Yoshitoshi's "The Cry of the Fox"
An Artwork Interpretation of the Japanese Artist Tsukioka Yoshitoshi's Woodblock Print: "The Cry of the Fox" from the series "One-Hundred Aspects of the Moon"
This essay was written and generously contributed by Olette Bowman, an undergraduate student minoring in printmaking and preparing to become an art teacher.
Part 1: Background Information of Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (月岡芳年)
There is one thing that every source about Tsukioka Yoshitoshi will say at the very beginning: he was the last master of the woodblock print that ever worked in Japan. He was a prolific printmaker, with over ten thousand prints attributed to him. He was born in 1839 as Owariya Yonejiro, and raised by his uncle (yoshitoshi.net). His art journey didn’t start until he was eleven, in 1850, when he took an apprenticeship with the Ukiyo-e master Utagawa Kuniyoshi. Kuniyoshi was himself a prodigy who gained fame for establishing the sub-genre of warrior prints in Ukiyo-e and produced prints that were incredibly different from what the rest of the Utagawa school was producing (Yoshitoshi, The Splendid Decadent; pp. 25-26).
Like many Ukiyo-e artists, Yoshitoshi began by sticking with what worked for his master.
His first series, Biographies of Modern Heroes, was a collection of warrior prints released in the mid-1860’s; though, he brought a unique, complex style to the genre that made him skyrocket in popularity (Yoshitoshi, The Splendid Decadent; p. 27). However, Yoshitoshi had a large obstacle in the way of his success: the end of the Edo period. The Edo period had spanned over 200 years (1615-1868), and was characterized by the rule of its warlords and its isolationism. Powerful military leaders known as the Shōgun wrested power from the emperor, and passed that power down to their descendents. Foreigners were not allowed into the country, due to Portuguese missionaries being deemed dangers to the Shōgun. It was the longest period of peace in the country’s history, so far (education.asianart.org).
However, Yoshitoshi lived in a period of great change. Starting in the 1840’s and going
into the 1850’s, there was significant unrest with the people of Japan. Because of the closed economic system created by the Shōgunate that relied heavily on rice-based agriculture, the economy was in constant flux (education.asianart.org). A coup was brewing within Japan, and Yoshitoshi was mirroring it with his work.
While it’s not his modern claim to fame, Yoshitoshi began creating works that built off his experience doing ukiyo-e warrior prints. He created works that featured heavily graphic imagery–famously, 28 Famous Murders and Prose, for which he created 14 of the 28 prints in the series (yoshitoshi.net). Some believe that he was just reflecting Japanese culture of the time (yoshitoshi.net), while others posit that it had more to do with his rapidly declining mental health (Yoshitoshi; The Modern Tokyo Times).
In the mid-1850’s, those feelings would come to a head. Matthew Perry (not to be confused with the Canadian actor) famously led a US navy force to a Japanese port, which quickly caused a domino effect that would end the Edo period and force the country out of isolation (Opening of Japan to the West). After this, Japan would return power back to the imperial family and begin rapidly industrializing, eventually making it the world power we know in the modern day (education.asianart.org).
During this time, as he struggled with his mental health and dealt with poverty, Yoshitoshi worked as a newspaper illustrator. His job was to create prints depicting the events of the insurrection against the Shōgun. This meant that he was constantly adding more violent imagery to his repertoire. At the same time, it was locking him into a specific style that aimed to closely mimic real-world events (Yoshitoshi: The Splendid Decadent).
It wasn’t until after Perry’s invasion of Japan’s ports settled into the Meiji era that Yoshitoshi would make his most successful print series: One Hundred Aspects of the Moon, 1885, and The New Forms of 36 Ghosts, 1889 (yoshitoshi.net). These prints moved away from the very intense, life-like gore that he had been creating, and moved back towards traditional Ukiyo-e; both in imagery and in style (Yoshitoshi: The Splendid Decadent). He also created artwork for local Kabuki theatres, depicting their actors in various roles.
Yoshitoshi sadly died only three years after finishing The New Forms of 36 Ghosts, in 1892, at only 53 years old (yoshitoshi.net).
Resource List - Part 1
Shin’ichi, Segi. Yoshitoshi: The Splendid Decadent. 1st ed. Tokyo ; Kodansha
International, 1985.
Chiappa, J. N., Levine, J. M. (2018, January 2). Brief Biography of Tsukioka
Yoshitoshi (1839-1892).https://yoshitoshi.net/bio.html
Jay, L. (2017, September 25). Japanese Art and the Harsh Reality of Life: Tsukioka
Yoshitoshi. Modern Tokyo Times. https://moderntokyotimes.com/japanese-art-and-the-harsh-reality-of-life-tsukioka-yoshitoshi/
San Francisco Asian Art Museum. (n.d.). Historical background of the edo period
(1615–1868). Asian Art Museum. https://education.asianart.org/resources/historical-background-of-the-edo-period/
Metraux, Daniel A. (n.d.). The perry expedition and the “Opening of japan to the West,”
1853-1873: A short history with documents - association for asian studies.
https://www.asianstudies.org/publications/eaa/archives/the-perry-expedition-and-the-opening-of-japan-to-the-west-1853-1873-a-short-history-with-documents/
Part 2: Focus Artwork Interpretation
Cry of the Fox from One Hundred Aspects of the Moon, Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, 1886
1) Style - Why is it Ukiyo-e?
Ukiyo-e as a genre is hard to pin down. The Japanese kanji 浮世絵 literally translates to “art of the floating world” (Jisho.org). It started out portraying Kabuki actors and beautiful women, but expanded over time. The genre is incredibly vast, but could generally be described as woodblock prints that depict important aspects of Edo-period Japanese daily life and culture.
Yoshitoshi, of course, studied under a great Ukiyo-e artist: Kuniyoshi, of the Utagawa
school, whose claim to fame was the addition of warrior prints to Ukiyo-e. Following in his master’s footsteps, creating warrior prints, was how Yoshitoshi got his start (Yoshitoshi: The Splendid Decadent). However, during the years of shift from the Edo period to the Meiji period, Yoshitoshi ;found himself creating more and more violent imagery. His most steady income came from newspapers, where he would create depictions of the events of the war. Often, those depictions were graphic and pictorial (Yoshitoshi: The Splendid Decadent).
It’s unclear whether the content was a result of his declining mental health or a cause of it (Yoshitoshi, Modern Tokyo Times). After the war settled down and the Meiji period ushered in peace (education.asianart.org), Yoshitoshi moved back to his roots. There is certainly a connection with his marriage, the end of the war (which marked him no longer recreating real-life violence), and the improvement of his mental health (Yoshitoshi, Modern Tokyo Times)(Yoshitoshi: The Splendid Decadent). Thus, he shifted back to the Ukiyo-e style. Cry of the Fox, one of the prints from One Hundred Aspects of the Moon, represents his return to the format. Using the moon motif, the series places a heavy focus on traditional Japanese folklore regarding ghosts and spirits. However, the biggest reason that Yoshitoshi went back to Ukiyo-e was simple: it was a dying art. The industrialization of Japan had pushed woodblock printing to the side as different methods of printing were introduced, such as lithography, and many Japanese citizens were concerned that traditional artforms would be lost (theartstory.com).
2) Subject - Why is it dressed like that? (Kabuki Theatre)
Cry of the Fox is not just some random fox dressed as a nun–though that is a bit what it
looks like. It’s a depiction from a story–a Kyōgen, to be precise–of the same name (Scholten Japanese Art). It was a humorous adaptation of an existing myth (Hakusōzu, Wikipedia). A Kyōgen is a type of performance that is short, humorous, and meant to be acted out during the interludes of longer shows (The Nohgaku Performer’s Association). They’re not performed with masks, unlike many traditional performance arts, and are meant to make the audience share in the joy of laughter. With its origins in portraying worldly pleasures in Edo period Japan, it’s no wonder the Ukiyo-e genre placed such an emphasis on depictions of plays.
As was established above, Yoshitoshi held a deep love for traditional Japanese arts, and it goes further than woodblock printing. He was said to be good friends with Ichikawa Danjuro, who was a famed Kabuki actor (yoshitoshi.net). Moreover, this depiction of the Kitsune was not the only Kabuki artwork he produced during this period. While the theme of 100 Aspects of the Moon was more focused on folklore, Yoshitoshi was strongly focused on theatre outside of this series. For example, in 1890, not long after he published Cry of the Fox, he was responsible for creating a series of Ukiyo-e actor triptychs titled Actors with Snow, Moon, and Flowers (Yoshitoshi: The Splendid Decadent, p. 155). It was also well-known that Yoshitoshi was good friends with the actor Ichikawa Danjūrō IX (yoshitoshi.net), and frequently helped with painting, set, and costume design for his plays (Yoshitoshi: The Splendid Decadent, p. 154).
3) Iconography - Why Depict The Kitsune?
The “Kitsune” in Japanese folklore is a shapeshifting fox that can take the form of a
human. There are ‘good’ Kitsune, who are servants to the god Inari, and ‘bad’ Kitsune, who are tricksters. ‘Bad’ Kitsune archetypes are similar to how western audiences see foxes–think Swiper the Fox from Dora the Explorer. That being said, very rarely do Kitsune actually hurt people in their stories; they serve to dissuade or befuddle (Kensington Japanese Gallery).
The play that this print is based off of, also called Cry of the Fox, tells the story of a
hunter who is being visited by his uncle, a priest. The priest goes through a lot of effort to convince the hunter that he shouldn’t hunt foxes anymore. When the hunter relents, the priest leaves. However, he goes to investigate when he hears an inhuman sound coming from the direction his uncle came from, and finds a fox in priests’ garb. It was not his uncle, it was a Kitsune in disguise, who the hunter quickly captured (Wikimedia Foundation)(Scholten Japanese Art).
The greatest possibility to why Yoshitoshi decided to depict a Kitsune, here, is that he just liked the play that it came from. As stated above, the shows were made to be short, humorous, and provide the audience a form of unity in escapism (The Nohgaku Performer’s Association). We already know that Yoshitoshi had a love for the performing arts, as stated above.
Digging a little deeper, we can see that folklore was a consistent piece of subject matter for Yoshitoshi, as well. As mentioned above, his first successful print series was of folk beings from China and Japan in 1865 (Yoshitoshi: The Splendid Decadent, p. 152).
4) Motif - Why Depict The Moon?
This series isn’t the only one where Yoshitoshi places emphasis on the moon. To name a
few others from the time period, there was the aforementioned series Actors with Snow, Moon, and Flowers, as well as Fujiwara Yasumasa Playing His Flute Beneath the Moon in 1883. Even the name he is most well-known for is “Tsukioka:” 月岡. The first Kanji is for moon, and the second Kanji is for hill (jisho.org).
While there’s no explicitly stated reason that he was so fixated on the moon, there’s an
argument to be made that the moon represented the end of the turbulence that he’d experienced in his life up to that point. He first took up the name “Tsukioka” in 1865, for his series One Hundred Ghost Stories of Japan and China; this would be, artistically, when things were starting to look up for his printmaking career before he was relegated to making newspaper prints (Yoshitoshi: The Splendid Decadent, p. 153).
Along with that, the time period in his life that was making these prints were times of
great prosperity for him. He married his last wife, Sakamaki Tai, in 1880 and got steady work creating art for Kabuki theatre (yoshitoshi.net)(Yoshitoshi: The Splendid Decadent, p. 154). Throughout almost all of his personal projects throughout this time, Yoshitoshi focused heavily on celestial bodies and cycles, such as in The Four Seasons and their Height. In 1887, he also built a completely new house because a geomancer told him his house was in an “inauspicious location” (Yoshitoshi: The Splendid Decadent, p. 154).
Resource List
Ukiyo-e Japanese prints movement overview. The Art Story. (n.d.).
https://www.theartstory.org/movement/ukiyo-e-japanese-woodblock-prints/
Shin’ichi, Segi. Yoshitoshi: The Splendid Decadent. 1st ed. Tokyo ; Kodansha
International, 1985.
Jay, L. (2017, September 25). Japanese Art and the Harsh Reality of Life: Tsukioka
Yoshitoshi. Modern Tokyo Times.
https://moderntokyotimes.com/japanese-art-and-the-harsh-reality-of-life-tsukioka-yoshitoshi/
San Francisco Asian Art Museum. (n.d.). Historical background of the edo period
(1615–1868). Asian Art Museum.
https://education.asianart.org/resources/historical-background-of-the-edo-period/
Introduction to kyōgen. 能楽協会 THE NOHGAKU PERFORMER’S ASSOCIATION.
(2020). https://www.nohgaku.or.jp/en/guide/kyogen
Scholten Japanese art: Tsukioka Yoshitoshi 1839-1892: The cry of the Fox. Scholten
Japanese Art | Tsukioka Yoshitoshi 1839-1892 | The Cry of the Fox. (n.d.).
https://www.scholten-japanese-art.com/yoshitoshi_II_32.php
Wikimedia Foundation. (2025, November 22). Hakuzōsu. Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakuz%C5%8Dsu
Chiappa, J. N., Levine, J. M. (2018, January 2). Brief Biography of Tsukioka
Yoshitoshi (1839-1892).https://yoshitoshi.net/bio.html
Jisho.org. (n.d.)*. https://jisho.org/search/%E6%9C%88%E5%B2%A1, Jisho.org:
Japanese Dictionary
Kensington Japanese Gallery of Anime and Manga. (2021, September 22). Japanese
folklore – yokai: The kitsune and the tanuki.
https://japanesegallery.com/anime_and_manga/blog-page/anime-manga/japanese folklore-yokai-the-kitsune-and-the-tanuki.html
*Note: I went back-and-forth on whether or not I should include proper references for the translations. I decided to include them just so you know I’m not making stuff up. “Jisho” is the Japanese language equivalent of the Merriam-Webster or the Oxford dictionary we have in the US. Each link in the reference list will take you to one of the specific kanji translation pages.