Episode 11 (Juichi dan), from the series "Tales of Ise for the Asakusa Group (Asakusagawa Ise Monogatari)"

Episode 11 (Juichi dan) is part of Kubo Shunman's [surimono](/glossary/surimono) series Tales of Ise for the Asakusa Group (Asakusagawa Ise Monogatari), a sequence reworking the famous tenth-century Heian classic for an early nineteenth-century kyoka circle. The Ise monogatari, with its loosely connected episodes built around poems and a Don Juan-like hero, was a perennial favorite for visual adaptation, and Shunman's series translates each chapter into a small, considered picture suited to the surimono format. The Asakusa group, like other kyoka circles, used such adaptations to align their contemporary comic verse with the high-cultural prestige of classical Japanese literature, even as their poems often played mischievously against that very tradition. Now held by the Art Institute of Chicago, this print exemplifies the elegant economy Shunman brought to the project. His Edo [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) idiom favored restrained palettes, fine line, and carefully managed empty space, all qualities that allowed inscribed poems to share the sheet without crowding the image. The printing, typical of refined surimono around 1810, would have included subtle gradations and likely embossed or metallic passages, signaling that the object was a private gift among poets rather than a commercial sheet. For modern viewers and collectors, the work demonstrates how Kubo Shunman bound the kyoka-e tradition to the older literary canon, using the Tales of Ise as both subject and frame for an ongoing dialogue between past and present.