The Departed Spirit of a Courtesan

The Departed Spirit of a Courtesan is an illustration by Kitano Tsunetomi (1880-1947) for Seien Shima's contribution to the Complete Works of Chikamatsu, the encyclopedic publishing project devoted to the plays of Chikamatsu Monzaemon, the great Osaka playwright of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The image is preserved through the [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e).org archive and survives within the long tradition of [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga), or pictures of beautiful women, that Kitano Tsunetomi did more than any other Osaka nihonga artist to renew in the early twentieth century. The subject, a courtesan's ghost, draws on a recurrent theme in Chikamatsu's jōruri and kabuki dramas, in which the women of the Osaka pleasure quarters appear as both objects of romantic devotion and figures of tragic loss. Kitano Tsunetomi, who had spent his career observing the women of Shinmachi and Sonezaki at close range, was uniquely placed to render such a subject without lapsing into either sentimentality or stereotype. The Osaka nihonga school within which he worked maintained close ties to local literary and theatrical circles, and book illustration of this kind was understood as a serious extension of the painter's vocation rather than a commercial sideline. The image accordingly carries the same fineness of line, attentiveness to pattern, and psychological reserve that distinguish Kitano Tsunetomi's exhibition paintings, while serving the practical purpose of giving visual form to one of the canonical women of the early modern Osaka stage. It belongs, in this sense, to a continuum of bijin-ga that extends from the woodblock prints of the Edo period through the painted scrolls and book illustrations of late Meiji and Taisho Osaka.