Fūryū sugatae hyakunin isshu

Fūryū sugatae hyakunin isshu—the Stylish Portrait Pictures for the One Hundred Poets—is an illustrated edition of the famous Hyakunin isshu poem anthology designed by Hishikawa Moronobu and held at the Art Institute of Chicago. The Hyakunin isshu, compiled by Fujiwara no Teika in the thirteenth century, pairs one poem each from a hundred classical poets, and by Moronobu's day it had become the most widely memorized literary work in Japan, taught in households and turned into the foundation of the popular karuta card game. Moronobu's contribution was to bring this classical canon into the modern Edo picture book: each poem is matched with a generous illustration of its author and a scene drawn from the poem's imagery or biographical lore. The portraits adopt up-to-date Edo body types and dress conventions—hence the fūryū, or 'stylish,' modifier in the title—rather than archaic court costume, anchoring the ancient text in contemporary visual taste. The line is crisp, the compositions horizontal and uncluttered, and the figures rendered with the confident outlining that became Hishikawa Moronobu's calling card. As the [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) founder, Moronobu used this project to argue that classical poetry belonged within the visual repertoire of early Edo ukiyo-e on equal footing with theater and the pleasure quarters. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves the volume as evidence of how he expanded ukiyo-e from amusement into a vehicle for serious literary culture in late seventeenth-century Edo.