Hinaji of the Chojiya, from the series "Fuji-bumi (Folded Love-letters)"

This Edo ukiyo-e print by Ippitsusai Buncho portrays Hinaji of the Chōjiya as a sheet in the bijin-ga series Fuji-bumi, 'Folded Love-letters.' The Art Institute of Chicago preserves the impression and identifies its place within the series. The Chōjiya was among the prominent houses of the Yoshiwara, and the series concept — pairing the elongated proportions of a folded letter with the elongated, vertical figure of a named courtesan — allowed Buncho to assemble a printed register of leading women of the licensed quarter under a unifying decorative conceit. Hinaji is presented in his customary manner: a single tall figure occupying the sheet, the outer robe treated as a broad patterned field, the obi tied at the front in the convention of high-ranking courtesans, and the face drawn with the finer linework that allowed Edo viewers to recognize one celebrated woman from another. Within Buncho's career the Fuji-bumi prints are valuable because they show his portrait sensibility — generally remembered through his yakusha-e — adapted to the parallel world of the Yoshiwara, where named individuals likewise needed to be made visible to a printed audience. As a piece of mid-1760s Edo ukiyo-e the sheet thus performs several functions at once: it celebrates a specific working figure of the pleasure quarter, advertises the house that employed her, and offers buyers a refined decorative print whose conceit of a folded love-letter linked the everyday business of romantic correspondence to the elevated tradition of named-beauty portraiture.