Momiji no ga, from the series "A Fashionable Parody of the Tale of Genji (Furyu yatsushi Genji)"

Momiji no ga, from the series A Fashionable Parody of the Tale of Genji (Furyu yatsushi Genji), held by the Art Institute of Chicago, is part of one of Chobunsai Eishi's most ambitious projects: a full set of yatsushi-Genji prints in which each chapter of Murasaki Shikibu's eleventh-century novel is recast in the dress and setting of contemporary Edo. Momiji no ga, Beneath the Autumn Leaves, is the chapter in which the young Genji and his rival To no Chujen perform the Sea of the Blue Waves dance before the emperor, and Eishi's parody translates this courtly tableau into a present-day scene of fashionable figures arranged among autumn maple leaves. The yatsushi format was characteristic of late-eighteenth-century Edo bijin-ga: an audience already familiar with the chapter outline of Genji could read each scene as a kind of visual rebus, identifying the classical subject through the choice of season, attribute, and figure grouping. Eishi was particularly well-suited to such projects. Trained originally in the Kano studio of Eisen'in Michinobu, he had a deep familiarity with the long pictorial tradition of Genji-e and could adapt its iconography to the floating-world idiom with unusual fluency. The Art Institute of Chicago's impression preserves the soft palette and slender, attenuated figures that mark his mature manner; the design exemplifies the cultivated, literary wing of his Edo bijin-ga, in which classical reference and Yoshiwara fashion become indistinguishable parts of a single image.