The Courtesan Hana-ogi of Ogiya as the Sennin Tekkai (from the series Eight Immortals of Sensuality)

Published around 1794 and now in the Cleveland Museum of Art, this print belongs to Kitagawa Utamaro's series "Eight Immortals of Sensuality" (Yatsushi Hakkasen), a witty Edo bijin-ga conceit in which famous Yoshiwara courtesans are cast as the Eight Daoist Immortals (sennin). Here Hana-ogi of the Ogiya, one of the most celebrated tayu of the late eighteenth century and a renowned cultivated beauty, is reimagined as Tekkai (Chinese: Li Tieguai), the immortal famous for projecting his soul out of his mouth in the form of a tiny figure. Such yatsushi pictures, in which figures from religion, history, or classical literature are recast in contemporary guise, were a cornerstone of ukiyo-e humor and a way of bringing the Yoshiwara into dialogue with elite culture. Utamaro's image flatters Hana-ogi's fame, exploits the printmaker's gift for elegant elongated figures, and indulges the Edo public's appetite for clever literary play. The okubi-e format would soon dominate his work, but here he is still working in a fuller compositional mode, attentive to the play of patterned textiles and the suggestion of psychological self-possession. As a leading practitioner of ukiyo-e, Utamaro understood that his Yoshiwara subjects were both real women and starring players in an ongoing fantasy world of the Edo period.