Geese Descending at Yoshiwara (Yoshiwara no rakugan), from the series "Eight Views of the Edo Pleasure Quarters (Edo irozato hakkei)"

From Koryusai's series Edo irozato hakkei (Eight Views of the Edo Pleasure Quarters), held by the Art Institute of Chicago and dated to about 1770 to 1772, this chuban print takes one of the classical Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang, Geese Descending on a Sandbar, and transposes it into the Yoshiwara pleasure quarter. The hakkei (eight views) convention had originated in Chinese landscape poetry in the eleventh century and had been thoroughly absorbed into Japanese visual culture by the eighteenth, where it became a flexible scaffolding for parodic re-imaginings of canonical themes. Koryusai's Edo irozato hakkei replaces the misty riverbanks of Xiao and Xiang with the lantern-lit streets of Yoshiwara, and the descending geese with a flight of motifs (visiting clients, courtesans, falling fan or letter) that signal arrival and departure. The series exemplifies his sophisticated handling of the mitate convention and his ability to give topographical and seasonal scaffoldings the cultural weight of bijin-ga.