'The Games of the Five Festivals: twisting the shadow lantern'

Kitagawa Utamaro's The Games of the Five Festivals: twisting the shadow lantern is an ukiyo-e print dated to circa 1790 and preserved in the Victoria and Albert Museum (museum number O422025). The composition belongs to a category of Edo bijin-ga in which fashionable women are shown enjoying seasonal amusements associated with the five major annual festivals of the Edo year. Here the chosen pastime is a shadow lantern, a paper-and-bamboo device whose painted figures appear to move when the lantern is rotated. Utamaro uses the small mechanism as a pretext for grouping his beauties around a shared focus, giving them a reason to lean, gesture, and look in different directions, which allows him to vary head tilts and hair ornaments across the sheet. The result is a typically Utamaro pairing of decorative pleasure and quiet psychological observation: each woman's expression registers her own response to the spinning lantern light, while the group as a whole functions as a calendrical, festival-themed bijin-ga. Stylistically the print reflects Utamaro's early to mid-career manner, with elegant attenuated figures, refined keyblock outlines, and a controlled nishiki-e palette appropriate for a luxury Edo print. The V&A's holding contextualizes Utamaro within the wider history of ukiyo-e at the South Kensington collection, alongside works by his contemporaries and rivals in the Edo bijin-ga genre. For collectors and students, this design illustrates how Utamaro extended the bijin-ga repertoire beyond the Yoshiwara and into domestic and civic amusement, while keeping his focus on the visual and emotional life of women. The shadow lantern itself is a useful Edo-period object historically and is here documented as a moment of fashionable play.