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

From Koryusai's series Furyu juni shi (Fashionable Twelve Signs of the Zodiac), in the Art Institute of Chicago and dated to about 1770 to 1772, this chuban print represents the Snake, the sixth animal in the twelve-year Chinese-Japanese zodiac cycle. The series, like Koryusai's parallel twelve-months sequences, used a calendrical framework as a scaffolding for bijin-ga, transposing each zodiac animal into a contemporary Edo setting and pairing it with a fashionable young woman. The Snake design plays the iconography of the serpent against the elegance of the bijin in characteristic mitate (parody) fashion, the snake legible as both literal zodiac referent and as a small narrative motif within the figural scene. The juni-shi (twelve zodiac) series gave Koryusai another structured opening for his prolific An'ei-era output and is among the more inventive of his calendrical projects.