This page attempts to catalog all known prints in Yoshitoshi‘s series ‘Mitate tai zukushi (見立 多以 盡 – Collection of Desires)’. (The title is now usually written with the simplified final character 尽.) It consists of images of bijin who notionally have wishes in mind, associated with the pose and surroundings in which they are portrayed.
It dates from the middle Yoshitoshi’s career, when he was about thirty-eight, a decade before his well-known masterpieces such as his great series “One Hundred Aspects of the Moon” (1885-1892), and “New Forms of Thirty-Six Ghosts” (often called simply “Thirty-Six Ghosts”) (1889-1892).
Unusually for a Yoshitoshi series, the entire series came out in a very short period, of only two months.
The series contains text by Tentendō Shujin, although some are by Kokonsha Ujin (e.g. #7).
The titles are given as best we currently know them, relying on secondary sources; we haven’t been able to confirm the titles from the original prints (as is our usual practise) for several reasons. First, they are written in hiragana, using a style of writing called sōsho, which is a short-hand which is difficult to read for non-specialists. Second, even with the hiragana titles in hand, they use illusive word-play, and are difficult to translate. Thus our reliance on secondary sources at the moment. All the titles include the word ‘tai‘ (‘I want to’).
The dates for each print have also not been checked and given yet.
Technical details
- Dates: 1877 (12) – 1878 (1)
- Size: Ōban
- Signed: Ōju Taiso Yoshitoshi
- Seal: Yoshitoshi
- Publisher: Inoue Shigehei
There appear to be at least two editions: what is almost certainly the first has three-colour title cartouches (red, white, and green) with bokashi grading; what seems to be the second has grey title cartouches, and grey backgrounds in many of the prints.
Prints from the edition with the three-colour cartouches have the printing date (in the round seal which is the usual Meiji printing information) filled in properly, but in the other ones, although the characters for ‘Meiji’, ‘year’, ‘month’, etc are there, the numerals have all been removed; so the date of the second edition(s) is not known.
In addition, the second edition has a small cartouche alongside the printer information either left blank, or (in some prints) filled with a block. This block appears to contain a person’s name – perhaps the printer of the original edition (the neighbouring small cartouche seems to contain the publisher’s information, and there would be no need to delete the block-carver’s name, if that’s what it was).
Previous cataloguings
The only known attempt to date to enumerate this series was in Keyes’ thesis:
Roger. S. Keyes, "Courage and Silence: A Study of the Life and Color Woodblock Prints of Tsukioka Yoshitoshi 1839-1892", Cinncinnati, 1982
where it appears as series #370; he indicated it contained 20 prints, but only gave detailed information on 14 prints of the prints in the series.
Oddly enough, although it is one of the most common of Yoshitoshi’s ‘lesser’ series (counting ’36 Ghosts’, ‘100 Aspects of the Moon’ and ’24 Aspects of Women’ as his ‘greater’ series), it is not covered in:
Eric van den Ing, Robert Schaap, "Beauty and Violence: Japanese Prints by Yoshitoshi 1839-1892", Havilland, Eindhoven, 1992
although one print from the series is illustrated there (pg. 19).
We use the Keyes numbers for the first 14, and have numbered the rest in the order in which we discovered them; the prints in the series do not appear to have any numbers on them.
This page (and list) is not guaranteed to be complete, although as far as we know it is; several references speak of twenty prints in this series, and we have twenty here.
If you know of any prints from this series which aren’t listed here, or have either i) better images than the ones below, or ii) missing information about individual prints (e.g. publisher, exact date) please let us know.
