The images of warriors presented in the previous section should in no way be taken as representative of the typical output of the early ukiyo-e artists. In fact, with the exception of book illustration, in which warriors were quite frequently depicted, the amount of warrior pieces in any eighteenth century print designers' work failed to rise above even 5%, and in most cases much less, until the artist Katsukawa Shuntei made them his specialty in the 1790's. On the other hand, almost every major artist dabbled in the depiction of warriors at one time or another, but these prints did not seem to catch the public imagination as did those of Yoshiwara beauties (bijin-ga) and the kabuki theater (yakusha-e). Three important exceptions to this general rule are to be found in images of Tomoe Gozen, Yoshitsune and Atsumori, which taken together comprise the majority of musha-e in the eighteenth century. Unlike the fierce warriors of early depictions, however, all three were imbued with a courtly nobility and a feminine form of beauty. In point of fact, many of the depictions of Atsumori and Yoshitsune, like some early yakusha-e, were bijin-ga of another sort, with homoerotic implications directed at the nanshoku ("male love") contingent of the mass market. As in the nanshoku ideal, each of these "beautiful youths" has a grizzled, tough and experienced counterpart, Benkei for Yoshitsune, Kumagae no Naozane for Atsumori. In some depictions of them, these implications are subtle, or even absent, but others make the nanshoku connection explicitly clear. Though certainly not the only reason for the popularity of these two figures in the eighteenth century, the erotic depictions of Atsumori and Yoshitsune represent a further domesticization (or perhaps "urbanization") and softening of the image of the hard warrior in his submersion into the world of (bi)sexual pleasure.

     Of the mere handful of warrior prints in the thousand-plus printed works of the first full-color print master, Suzuki Harunobu, at least three are representations of Atsumori. One is a paired set of pillar prints typical of most eighteenth century portraits, with Atsumori on the left sheet, turning his horse in the ocean to face Kumagae, on the right sheet, who calls to him from the shore. Only one sheet of this diptych remains, but the composition is quite similar to the pair of prints on the upper left by the minor 1720's artist Kiyoharu, the earliest extant single-sheet prints on the Atsumori theme, and no doubt a version of those which set the standard for depictions in the eighteenth century. Far more striking are Harunobu's other Atsumori compositions, depicted here to either side. The left, dating from c.1766, shows Atsumori and Kumagae not by the seaside but secluded in a valley grove. Whereas the traditional depiction of these warriors has Kumagae on top of Atsumori, hesitant to take his life, as in the rather typical image to the top right by Harunobu's pupil Koryûsai, here it is the grizzled warrior down on one knee before the beautiful youth, tugging on his armor and apparently pleading for his sexual assent, as he looks guiltily over his shoulder at his approaching comrades. The leering eye of the horse seems to provide a knowing third-person commentary on the scene. A later print of c.1768 to the immediate right repeats the theme once more, with the elements reduced and the players enlarged for focused effect. Once more it is the elder warrior Kumagae, overcome by the youth's beauty, who falls to his knees to implore him, raising a fan with a red circle that may be as much an erotic symbol suggesting the nature of his desire as a personal emblem.

     Certainly not all of the Atsumori woodblocks are as direct about the homoerotic implications of the scene. Quite to the contrary, in other prints, Atsumori is depicted as an ideal heterosexual lover. In this pillar print on the immediate left by Harunobu's pupil Koryûsai, for example, it is a woman, Atsumori's fiance Tamaori Hime, who kneels before him, unwilling to let him go off into battle. She clings to the explicitly phallic horn of his helmet, as he raises a hand to restrain her. The scene is similar to that of other prints depicting a courtesan unwilling to let her customer slip off in the early morning. In the print to the lower right, by Okamura Toshinobu in the 1740's, Atsumori is depicted completely out of his ordinary context, but for a painting of a wave in the background to suggest the shore at Ichinotani. Here it is not Kumagae that he grapples with, but a Yoshiwara courtesan, as another courtesan comes up to hail them like one of Kumagae's comrades. The title of the print, with erotic puns, reads "Onna Ichinotani MuchEno Atsumori" ("Atsumori Lost in the Single Valley of Woman"). The joke here is apparently that Atsumori, like Kumagae, is so absorbed in his single-minded attack that he fails to hear the second courtesan's approach. Like several other eighteenth century popular images of warriors, this print is likely a subtle dig at the samurai of Toshinobu's own day, who were depicted as lacking that suave coolness of the chônin man-about-the-town, the masculine ideal of the eighteenth century.

     Whether they be hetero- or homoerotic however, what is important about these depictions of Atsumori in the eighteenth century is that they utterly disavow the traditional place and historical role given to the warrior, instead incorporating him completely, and playfully, into the ethos of sexual love of the time. Fully aware of the powerful misreadings of national history they are making, these artists exult in the absurdity of their parodies, neither respecting the past, nor the figures exalted as heroic role models, but raising instead the hedonistic values of the chônin as a scope though which both the past and all given systems can be revisioned. As such, these prints stand in stark contrast to those of the nineteenth century, which, as I will now attempt to demonstrate, sought to mold the values of the age to the way of the warriors, rather than the warriors to the age. In so doing, a pious view of national history was upraised, and the old heroes revived, the past brought to life but at the expense of the present. And as I hope to demonstrate, at great costs to the future as well.

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