Naniwaya Okita and Takashima Ohisa playing a game of ken

Naniwaya Okita and Takashima Ohisa playing a game of ken, dated 1788 in the Art Institute of Chicago, brings together two of the most celebrated young women of late eighteenth-century Edo: Okita of the Naniwaya teahouse near Asakusa and Ohisa of the Takashimaya senbei shop in Ryōgoku. Both were so-called kanban-musume, daughters of merchant houses whose beauty had become almost public property and a fixture of [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) portraiture. Chōbunsai Eishi shows them in the midst of ken, a hand-gesture game popular at the time, the kind of intimate scene that turns named celebrities into participants in a contemporary leisure subject. The composition reflects the Chobunsai school's preference for elongated proportions, long sustained contours, and a restrained palette that places weight on patterned textiles. Eishi's training in the Kano studio of Eisen'in Michinobu gave him the spatial discipline visible in the careful triangulation of the figures and the calm intervals between them. The print is also valuable as a document of celebrity culture in 1780s Edo: Okita and Ohisa were the subjects of competing print campaigns by Kitagawa Utamaro and others, and Eishi's inclusion of them in a single sheet aligns him with that broader contest of [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) while preserving his own cooler, more aristocratic register. The Art Institute of Chicago records the impression's 1788 date and the identification of both subjects, making it a particularly clear instance of Eishi's engagement with the famous beauties of his moment.