Horie monogatari emaki (Illustrated Tale of Horie)

This elaborately colored handscroll, with almost overbearing ornamentation, is one of a set of scrolls known as the “Matabei-type handscrolls.” Its artist Iwasa Matabei was born the son of Araki Murashige, a military general during the Sengoku (Warring States) period. A year after his birth, nearly his entire family was slaughtered at the hands of the warlord Oda Nobunaga (1534–1582); however, the infant Matabei was rescued and taken to Kyoto to be raised as a painter. At around the age of forty, Matabei moved to Echizen province (present-day Fukui prefecture)
to serve under the provincial lords Matsudaira Tadamasa and Tadaaki. It was during this period that he is thought to have produced the Matabeitype handscrolls.
The sometimes gruesome scenes depicted in the paintings in this work resonate with the artist’s own personal history. These scrolls depict the Tale of Horie ( J. Horie monogatari), a prose narrative (otogi zōshi) dating back to the Muromachi period. It relates the story of a young man, named Tsukiwaka, seeking revenge
on those who had killed his parents when he was a child. The best-known version of this tale, a twelve-scroll set in the MOA Museum, is actually an abbreviated version of the story. The Kyoto National Museum scroll comes from an earlier
twenty-scroll set, of which six scrolls are known to have survived: three in the Kōsetsu Museum, one in a private collection in Mie prefecture, one in Chōkoku-ji Temple in Nagano prefecture, and this volume in the Kyoto National Museum.
The KNM scroll, which directly precedes the final scroll of the series (owned by Chōkokuji), depicts the climax of the entire narrative, in which the main character finally avenges the death of his parents.