The Actor Sanogawa Ichimatsu I looking at a guidebook to the pleasure quarters

Recorded by the Art Institute of Chicago as a color woodblock print in oban format and benizuri-e classification dated to around 1750, this image depicts the kabuki actor Sanogawa Ichimatsu I examining a guidebook to the pleasure quarters, a saiken or yujo hyobanki, the printed catalogues that ranked the courtesans of the Yoshiwara and other licensed districts. The motif of the guidebook reader was a recurring conceit in ukiyo-e because it allowed designers to nest one form of printed culture within another, with Ishikawa Toyonobu's own woodblock print depicting an actor consulting precisely the same kind of mass-market publication that connoisseurs of ukiyo-e themselves owned. Ichimatsu, the great onnagata whose checkered kimono pattern gave Japanese the word for the checkerboard motif, was the most repeatedly portrayed actor in Toyonobu's oeuvre, and this sheet places him in the meta-textual posture of consumer-as-spectacle. Benizuri-e classification confirms the use of two or three printed color blocks supplying rose pink and grass green over the black-line printing. The Art Institute print is an essential document of the print-within-the-print conceit and of the Yoshiwara guidebook culture that underwrote so much of mid-Edo ukiyo-e iconography.