The Day of Starting (Kotohajime), from the series "The Fashionable Five Days of Starting (Furyu go kotohajime)"

The Day of Starting (Kotohajime), from Isoda Koryusai's 1768 series Fashionable Five Days of Starting (Furyu go kotohajime), addresses the five auspicious "first days" of the New Year calendar — the days on which Edo households formally inaugurated cooking, sewing, water-drawing and other practical arts of the new year. Koryusai recasts each of these calendrical observances as an elegant tableau of young women in seasonal kosode, allowing the series to function simultaneously as an almanac, a fashion catalogue and a parade of bijin-ga types. In this sheet the kotohajime ceremony is figured through a vignette of a townswoman engaged in a ritual gesture of the new year — handling a tray, lighting a brazier, or beginning a household task — observed at close, intimate range. The mitate of calendrical custom became one of Koryusai's most fertile devices, and the visual logic developed here would carry directly into his great Hinagata Wakana no Hatsumoyo series of the late 1770s, where seasonal robes mark the rhythms of the Yoshiwara year. Working in the wake of Suzuki Harunobu's death in 1770, Koryusai was emerging as the dominant designer of refined Edo bijin-ga, and the elongated proportions, soft palette and tightly integrated patterning of this print exemplify his Meiwa-era manner. The Art Institute of Chicago impression (object 36281) is a chuban nishiki-e with delicate registration of indigo, mustard, and rose, embossed key-block detail in the textile patterns, and the soft mica-like surface typical of high-quality 1760s printing. Source: Art Institute of Chicago, https://www.artic.edu/artworks/36281.