Twenty-Eight Famous Murders with Verse (Eimei nijūhasshūku)

This page is a catalog all the prints by Yoshitoshi in the series ‘Eimei nijūhasshūku (英名 二十八 衆句 – 28 Famous Murders with Verse)’, of which Yoshitoshi produced half, with Yoshiiku (1833-1904) being responsible for the others.

It dates from quite early in Yoshitoshi’s career, when he was about twenty-seven, 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).

The series contains illustrations of events which often have a historical background, and were usually well-known from kabuki and noh plays.

The series contains text by what is claimed to be ten different writers, although one was listed twice, as Sanzantei and Kōrai.

If you better images than the ones below, or iii) missing information about individual prints, please let us know. There is also a title page, dating from the autumn of 1865, which we do not have an image of.

Technical details

• Dates: 1866 (12) – 1867 (5)
• Size: Ōban
• Signed: Ikkaisai Yoshitoshi hitsu
• Seal: Kiri
• Publisher: Sano-ya Tomigorō (Kinseidō)
• Block carvers: Hirokō Shimizu Ryūzō

Previous cataloguings

This series appears in:

	Eric van den Ing, Robert Schaap, "Beauty and Violence: Japanese
		Prints by Yoshitoshi 1839-1892",
		Havilland, Eindhoven, 1992

where it appears as series #16 (pp. 103-104). It is also listed 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

as series #183. The complete series is illustrated in:

	Kazuichi Hanawa, Suehiro Maruo, "Bloody Ukiyo-e in 1866 and 1988)",
		Libro-Port, Tokyo, 1988

We use the Keyes/B+V numbers for the table of prints images/information in the section below. The following table gives a concordance between the B+V numbers, and the print numbers from the title page of the series: