The Six Immortal Poets (Rokkasen), from the series "Collection of Comic Performances from the Niwaka Festival in the Pleasure Quarters (Seiro niwaka kyogen zukushi)"

The Six Immortal Poets by Isoda Koryusai belongs to the series Seiro Niwaka Kyogen Zukushi, a Collection of Comic Performances from the Niwaka Festival in the Pleasure Quarters, in which the amateur theatricals staged annually in the Yoshiwara are documented as a kind of cultural calendar. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves the impression that records this design, dating it to 1771. The print stages a parody of the canonical Rokkasen, the six poets of the Heian period whose verses anchored the imperial anthologies and whose images had been recopied for centuries in waka tradition. Here courtesans and their young attendants take on the roles of the six poets, replacing the imperial court with the licensed quarter and the gravity of classical poetry with the spirited tone of the Niwaka festival. The substitution is the heart of the joke and the heart of the artistry: Koryusai's audience would have recognized each poet's traditional attributes even as those attributes were carried by women of the Yoshiwara. The print belongs to the same broader project as the celebrated series Hinagata Wakana Hatsu Moyo, in which Koryusai's Edo bijin-ga incorporated layers of classical reference into the commercial print, and it confirms his standing as one of the most ambitious designers of parodic ukiyo-e in the decade after Suzuki Harunobu's death.