Scene from the Noh Play Yoroboshi

This screen depicts a scene from the Noh play "Yoroboshi." It is color on silk with a gold ground and measures 186.4 x 406 cm. It is designated an Important Cultural Property. On the gold ground are a plum tree with widely stretching branches and white flowers, and a red setting sun. The plum spans the right and left screens, and amid the fallen blossoms a man with a cane bows his back and clasps his hands in prayer.

The subject is "Yoroboshi," which is also performed in Noh. Yoroboshi means something like a beggar monk with weak legs. Saemon-no-jo Michitoshi, regretting that he once abandoned his son, gives alms to the poor at Tennoji in Osaka in the second month, when plums bloom. There a blind youth nicknamed "Yoroboshi" comes tottering with a cane. Michitoshi realizes that the youth, who at sunset prays to the setting sun in the west as Amida Buddha, is his own son, and they return home hand in hand.

The artist, Shimomura Kanzan, was a Japanese-style painter born in Wakayama Prefecture in 1873 and died in 1930, who took on new forms of expression while building on traditional forms and techniques. Kanzan is said to have painted this picture inspired by the Garyu-bai plum tree in Sankeien Garden, and it conveys a Noh-theater mood along with faces that recall Noh masks.