Two Young Women Playing Cat's Cradle

This chuban-format print of about 1769, in the Art Institute of Chicago, depicts two young women absorbed in a game of ayatori, the string figure game known in English as cat's cradle. The pastime, played with a loop of cord stretched between fingers in increasingly elaborate configurations, was a staple of Edo girls' leisure and a recurring subject in eighteenth-century bijin-ga. Koryusai uses the visual interest of the taut, intersecting cord lines to organize the composition, threading them between the two figures like a vertical bridge that joins them at the center of the print. The result is one of his most quietly elegant double-figure studies. Stylistically, the print sits firmly in the late Harunobu idiom that Koryusai had absorbed completely by the end of the 1760s, with slim figures, delicate facial features, and soft pastel registration that emphasize the intimacy and concentration of the scene.