Young Woman Throwing a Ball at a Young Man

Young Woman Throwing a Ball at a Young Man, designed by Isoda Koryusai in 1769, captures the playful violence of a small, domestic incident: a young woman, her arm extended in mid-throw, hurls a temari ball at a youth who twists or ducks out of its trajectory. Koryusai uses the gesture to compose a tightly choreographed Edo bijin-ga: the woman's body extends through a long diagonal, her sleeves billowing back with the motion, while the boy's body curves in response, the ball suspended in flight between them. The thrown ball stands in a long tradition of erotic and emotional play in floating-world imagery, in which small acts of mock aggression — pinches, slaps, splashed water — encode flirtation and unspoken desire. The print belongs to the moment around 1769 when, in the wake of Suzuki Harunobu's death, Koryusai was emerging as the leading designer of refined nishiki-e Edo bijin-ga; his command of body language here anticipates the narrative individuation he would later use to distinguish each named courtesan in the Hinagata Wakana no Hatsumoyo series of the late 1770s for the publisher Nishimuraya Yohachi. The Art Institute of Chicago impression (object 36153) is a chuban colour woodblock with warm reds and indigos in the figures' kimonos, a soft yellow background, and the temari ball rendered in finely cut concentric segments. The print's combination of narrative incident, kinetic body design and refined patterning exemplifies Koryusai's confident handling of the early polychrome medium as a vehicle for the small, observed dramas of Edo townspeople's lives. Source: Art Institute of Chicago, https://www.artic.edu/artworks/36153.