Tsuchiyama (Meizan of the Choji-ya (Brothel)

Tsuchiyama (Meizan of the Choji-ya Brothel) is a sheet from Keisai Eisen's series Beautiful Women for the 53 Stations of the Tokaido (Tokaido gojusan-tsugi mitate bijin), in which each of the Tokaido post-stations between Edo and Kyoto is recast as a portrait of a beauty rather than a landscape. Tsuchiyama was the forty-ninth station on the Tokaido, in the foothills of the Suzuka Pass between Mie and Shiga provinces, and is best known in Hiroshige's straight landscape series for its rain-soaked depiction of travelers on a mountain road. Eisen's print abandons the landscape entirely. Instead it identifies a named courtesan - Meizan, working in the prestigious Choji-ya brothel of the Yoshiwara - and pairs her with the station name in a layered mitate that turns the post-stations of the Tokaido into a portrait gallery of Edo's named courtesans. The image is preserved in the ukiyo-e.org archive sourced from Art of Japan. Stylistically the figure is built with Eisen's full late-Edo bijin-ga apparatus: elongated proportions, heavily drawn outer kimono, the obi tied in front as the marker of the courtesan's profession, and an elaborate cluster of combs and pins around the coiffure. The print is documentary as well as decorative - Meizan of the Choji-ya was a real woman in the Yoshiwara registers of the late 1820s and early 1830s.