Settsu, from the series "Fashionable Six Jewel Rivers (Furyu Mu Tamagawa)"

Settsu, from Isoda Koryusai's series Fashionable Six Jewel Rivers (Furyu Mu Tamagawa), is a 1767 design held at the Art Institute of Chicago. Like the other prints in the cycle, it transposes one of the six poetically celebrated Tamagawa rivers — in this case the Tamagawa of Settsu, conventionally associated with the imagery of plum and the Mitsu mooring — into a contemporary genre tableau peopled by elegant Edo figures. Koryusai sets the scene at the river's edge, where stylized water, riverbank vegetation, and an architectural fragment or two provide just enough indication of place to evoke the poetic referent. The figures themselves are rendered in his early mature bijin-ga manner: contour-driven, attentive to textile pattern, and arranged in a measured rhythmic spacing along the surface. By aligning a classical waka theme with the pictorial vocabulary of contemporary Edo bijin-ga, Koryusai invited educated viewers to oscillate between recognition of poetic allusion and pleasure in fashionable detail. This dual operation prefigures the strategy of his later, more famous series Hinagata Wakana no Hatsumoyo, which lavished similar attention on the courtesan parade while quietly retaining a structural debt to classical sequencing. Settsu also exemplifies how the Furyu Mu Tamagawa set worked cumulatively: each sheet acquired additional resonance when viewed beside its five companions, the six rivers forming a kind of geographic and poetic round. As a single-sheet survivor of that polyphonic project, the print preserves a chapter in Koryusai's experiments with classical literary frameworks, the same experiments that would shape his later career.