Ono no Komachi at Seki Temple, from the series The Seven Fashionable Komachi (Furyu nana Komachi)

From the series Furyu Nana Komachi (Seven Fashionable Komachi), in the Art Institute of Chicago and dated to about 1771, this chuban print represents Ono no Komachi at Sekidera, one of the seven canonical legendary episodes from the life of the Heian-period poet. The Sekidera episode shows the aged Komachi recalling her former beauty to a young temple priest, and the iconography of Komachi as an aged figure had long been a counterweight in classical Japanese visual culture to the more familiar image of Komachi as paragon of feminine beauty. Koryusai, following the mitate (parody) convention that dominated his bijin-ga of this period, transposes the episode into the visual idiom of contemporary Edo, casting Komachi as a fashionable young woman whose pose only obliquely references the classical narrative. The series gathers all seven Komachi episodes into a unified visual program and shows Koryusai's deep engagement with classical Japanese literature as a scaffolding for fashion-system bijin-ga.