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

Plate Ni from Katsukawa Shunsho's series Tales of Ise in Fashionable Brocade Pictures (Furyu nishiki-e Ise monogatari) illustrates the famous Akutagawa episode of the tenth-century Ise monogatari, in which the protagonist elopes with a beloved aristocratic woman who is then carried off by a demon while he shelters her in a ruined storehouse. The print is held in the Art Institute of Chicago and belongs to the late 1760s. Shunsho updates the Heian narrative in the furyu manner of mid-Edo ukiyo-e, dressing the figures in the kimono of his own moment and locating the action in an interior reconfigured for contemporary recognition. The series, ordered by the iroha syllabary, is one of Shunsho's notable early excursions in nishiki-e, the polychrome brocade printing technique that had been newly perfected in Edo. Katsukawa school fame rested chiefly on his actor prints, but the Furyu nishiki-e Ise monogatari shows him as a designer comfortable with classical narrative, working confidently in the literary register that Suzuki Harunobu had brought to the foreground of Edo ukiyo-e in the same decade. The Akutagawa episode invited compositions of compressed emotional intensity, the lovers alone in their hiding place at the moment before catastrophe, and Shunsho's plate stands in a tradition of Akutagawa imagery that extends back through Tosa-school painting to medieval picture scrolls.