Act Six from the series Treasury of Loyal Retainers (Chūshingura) Parodied by Famous Beauties: A Set of Twelve Prints (Komei bijin mitate Chūshingura, junimai tsuzuki)

Act Six from the series Treasury of Loyal Retainers (Chushingura) Parodied by Famous Beauties: A Set of Twelve Prints (Komei bijin mitate Chushingura, junimai tsuzuki) is a Kitagawa Utamaro design of about 1794 at the Harvard Art Museums. The series belongs to a celebrated tradition of mitate-e in which ukiyo-e designers reimagined the kabuki and jouri drama Chushingura - the great revenge tale of the forty-seven ronin - through the figures of contemporary female beauties. Each sheet corresponds to one act of the eleven-act play, with the additional opening or closing sheet rounding out the set of twelve. Act Six is among the most emotionally charged episodes in the cycle, centred on the suicide of Hayano Kanpei, and earlier ukiyo-e depictions had treated it with sober gravity. Utamaro's parody recasts the act through Edo bijin-ga: courtesans and their attendants take the place of the original samurai actors, fashionable robes replace stage costumes, and the gravity of the source is rephrased in the visual idiom of the Yoshiwara. The result demonstrates the cultural authority that bijin-ga had achieved by the mid-1790s, where even the most respected drama in the kabuki repertoire could be retold through female beauty. As preserved at Harvard, the print belongs to one of Utamaro's most influential series and exemplifies the inventive use of mitate that ukiyo-e developed for an increasingly sophisticated urban audience.