#muzan-e

muzan-e (yamanouchi, 1999)

gore is an art form in which the subject matter is being subjected to extreme physical trauma or death. The growing modern trend of gore began in Japan during the 1920s and is named ero guro, but the act of gore in artwork can be traced back further to the muzan-e 'bloody prints' from the 1800 japan.

THE MUZAN-E:

The muzan-e are a series of Japanese wood prints of violent nature which are credited as the first pieces of gore art. The prints where created in the edo and meiji periods which were the times in Japan where art was so popular that the military had to take over the country. One of the earliest pieces from the muzan-e is the collection '28 famous murders with verse' from the 1800s which depicts everything from cannibalism to beastiality. These pieces are extremely prevalent in Japanese culture as they are used to depict yokai which are japanese spirits that control everything about their lifestyles.

ERO GURO:

Modern Muzan-E by Maruo Suehiro

Suehiro Maruo, a manga artist whose works are heavily influenced by the original woodcuts, and artist Kazuichi Hanawa, created a modern version of the Muzan-e in 1988 with an art book entitled Bloody Ukiyo-e. While just as bloody and disturbing as the collection it is based on, Bloody Ukiyo-e also show cases a higher degree of full frontal nudity, sexual perversion and includes pop-culture references and modern real life events, such as painting a gun wielding Marc Bolan as a mercenary or the suicide of Adolf Hitler. -from Wiki

The Muzan-e, also known as the 'Bloody Prints', refers to Japanese woodcut prints of violent nature published in the late Edo period and Meiji Period.

One of the earliest and most well-known examples is the collection Twenty-Eight Famous Murders with Verse (英名二十八衆句 eimei nijūhasshūku?) by the artists Yoshitoshi and Yoshiiku from the 1860s, which depicted several gruesome acts of murder or torture based on historical events or scenes in Kabuki plays.[1][2]

Although most of the works are solely violent by nature, it is perhaps the first known example of ero guro or the erotic grotesque in Japanese culture, an art sub-genre which depicts either erotic or extreme images of violence and mutilation. The Muzan-e has influenced many modern day art formats and ero guro can be found in manga with the works of Suehiro Maruo, Shintaro Kago or Toshio Maeda; in many live action films such as the pink film movement and most of the works of director Takashi Miike and even non-Japanese artists such as Trevor Brown.

No. 4: 御所五郎蔵 (Gosho Gorozō Battling a Shadow)

Series: 英名二十八衆句 (Twenty-eight Famous Murders with Verse)

Centre: 「関口屋伴蔵　尾上菊五郎」 

Left: 「怪談牡丹燈篭」「半蔵妻みね　坂東しう調」 

Depiction of scene from Botan Dōrō, Peony Lantern (牡丹燈籠)

  Otogi Boko version　

On the first night of Obon, a beautiful woman and a young girl holding a peony lantern stroll by the house of the widowed samurai Ogiwara Shinnojo. Ogiwara is instantly smitten with the woman, named Otsuyu, and vows an eternal relationship. From that night onward, the woman and the girl visit at dusk, always leaving before dawn. An elderly neighbor, suspicious of the girl, peeks into his home and finds Ogiwara in bed with a skeleton. Consulting a Buddhist priest, Ogiwara finds that he is in danger unless he can resist the woman, and he places a protection charm on his house. The woman is then unable to enter his house, but calls him from outside. Finally, unable to resist, Ogiwara goes out to greet her, and is led back to her house, a grave in a temple. In the morning, Ogiwara’s dead body is found entwined with the woman’s skeleton.   

「近世人物誌」「やまと新聞附録」　「第十一」「花井お梅」 

(Lives of modern people, a supplement of the Yamato newspaper: no. 11,  Oume Hanai)

"Hanai Oume, who formerly had been a geisha under other names, was the owner of the Suigetsu restaurant in Tokyo. The night of June 9, 1887, she killed a man named Kamekichi on the banks of the Sumida River and afterward was arrested and charged with murder. Oume pled in court that she had been refusing Kamekichi's advances for some time, that he had attacked her in the dark with a knife, and that she had killed him in self-defense. The prosecution charged that the couple had been violent lovers, that Oume was a woman with a violent temperament, that Kamekichi had become increasingly parasitic, and that she had premeditated the murder. Oume was sentenced by the court to life imprisonment. The trial made her a celebrity, and a play and a novel were written about her. She was paroled from prison in 1903 and from that time supported herself through public recitations of her story. Yoshitoshi's print was published about two months after the murder as the eleventh in a series of twenty pictures of contemporary figures, issued as supplements by the Yamato Newspaper. This was Yoshitoshi's last set of Ònewspaper printsÓ [...]. The text at the top of the print presents a brief biography of Oume and a resume of the two theories of her guilt, concluding that one way or another, Òshe was certainly an extraordinary woman.Ó Details in the figure's presentation show that Yoshitoshi was clearly convinced that the murder was in self-defense. Oume could neither have concealed nor held a knife before the meeting: she has dropped from her hands the umbrella and the lantern bearing the name of her restaurant, and a folded piece of cloth has fallen from the only place she could conceal a weapon, the pocket formed by the overlap of her robe across her chest. Also, the lantern is slashed indicating that she held it up to protect herself. How she tore the knife from her assailant the artist left us to guess, but he obviously sympathized with her cool determination to finish of the hapless Kamekichi once and for all rather than risk a later attack."