Descending Geese at Katada (Katada rakugan), from the series "Fashionable Eight Views of Omi (Furyu Omi hakkei)"

Another sheet from "Fashionable Eight Views of Omi," this Art Institute of Chicago oban, dated c. 1814/17, depicts Katada rakugan — Descending Geese at Katada — one of the eight classical views of Lake Biwa. The original scene at Katada, a town on the lake's western shore, features wild geese descending toward the water against an autumnal sky, a melancholy late-season image associated in classical poetry with travelers and the passage of time. Eizan replaces the landscape subject with his characteristic bijin focus: the goose-descent scene becomes the setting or attribute for a fashionable woman, and the literary mood of the meisho is filtered through a Bunka-era Edo viewer's sensibility. Together with the Seta and Yabase prints, the Katada sheet documents how Eizan's Omi-hakkei series re-read classical landscape through the bijin-ga lens.