Umegawa

Umegawa is the tragic courtesan heroine of the joruri and kabuki play Meido no Hikyaku (Courier for Hell), in which she and the courier Chubei flee Osaka after he embezzles money to buy her freedom. As a subject for bijin-ga, Umegawa's figure carried associations with doomed love and the licensed quarter culture that Tsunetomi depicted throughout his career. This portrait likely shows her in formal courtesan regalia — an elaborate uchikake outer robe, stacked kanzashi hairpins, and lacquered geta — the layered textile rendering providing Tsunetomi ample opportunity to demonstrate his command of pattern-within-pattern through woodblock. His Osaka perspective gave him particular intimacy with this subject: the play is set in the Shinmachi district, the city's premier pleasure quarter, which informed much of his pictorial vocabulary.