This page attempts to catalog all known prints in Yoshitoshi’s series ‘Tsūzoku saiyūki (通俗 西遊記 – A Modern “Journey to the West”)’. The ‘Journey to the West’ in one of the classic novels of Chinese literature; it is a unification of a number of supernatural myths and legends about the pilgrimage of famous Chinese Buddhist monk named Xuanzang to India (then known as the Western Regions), at the time of the Tang Dynasty, in order to collect a number of Buddhist religious texts.
The series dates from the start of Yoshitoshi’s career, when he was about twenty-five. It thus dates from about two decades 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).
According to Keyes, the text in the cartouches is by Sumida Kurozato (Kokutō) Ryōko.
Main characters
The prints include small cartouches labelling the personae (the term ‘persona’ is used throughout, to avoid confusion with the term ‘character’, which is used to mean ‘ideogram’ throughout the site) shown in each print. Some of the main personae, whose names appear again and again, are listed here. Listed right after the monk are four companions and protectors of the monk, who acted as disciples, who were assigned to him to help him with his task.
玄奘 三藏 – Genjō-sanzō – The monk Xuanzang (Xuanzang-sanzang in Chinese – the second part of the name literally means “Three Baskets [of Buddhist teaching]”); he is drawn as a younger monk, with a mark on this forehead, often astride a horse (see below)
孫悟空 – Son Gokū – The Monkey God or Monkey King (Sun Wukong in Chinese); the most intelligent and powerful of the companions, he is always drawn as a monkey
豬 八戒 – Cho Hakkai – Pigsy (Zhu Bajie in Chinese – literally, “Eight-Precepts Pig” or “Pig of the Eight Prohibitions”); he is always drawn as a pig (although the shape of his snout looks more like an alligator than that of a modern farm pig)
沙 悟淨 – Sa Gojō – Sandy or Friar Sand (Sha Wujing in Chinese – literally, “Sand Awakened to Purity”); he is drawn as an old monk
玉龍三太子 – ? – The Third Prince of the Dragon-King (Yulong Santaizi in Chinese); usually drawn as a white horse, ridden by Genjō-sanzō
The names of other personae who appear in specific prints (usually one of the many demons whom the travellers have to content with) are given at that print.
Technical details
Dates: 1864 (10) – 1865 (8)
Size: Ōban
Signed: Ikkaisai Yoshitoshi
Publisher: Fukuta
Previous cataloguings
The only known attempt to enumerate this series is 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 #116.
Keyes listed 9 prints in the series; we have probably found an additional 12 prints, making 21 in total. (The uncertainty is because is a slight question about one of the prints that Keyes lists; if the one we have for that one is not the one we think it is, we will have found 13 additional prints.) We use the Keyes numbers for the first 9, and have numbered the rest in the order of their dates, as Keyes did for the first nine.
The prints in the series do not appear to have any titles, or have numbers on them, or otherwise be in any explicit order. Japanese museums which have prints on display from this series do not show titles for the prints, merely list the personae which are labelled in each image. The ‘Journey to the West’ has 100 chapters, but Yoshitoshi does not seem to have set out to produce one print per chapter. In particular, at least of one the images is from quite late in the story. Also, although the row of characters on the left hand roll of the scroll-shaped title cartouche appears to be something like a chapter name, for each ‘chapter name’, several prints bear the same string of characters.
This page (and list) is not necessarily complete; the series is not well documented, and there may be yet other prints which have not yet come to our attention. However, given that the Museum of Fine Arts collection contains two almost-complete sets of this series, covering the same 21 prints as we had already found, the probability that there are large numbers of prints still missing is essentially nil. There may still be a small number undiscovered, but that would be the limit.
If you know of any prints from this series which aren’t listed here, or have either i) information about any errors on the page, ii) better images than the ones below, or iii) missing information about individual prints (e.g. publisher, exact date) please let us know.
