"Chi": Musashi Plain, from the series "Tales of Ise in Fashionable Brocade Pictures (Furyu nishiki-e Ise monogatari)"

From Katsukawa Shunsho's series Tales of Ise in Fashionable Brocade Pictures (Furyu nishiki-e Ise monogatari), this plate marked Chi illustrates the Musashi Plain episode of the tenth-century Ise monogatari, the foundational work of Japanese courtly literature. The series, held in the Art Institute of Chicago, dates from the late 1760s and is one of Shunsho's important early ventures in nishiki-e, the polychrome brocade printing technique that had been newly perfected in Edo around 1765. Each plate is keyed to a syllable of the iroha poem, the traditional Japanese pangram, and Shunsho recasts the canonical Ise scenes in contemporary fashion, a furyu or modish updating that was characteristic of mid-eighteenth-century Edo ukiyo-e. The Musashi Plain episode tells of the protagonist eloping with his beloved across the expansive grasses of the plain east of Kyoto, pursued by her family; Shunsho's version transposes the Heian lovers into figures dressed in the elegant kimono of his own day. The series demonstrates Shunsho's command of a register quite distinct from the yakusha-e on which Katsukawa school fame chiefly rested, showing him as a designer comfortable with classical narrative and the refined bijin idiom. The Furyu nishiki-e Ise monogatari is among the most ambitious of his non-actor projects and a key reference for the breadth of his Edo ukiyo-e output.