It dates from the middle Yoshitoshi's career, when he was about thirty-eight, a decade before his well-known masterpieces such as his great series "One Hundred Aspects of the Moon" (1885-1892), and "New Forms of Thirty-Six Ghosts" (often called simply "Thirty-Six Ghosts") (1889-1892). Unusually for a Yoshitoshi series, the entire series came out in a very short period, of only two months.
The series contains text by Kokonsha Ujin. All the titles include the word 'tai' ('I want to').
There appear to be two editions: what is almost certainly the first has three-colour title cartouches (red, white, and green) with bokashi grading; what seems to be the second has grey title cartouches, and grey backgrounds in many of the prints. Prints from the edition with the three-colour cartouches have the printing date (in the round seal which is the usual Meiji printing information) filled in properly, but in the other ones, although the characters for 'Meiji', 'year', 'month', etc are there, the numerals have all been removed; so the date of the second is not known.
In addition, the second edition has a small cartouche alongside the printer information either left blank, or (in some prints) filled with a block. This block appears to contain a person's name - perhaps the printer of the original edition (the neighbouring small cartouche seems to contain the publisher's information, and there would be no need to delete the block-carver's name, if that's what it was).
This page (and list) is not guaranteed to be complete, although as far as we know it is; two references speak of twenty prints in this series, and we have twenty here.
The titles are given as best we currently know them; there is some confusion in our English-language sources, and we haven't been able to confirm the titles from the original Japanese. The dates for each print have also not been checked and given yet.
If you know of any prints from this series which aren't listed here, or have either i) images of the prints for which we are missing images, ii) better images than the ones below, or iii) missing information about individual prints (e.g. publisher, exact date) please let us know.
Roger. S. Keyes, "Courage and Silence: A Study of the Life and Color Woodblock Prints of Tsukioka Yoshitoshi 1839-1892", Cinncinnati, 1982where it appears as series #370; he indicated it contained 20 prints, but only gave detailed information on 14 prints of the prints in the series.
We use the Keyes numbers for the first 14, and have numbered the rest in the order in which we discovered them; the prints in the series do not appear to have any numbers on them. The three at the end are the 'missing' ones, but we don't know which is which.
| Thumbnail | Number | Date | Title | Description |
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#1 | Meiji 10 / 12 (1877/12) | I really want to go to sleep | |
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#2 | Meiji 11 / 1 (1878/1) | I want to see my face / I want to see a Kabuki play | |
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#3 | I want to drink a cup of wine | ||
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#4 | I want another drink | ||
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#5 | I want to become beautiful | ||
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#6 | I want to make it bloom early | ||
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#7 | I want it to snow more | ||
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#8 | I want to cancel my subscription / I want to strike it from the record (?) | ||
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#9 | I want to take out the good ones | ||
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#10 | I want to wash my hands (Te ga araitai) | ||
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#11 | I want to be massaged (Oshite moraitai) | ||
| Unidentified | #12 | I want someone to decide for me | ||
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#13 | I want to see it in my dreams | ||
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#14 | I want to place a dish | ||
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#15 | I want you to fight honorably (?) | ||
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#16 | I want to show you the cherry blossoms in bloom (?) / I want to become beautiful | ||
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#17 | I want to offer you sake (?) | ||
| Unidentified | #18 | |||
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#19 | I want to go abroad | ||
| Unidentified | #20 | |||
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#'21' | |||
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#'22' | |||
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#'23' |