Poem by Minamoto no Muneyuki from the series One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets Explained by the Nurse

Poem by Minamoto no Muneyuki is another sheet from One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets Explained by the Nurse (Hyakunin isshu uba ga etoki), the late series in which Katsushika Hokusai designed scenes to accompany each of the hundred classical waka included in Fujiwara no Teika's celebrated anthology. Minamoto no Muneyuki, a tenth-century courtier, contributed a famous winter poem on the cold of a deserted mountain village, and Hokusai treats the verse with a quiet landscape or genre scene that catches its bleak, lonely mood. Drawn around 1835, the print uses the long oban format in which a poem appears in a cartouche above an image of contemporary figures, peasants, or travelers whose activities loosely echo the classical text. The Art Institute of Chicago holds this impression. As an Edo ukiyo-e print, Poem by Minamoto no Muneyuki is part of one of Hokusai's most intellectually ambitious projects: an attempt to recast the entire Hyakunin Isshu anthology into a unified visual cycle that could speak both to traditional poetry connoisseurs and to a wider ukiyo-e audience. The uba ga etoki series links Hokusai's landscape and figure designs to a centuries-old literary tradition, and individual sheets like this one demonstrate how an established master could continue to invent new structural relationships between text and image deep into the last decades of his career.