The Flying Down of Wild Geese at Yoshiwara

The Flying Down of Wild Geese at Yoshiwara by Isoda Koryusai is a sophisticated mitate-e that grafts one of the canonical Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang onto the licensed pleasure quarters of Edo. In the Chinese landscape series, the Wild Geese Descending refers to flocks settling on the sandbanks of the Xiang River; Koryusai relocates the motif to the Yoshiwara, where the descending geese become a metaphor for the procession of clients and courtesans through the quarter's nightly entertainments. The Metropolitan Museum of Art preserves the impression that documents this design, dating it to around 1770, in the period of Koryusai's most ambitious mitate-e production. The substitution depends on the audience's ability to hold both the classical Chinese reference and the contemporary Edo bijin-ga subject in mind simultaneously, a layered intelligence that defined the polite humor of late eighteenth-century Edo. The print belongs to the same broader series of fashionable Edo views in which Koryusai parodies the Xiao-Xiang landscapes, and it complements the courtesan portraits of his celebrated series Hinagata Wakana Hatsu Moyo by treating the Yoshiwara not as a stage for individual stars but as a self-contained landscape with its own seasons and weathers. For collectors, the design is a fine example of how Koryusai used the apparatus of Chinese poetic landscape to celebrate the pleasure quarter at the heart of Edo cultural life.