Tōsei Nana Komachi (Seven Komachi of the Day)

Tōsei Nana Komachi (当世七小町, 'Seven Komachi of the Day') is a color woodblock print by Kitagawa Hidemaro of the early nineteenth century, held by the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (object number 217097). The print belongs to a series translating the seven canonical episodes of the Ono no Komachi legend — the Heian-period poet whose life and afterlife generated a long cycle of narrative paintings, prints, and Noh plays — into seven contemporary Yoshiwara scenes. The Komachi mitate was a standard subject of late-Edo bijin-ga, designed earlier by Suzuki Harunobu, Chōbunsai Eishi, and Kitagawa Utamaro himself; Hidemaro's contribution to the genre continues his teacher's mitate strategy into the Bunka decade. Each print in such series typically pairs one Komachi episode (Sōshi-arai Komachi, 'Komachi Washing the Book'; Sotoba Komachi, 'Komachi at the Stupa'; Kayoi Komachi, 'Komachi Visiting,' and others) with a Yoshiwara figure whose pose or attribute evokes the classical scene. The figural style follows Hidemaro's characteristic Kitagawa-school vocabulary — elongated neck, narrow oval face, patterned kimono falling in long vertical folds — and the literary conceit places the print within the same intellectualized parody tradition that Eishi had perfected in the 1790s.