Shunbaisai Hokuei
Artwork: Oiwa on the Broken Lantern, 1832
Shunbaisai Hokuei (active 1824–1837) was the leading designer of kamigata-e, the actor prints of Osaka, in the years when the Osaka stage rivaled Edo's. Osaka's actor prints were a regional art of their own, made for the fans who packed the theaters of the Dōtonbori, and Hokuei was their defining hand.
The work below, designed in 1832, shows the star Arashi Rikan II in the role of Iemon, the husband of Tōkaidō Yotsuya Kaidan, crouched on the floor with his sword half drawn as the face of the wife he poisoned swells out of a broken lantern above him. Hokusai had drawn Oiwa's ghost alone in Edo a year earlier. Hokuei tells the story the Osaka way: not the ghost alone, but the ghost and the man who made her, facing each other in the dark.