The Heron Maiden

The motifs of feathers so subtly integrated in the white robe of this young woman and her anachronistic hair style clearly suggests that the artist intended to create a portrayal of the Heron Maiden (Sagi musume), a role from a Kabuki dance performance first staged in the late eighteenth century, but which remained popular even into modern times. The Nihonga artist Kōka, who also designed woodblock prints under the name Toyonari, was a dedicated fan of Kabuki and through his career created images inspired by stage performances.

Here the painting was specifically inspired by The Heron Maiden (Sagi Musume), a popular nagauta, or single-scene Kabuki song-and-dance form with musical accompaniment. First performed in 1762 in Edo (present-day Tokyo), the performance was regularly revived and often depicted by ukiyo-e print artists. The dance had a surge in popularity during the Taishō period (1912–26), beginning from around 1920, when it became the subject of many prints and paintings by Nihonga artists, including Kōka’s contemporary Kitano Tsunetomi (1880–1947), who produced a particularly famous Shin hanga print on the Heron Maiden in 1925, which was preceded by a painting on the same subject. Kōka’s painting here probably dates to the same period.

The dance-drama was loosely based on a popular folk tale in which a wounded white heron is rescued by a young man, and then suddenly transforms itself into a beautiful young woman. He falls in love and marries her, but he soon realizes that, despite their love, she remains the heron he saved, and that she must disappear forever. The Kabuki dance version weaves the events into a ghost story in which the actor first appears as the lonely spirit of a snow heron, which is then transformed into a beautiful woman wearing a white kimono with black obi, and a white snow hood (zukin). The white robe is actually her wedding dress, while the dark obi symbolizes death. In the dance performance, the actor’s heron-like steps reveal her true nature, and several costume changes occur in rapid sequence.

A Nihonga artist, Koka specialized in bijinga, “paintings of beauties.” He first studied with print designer and painter Ogata Gekkō (1859–1920), then graduated from the Tokyo Art School. Throughout his career, he also worked as an illustrator and print designer. As mentioned above, Kōka was a devotee of kabuki, and, beginning in 1916, he collaborated with the publisher Watanabe Shōzaburō in designing dynamic and immensely popular actor prints in the Shin hanga mode, styling himself “Toyonari.” Yet, one of his best-known color woodcuts is a self-published Dancing at the New Carlton Hotel in Shanghai, of 1924, which was an homage to the Jazz Age and one of the very first Shin hanga prints to depict modern girls (moga), albeit in China as opposed to Japan.