The Noda Jewel River, from a hexaptych depicting the Six Jewel Rivers

From a celebrated hexaptych in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Noda Jewel River is one of six [oban](/glossary/oban) sheets that together comprise Shunman's ambitious treatment of the Mu Tamagawa, or Six Jewel Rivers - a canonical set of poetic place-names long associated with classical waka. Made around 1781-1789, during Shunman's [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) period under the influence of his teacher Kitao Shigemasa and the broader Kiyonaga style, this set is among the most ambitious commercial print projects of his career. The Noda Jewel River, in Mutsu Province, was associated in poetry with the call of the plover; Shunman pairs the literary reference with a contemporary genre scene set on the riverbank, populating the image with elegant women in fashionable dress and a landscape distilled into a few decisive horizontal bands of color. Each of the six prints functions independently but reads as part of a coordinated suite, with shared figure types and complementary color choices building visual coherence across the hexaptych. The project belongs to a long tradition of associating individual [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) prints with specific poetic locales, but the breadth and consistency of Shunman's treatment is unusual. The Art Institute of Chicago holds multiple sheets from the series, allowing the suite to be studied as a coherent whole rather than as scattered fragments, and the Noda print typifies Shunman's ability to fuse classical allusion with contemporary urban genre - the literary register made comprehensible through everyday figures.