Yokihi (Chinese: Yang Guifei) with attendant

This hosoban sumizuri-e from the Art Institute of Chicago depicts Yokihi, the Japanese reading of Yang Guifei, the legendary Tang dynasty imperial consort whose tragic affair with Emperor Xuanzong was the subject of Bai Juyi's Song of Everlasting Sorrow and of countless later East Asian retellings. Shigenaga renders Yokihi with an attendant in a refined Chinese-style setting, the figures in elaborate continental robes that ukiyo-e designers used as visual shorthand for classical Chinese subjects. The print is executed entirely in sumi ink (sumizuri-e), the earliest mode of woodblock printing, without applied color, and the hosoban format gives the composition a tall slender proportion appropriate to the iconography of a courtly beauty. Shigenaga's treatment exemplifies the way Edo print designers domesticated classical Chinese literary subjects for a vernacular Japanese audience, situating Yokihi within a recognizable iconographic vocabulary while preserving enough exotic detail (the robes, the attendant's pose) to mark her as continental. Impressions of mid-Edo sumizuri-e in clean state are increasingly scarce; the Chicago sheet preserves the keyblock line with the clarity needed to appreciate Shigenaga's draftsmanship before the visual noise of color was added.