No. 6: Tama River of Koyasan in Kii Province, from the series "Six Jewel Rivers of the Floating World (Ukiyo Mu Tamagawa)"

No. 6: Tama River of Koyasan in Kii Province, from the series Six Jewel Rivers of the Floating World (Ukiyo Mu Tamagawa), is a circa 1769 hosoban color woodblock print at the Art Institute of Chicago, completing the six-sheet set known from the same series. The Tama River of Koyasan (today's Wakayama Prefecture) was associated in classical poetry with the mountain monastery of Mount Koya, founded by Kukai in the ninth century as the headquarters of the Shingon school of esoteric Buddhism. As one of the six Jewel Rivers, it carried connotations of pilgrimage and religious devotion. Shigemasa's floating-world parody of this storied river translates a place of sacred austerity into the lively idiom of the print, populating the location with contemporary figures whose dress and posture identify them with the world of eighteenth-century Edo. Together the six sheets of the Ukiyo Mu Tamagawa series demonstrate how thoroughly the literary culture of classical waka had been absorbed and reworked by ukiyo-e by the late 1760s. The Art Institute of Chicago's preservation of this complete series makes it an unusually instructive group for the study of Shigemasa's literary print practice.