Turning a Shamisen (Shamisen no nejime), from the series "Chanting to Shamisen by Young Women of Today (Tosei musume joruri)"

Turning a Shamisen (Shamisen no nejime), from the series Chanting to Shamisen by Young Women of Today (Tosei musume joruri), designed by Kitagawa Utamaro around 1799 and held by the Art Institute of Chicago, is a study in concentrated gesture. The series follows young women performing joruri, narrative song accompanied by shamisen, an activity that bridged amateur practice in respectable households and professional entertainment in the pleasure quarters. This sheet zooms in on the small but characteristic action of tuning, the slim fingers turning a peg while the head tilts to listen, an intimate moment in which the player is briefly absorbed away from any audience. Utamaro's bijin-ga manner is well suited to this kind of subject: the okubi-e proximity of head and shoulders to the picture plane lets him model the curve of the neck, the slight tension in the jaw, and the alertness in the eyes. The Edo bijin-ga genre had long depicted music-making, but Utamaro is unusual in attending to a preparatory, almost private gesture rather than a public performance. The printed surface balances the delicate pattern of the kimono with the precise linework of the instrument, the shamisen body itself a quiet anchor in the composition. For collectors of ukiyo-e prints and of Kitagawa Utamaro in particular, this Art Institute of Chicago impression illustrates how he could find a powerful image inside an action as small as tuning a string.