The Courtesan Kaoru of Chojiya Looking Down at a Love Letter on the Floor

The Courtesan Kaoru of Chojiya Looking Down at a Love Letter on the Floor, designed by Isoda Koryusai in 1768, names one of the celebrated oiran of the Chojiya house in the Yoshiwara and presents her in a single, charged narrative moment: a folded letter, presumably amorous, has just been delivered or has tumbled to the matting, and Kaoru stoops slightly to read its inscription. Koryusai uses the device of the letter to motivate the bend of the courtesan's body, allowing him to display the long sweep of her uchikake, the elaborate bow of her front-tied obi and the bristling array of kanzashi hair ornaments that proclaim her rank. By naming Kaoru, the print belongs to the celebrity-portrait current of Yoshiwara nishiki-e — the same tradition that Koryusai would carry to its definitive expression in the Hinagata Wakana no Hatsumoyo series of the late 1770s, in which each named courtesan poses in a seasonal fashion. The mitate background here is the long literary tradition of love-letters as emblems of unspoken longing in classical waka and Heian monogatari, recast in Edo bijin-ga terms. The Art Institute of Chicago impression (object 23062) is a chuban nishiki-e with carefully balanced indigo, rose and mustard, the keyblock outlines firm and the textile patterns picked out with cherry-block colour separations characteristic of late-1760s printing. The print exemplifies Koryusai's ability to combine portrait identification, narrative incident and fashionable display into a single Yoshiwara image of the kind that drove the early commercial market for nishiki-e. Source: Art Institute of Chicago, https://www.artic.edu/artworks/23062.