Cleveland Museum of Art

The Illustrated Tale of Oishi Hyōroku

Date

1700s

Medium

handscroll; ink and color on paper

Culture

Japan, Edo period (1615–1868)

Department

Japanese Art

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

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.

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