Mochizuki: Kaidomaru with His Animal Companions Catching a Small Tengu with a Limed Stick, no. 26 from the series The Sixty-nine Stations of the Kisokaidō

In his series The Sixty-Nine Stations of the Kisokaidō, Utagawa Kuniyoshi gives a grand tour of the Japanese imagination in the mid-19th century by pairing scenes from history, legend, fiction, and drama with landscape vignettes. Though often focused on the samurai and/or actor classes, Kuniyoshi also uses legends to explore nature outside of human contact. This print portrays Kaidōmaru, the child superhero more commonly known as Kintarō. A popular topic in prints, he is often depicted in red or orange, symbolizing his strength and energy. This supernatural child of the Thunder God and Yamauba (Mountain Witch) grows up with the forest animals—bears, rabbits, monkeys—as his playmates. Here, Kaidōmaru and his animal friends thrust a pole covered with a sticky substance called birdlime into trees to catch song birds. Instead of a bird, however, they accidentally capture a baby Tengu: a half-bird, half-man, mountain goblin. This humorous scene makes an elaborate pun on the name of the town Mochizuki, whose name sounds like birdlime (torimochi) and “a thrust” (tsuki). The town, depicted in the inset landscape, was located on an historic highway between the cities of Edo and Kyoto.