Choemon Carrying Ohan on His Back

Choemon Carrying Ohan on His Back, dated 1796 and held by the Art Institute of Chicago, references another celebrated shinjumono romance: the love-suicide play Katsuragawa renri no shigarami (The Tie that Binds at the Katsura River), in which the merchant Choemon and his young lover Ohan ultimately drown themselves together in the Katsura River. Kitagawa Utamaro chooses a tender moment of the narrative rather than its catastrophic end: Choemon carrying Ohan on his back across difficult ground, a posture that both literalizes the asymmetry of their relationship (older man, very young woman) and signals the protective intimacy that the play asks audiences to take seriously. The composition gives the figures the close, intertwined silhouette typical of Utamaro's mature ukiyo-e couples and uses subtle facial expression to inflect what could be a melodramatic episode into a quiet pictorial poem. As with Koharu and Jihei, this print shows how Edo bijin-ga absorbed kabuki and joruri material, refashioning narrative high points into intimate portraits.