Fidelity (Shin), from the series "A Fashionable Parody of the Five Virtues (Furyu yatsushi gojo)"

Fidelity by Isoda Koryusai is a plate from the series Furyu Yatsushi Gojo, A Fashionable Parody of the Five Virtues, in which the five Confucian virtues of benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and fidelity are reimagined through scenes from the Yoshiwara. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves the impression that documents this design, dating it to 1771. The Confucian Five Virtues had long served as the moral backbone of East Asian education, and Edo audiences were thoroughly familiar with their attributes and their canonical embodiments. Koryusai's series transposes those virtues onto the licensed quarter, where each virtue is illustrated through the conduct of a courtesan or her customer, and the joke lies in the unexpected fit between Confucian gravitas and Yoshiwara reality. Shin, fidelity, is the most demanding of the five virtues in the courtesan world, where ritualized constancy was both a marketing claim and an emotional aspiration, and Koryusai treats the theme with characteristic restraint. The print belongs to the same broader practice of cultural parody that defined his Edo bijin-ga, including the celebrated Hinagata Wakana Hatsu Moyo series, and it demonstrates how thoroughly he had absorbed the polite humor of Edo's educated audience by the early 1770s. The work helps establish the intellectual range of Koryusai's parodic prints and the literary self-consciousness of the Yoshiwara market in his decade.