A Modern Day "Clear Mirror" (Masukagami) 万寿嘉々見

A Modern Day Clear Mirror (Masukagami), dated 1822 and held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a Keisai Eisen print that plays on the title of the famous fourteenth-century historical narrative Masukagami while delivering an Edo [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) image of a fashionable contemporary woman. The pun is part of a wider mitate tradition in which classical literary titles were repurposed for present-day genre scenes, allowing print buyers to enjoy both the cultural reference and the modern image. The subject is a young Edo woman shown with the elongated proportions characteristic of Eisen's bijin work in the early 1820s — a long neck, sharply cut features, and a robe whose patterning is given as much pictorial attention as her face. The mirror referenced in the title may also appear in the composition as an object held or implied by the figure, a frequent device in Eisen's beauties. By 1822 Eisen was firmly established as a successor to Utamaro and Eisho within the Edo bijin-ga tradition, while also experimenting with the more elaborate, slightly mannered female type that would distinguish his later work. The Met's holdings of Eisen are substantial and include several variations on this mitate format. The print precedes his landscape collaboration on the Kisokaido by more than a decade, and it sits firmly in the urban, fashionable, literary register that defined his earlier reputation. The title pun is characteristic of the verbal play that publishers and print designers used to attract a cultivated readership.