Shamisen, Plectrum and a Book

Shamisen, Plectrum and a Book is an unusual still-life-style composition in Chobunsai Eishi's repertoire, a quiet arrangement of objects that nevertheless carries strong human associations. The Metropolitan Museum of Art preserves this impression, in which a shamisen, the three-stringed instrument central to Yoshiwara and theatrical music, lies beside its plectrum and an open book, the latter likely a songbook or popular literary work. The absence of a figure makes the print all the more evocative: any viewer familiar with Edo bijin-ga would immediately read the assembled objects as the props of an absent geisha or courtesan, whose presence is implied by the careful disposition of her tools. In this respect, the print belongs to the tradition of furyū still life that became fashionable in the late eighteenth century, when poets and artists treated everyday objects as carriers of mood and memory. The clean contour lines, the restraint of color, and the use of expanses of pale paper to frame the objects all reflect Eishi's Kano-trained ukiyo-e formation under Kano Eisen-in. He brings to the design the same disciplined drawing he would apply to a figure print, but applies it here to the curving body of the shamisen and the calm flatness of the book's pages. Chobunsai Eishi thus extends his bijin-ga sensibility from human subject to inanimate prop, suggesting that the entire world of the pleasure quarter could be evoked through a few carefully chosen items resting in elegant equilibrium.