Parody of the Letter-Reading Scene in Chushingura

This hashira-e (pillar print) color woodblock print at the Art Institute of Chicago is a parody (mitate-e) of the famous letter-reading scene from Chushingura, the kabuki and joruri retelling of the historic Ako vendetta of 1701-1703. In the original ninth-act letter-reading scene, the loyal retainer Yuranosuke reads a secret message, often watched from concealed positions by other characters in a tense moment of dramatic suspense. Shuncho transposes the scene into a contemporary domestic register, substituting fashionable Edo women in his characteristic Tenmei manner for the kabuki samurai of the source narrative. The mitate-e genre, central to Tenmei-era ukiyo-e, depended on the viewer's immediate recognition of the source: the joke of the parody is that the iconic male-coded dramatic situation has been reinhabited by elegant townswomen. The hashira-e format, with its extreme vertical compression, made the parody all the more virtuosic, forcing Shuncho to stage the scene in a column of paper that left no room for spatial excess.