Monkey (Saru), from the series "Fashionable Twelve Signs of the Zodiac (Furyu juni shi)"

Monkey (Saru), from Isoda Koryusai's 1768 series Fashionable Twelve Signs of the Zodiac (Furyu juni shi), exemplifies the mitate strategy of mapping Chinese zodiac animals onto contemporary scenes from the floating world. Each sheet in the cycle associates one of the twelve calendrical creatures with an episode from Edo daily life, allowing Koryusai to compose a portfolio of fashionable young women and townsmen while invoking the classical zodiac as an organising conceit. In this print the Year of the Monkey is figured through a vignette involving the animal itself, most likely a tethered or performing monkey of the kind familiar from Edo street entertainments and saru-mawashi acts, observed by an elegant townswoman whose striped robe and elaborate obi mark her as a participant in the urban consumer culture Koryusai catalogued throughout his career. Working in dialogue with Suzuki Harunobu's recently invented nishiki-e, Koryusai gives the figure the slender 1760s proportions then in vogue, while already pushing toward the more solid bodies and confident graphic outlines that would characterise his Edo bijin-ga of the 1770s and his later, oversized Hinagata Wakana courtesan portraits. The Art Institute of Chicago impression (object 21168) is a chuban-format colour woodblock with finely registered pinks, yellows and indigos and the kentou registration marks typical of mid-Meiwa-era publishing. As one of twelve scenes, it would have been collected by Edo connoisseurs both as a fashionable image and as a complete zodiacal set, demonstrating Koryusai's early command of serial design built around classical schemata. Source: Art Institute of Chicago, https://www.artic.edu/artworks/21168.