Daikoku with an Abacus and a Woman with a Rat Running up Her Arm

Daikoku with an Abacus and a Woman with a Rat Running up Her Arm is a Keisai Eisen surimono catalogued by the Art Institute of Chicago and dated to 1828. The print combines two Edo ukiyo-e favorites — the popular deity Daikoku, one of the Seven Lucky Gods and a patron of wealth and the kitchen, and a fashionable young woman of the kind central to Eisen's bijin-ga — within a single sheet keyed to the auspicious zodiac sign of the rat. Daikoku is seated to one side with his characteristic mallet at his hip and an abacus in his lap, ready to tally the year's prosperity; opposite him, a woman in a richly patterned kimono lifts an arm along which a small white rat scampers toward her shoulder. The rat invokes the calendrical year of the rat with which the print is paired and serves at the same time as Daikoku's traditional animal companion. Eisen organizes the composition around the diagonal of the woman's arm, allowing the deity's compact form to balance the more elongated figure on the right. As with the rest of his surimono, the print uses metallic pigments, blind embossing, and selective karazuri to give patterned textiles, lacquer, and the rat's fine fur a tactile presence that the small format would otherwise lack. Kyoka verses inscribed across the upper field would have linked the picture to the New Year's greetings of an Edo poetry circle. The Art Institute of Chicago presents the print as a mature example of Eisen's bijin-ga vocabulary applied to the emblematic, calendar-driven mode that surimono patrons demanded, and the work stands as a fine specimen of late-Edo ukiyo-e at its most refined.