Autumn Moon at the Temple Ishiyamadera from the series Fashionable Eight Views

Autumn Moon at the Temple Ishiyamadera, from the series Fashionable Eight Views (Furyu Hakkei), dated 1814 in the Cleveland Museum of Art's catalog, transposes one of the canonical Eight Views of Omi onto the Edo bijin-ga of the Kikukawa school. The Eight Views of Omi, a Japanese localization of the Chinese Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers, fixed eight scenes around Lake Biwa as the standard cycle of poetic landscape: autumn moon at Ishiyama temple, evening snow at Hira, returning sails to Yabase, evening bell at Mii temple, and so on. Kikukawa Eizan's furyu (fashionable, modish) variation replaces the landscape with a beauty whose attributes — a fan, a sleeve, an upturned face — evoke the named view. The autumn moon at Ishiyamadera carried particular literary weight: Murasaki Shikibu was traditionally said to have begun The Tale of Genji while watching the moon from that temple, and any image of the site invokes the most prestigious episode of Japanese literary biography. Eizan layers the reference into bijin-ga, his figure pose at once contemporary and Heian-allusive. The Cleveland Museum of Art's record may be consulted at https://clevelandart.org/art/1985.302. The series stands as a useful case study in the way the Kikukawa school used the Eight Views format to fold landscape and classical literature into the bijin-ga market.