined by the death of his father; Eisen ended up becoming a professional artist to support himself and his three younger sisters. While Eisen is not considered to have belonged to the Hokusai school, late in life he wrote of how important Hokusai’s influence had been on forming his own style, noting that he had absorbed the principles of [Hokusai’s] art, the bones of his method (gasoku koppō). Given the similarities in compositional sensibility and technique that scholars have observed between Hokusai’s work and Eisen’s, it is perhaps not going too far to suggest that with Eisen, as well as with Shigenobu I and II, Hakkenden was being illustrated in the Hokusai manner.²¹

Eisen first became involved with Hakkenden in Volume