"Na": Nunobiki Waterfall, from the series "Tales of Ise in Fashionable Brocade Pictures (Furyu nishiki-e Ise monogatari)"

Designed by Katsukawa Shunsho around 1767, this color woodblock print is part of the series Tales of Ise in Fashionable Brocade Pictures, Furyu Nishiki-e Ise Monogatari, with sheets organised by the syllables of the Japanese phonetic order. The syllable Na is keyed here to the Nunobiki Waterfall, a celebrated cascade in the Settsu region that figures in the classical Ise Monogatari as the setting for a poem comparing the fall's white water to scattered pearls. Shunsho translates the literary motif into the visual idiom of Edo ukiyo-e, casting his figures in contemporary dress and using the waterfall as a vertical compositional spine that organises the figural drama. The mid-eighteenth century had recently seen the perfection of full-color nishiki-e printing, and the series gave Shunsho and his publisher a chance to showcase the medium's capacity for elegant patterned robes and atmospheric landscape effects. While Shunsho would soon redefine yakusha-e through his leadership of the Katsukawa school, the Ise Monogatari cycle demonstrates his comfort with classical literary subject matter that flattered well-read patrons. The print is preserved at the Art Institute of Chicago, where it documents the early flowering of the nishiki-e medium in Edo and Shunsho's place among the designers who carried classical Japanese literature into the everyday visual culture of the period.