Komachi Washes the Book (from the series Seven Elegant Episodes from the Life of the Poetess Ono no Komachi)

Komachi Washes the Book, from the series Seven Elegant Episodes from the Life of the Poetess Ono no Komachi, dated about 1810 in the Cleveland Museum of Art's records, draws Kikukawa Eizan into the tradition of mitate prints that recast figures from classical Heian poetry as modern Edo beauties. Ono no Komachi, a celebrated ninth-century waka poet, accumulated a body of legend that became a standard sevenfold cycle in Japanese painting and theater — the Seven Komachi — in which scenes from her supposed biography (the lover's hundred nights, the visit to the Sekidera, the parrot poem) provided a series of devotional or melancholy postures. The 'washing of the book' refers to the legend in which Komachi cleansed a poem to expose a rival's attempt to discredit her. Eizan's mitate translates the episode into the world of Edo bijin-ga; his Komachi has the slender body and elaborately patterned outer robe of his contemporary courtesans, and the classical reference is carried by props and posture rather than by costume. The Kikukawa school that Eizan led specialized in this kind of allusive series, which flattered the literacy of urban print buyers familiar with the Komachi cycle from kabuki and noh. The Cleveland Museum of Art's catalog entry, with technical detail, may be consulted at https://clevelandart.org/art/1943.30.