Nozarashi Gosuke is a fictional character who first appeared in a novel published in 1809, Honchō suibodai zenden (literally The Altar of Drunkenness in Japan, with wordplay on the Japanese title of the translated Water Margin), written by Santō Kyōden (1761–1816) and illustrated by Utagawa Toyokuni (1769–1825), the teacher of both Kuniyoshi and Kunisada. In the story, Gosuke is a disciple of the great Zen master Ikkyū Sōjun (1394–1481), but he only spends half of each month serving in the temple. The other half of the month he roams as an unruly otokodate, or street knight, a term for a fashionable, streetwise young man who uses his martial arts skills to fight oppression. The character was so appealing that he appeared in a number of kabuki plays as well, but Kuniyoshi presents him here as a “real,” historical personage, one of a set of ten. Ikkyū was known for carrying a skull on a stick to remind those around him of the evanescence of human life, and Gosuke echoes this teaching by wearing a black kimono with a pattern of skulls. Upon close inspection, the skulls are revealed to be made up of clusters of cats and kittens, an inside joke by cat-loving Kuniyoshi. Skulls also appear on the purple priest’s cape that Gosuke wears draped over the black kimono, but these skulls are made of lotus leaves. Finally, a worn wooden clog dangles from the hilt of Gosuke’s sword, with strands of grass threaded through the skull-like holes for the thongs, so that it parodies Ikkyū’s skull on a stick.

(Sarah E. Thompson, from MFA Publications, Kuniyoshi X Kunisada (2017), pp. 226-7.)

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