Two Young Women Looking out at Young Man Dressed as Komuso

Two Young Women Looking out at Young Man Dressed as Komuso, designed by Isoda Koryusai in 1769, captures a familiar Edo street scene from the upper-floor window of a townhouse: two young women lean on a railing or sliding screen, gazing down at a youth disguised as a komuso, the deep wicker-hatted Fuke-sect mendicant who travelled the streets playing a shakuhachi flute and soliciting alms. The komuso costume — voluminous robes, a basket-like tengai over the head, and the bamboo flute — was popular both as a real religious habit and as a romantic disguise; in floating-world fiction, it was the classic guise of a lover travelling incognito to meet a courtesan or beloved in town. Koryusai uses the basket-hat to obscure the youth's face, leaving the women's curiosity (or recognition) as the print's dramatic engine. The composition belongs to the broad genre of street-and-window vignettes that Koryusai cultivated alongside the celebrity courtesan portraits that would culminate in the Hinagata Wakana no Hatsumoyo series of the late 1770s; together, these strands map an Edo bijin-ga repertoire reaching from the licensed quarter into the wider urban thoroughfare. The Art Institute of Chicago impression (object 89144) is a chuban nishiki-e in characteristic late-Meiwa colour: indigo and rose in the women's robes, warm ochres in the wooden architecture, and a darker keyblock for the komuso's wicker hat and flute. The image preserves Koryusai's eye for layered observation — women watching a watching man — within the disciplined surface of the polychrome print. Source: Art Institute of Chicago, https://www.artic.edu/artworks/89144.