Spring Rain Collection (Harusame shū), vol. 2: Pine Shoots and Accoutrements for New Year’s Celebrations

Pine Shoots and Accoutrements for New Year's Celebrations belongs to volume 2 of the Spring Rain Collection (Harusame shu), the luxury surimono album associated with Ryuryukyo Shinsai and held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, dated to around 1800. The composition assembles young pine shoots, lacquered or paper-wrapped accessories, and other emblems of New Year ritual, building a portable celebration on a single sheet. As a designer within the Hokusai school after his training under Tawaraya Sori, Shinsai produced surimono that compressed the ceremonies of the calendar into still lifes whose every element carried both visual and verbal weight. The pine shoots evoke endurance, longevity, and the eternal continuity of the season, while the surrounding objects, such as ceremonial ornaments and folded textiles, point to the household practices that surrounded the holiday. The Harusame project, eventually compiled and reissued by later editors and admirers including Shibata Zeshin, brought together Shinsai's surimono with those of other designers in a self-conscious anthology of the genre. Surimono printers used blind embossing, mica, and metallic pigments to give such sheets their characteristic luminosity, and the volume's careful registration and restrained palette suit the New Year theme. The kyoka verses originally printed on the sheet would have completed the program, anchoring image to specific occasion and to the poetic community responsible for the commission. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's impression remains an accessible witness to the Harusame album's central place in early nineteenth-century print culture.