A Parody of Yuranosuke in the Pleasure Quarters (Mitate Yuranosuke yukyo)

A Parody of Yuranosuke in the Pleasure Quarters (Mitate Yuranosuke yukyo), held by the Art Institute of Chicago, takes as its subject Oboshi Yuranosuke, the leader of the forty-seven ronin in the Kanadehon Chushingura, the celebrated kabuki and bunraku dramatization of the Ako vendetta first staged in 1748 and quickly absorbed into nearly every visual genre in Edo. The seventh act of the play is set in the Ichiriki teahouse in Kyoto's Gion district, where Yuranosuke feigns dissolute revelry with courtesans in order to lull the enemy into believing that he has abandoned the planned vengeance. Eishi's print parodies (mitate) this scene by translating it into a generic Edo pleasure-quarter setting and substituting his own slender, attenuated bijin for the kabuki dramatis personae. The conceit allowed late-eighteenth-century printmakers to deliver Chushingura content in the visual register of fashionable [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) rather than in the actor-portrait ([yakusha-e](/glossary/yakusha-e)) format that censorship intermittently constrained. Eishi's design participates in this strategy and gives him the chance to handle the Yuranosuke iconography (the lacquer cup, the seated central position among courtesans, the air of dissolute leisure) from inside his own Edo bijin-ga idiom. As a Kano-trained [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) artist, he was unusually comfortable working between dramatic, literary, and bijin-ga subjects, and the Art Institute of Chicago's impression, dated to the late eighteenth century, preserves the resulting print as part of its substantial holding of Eishi mitate compositions.