The Departed Spirit of a Courtesan

The Departed Spirit of a Courtesan is a woodblock print by Shima Seien from the same Taisho-period publication programme as her other Chikamatsu illustrations, the Dai Chikamatsu zenshu (Complete Works of Chikamatsu). The image belongs to a long tradition in Japanese visual culture of representing the spirits of yujo - the courtesans of the licensed pleasure quarters - whose stage stories so often ended in suicide, madness, or other forms of social erasure. In the plays of Chikamatsu Monzaemon especially, the inner life of the courtesan, her loyalty, jealousy, and grief, are pushed to the foreground; visual translations of these heroines naturally turned toward the iconography of ghosts and apparitions, drawing on a deep Edo-period repertoire of yurei imagery while remaining bijin-ga at heart. As a Taisho-Showa woodblock artist, Shima Seien approached this difficult subject with the restrained tonality typical of her work: physical attenuation, downcast or averted gaze, and clothing that floats free of an inhabited body all communicate spiritual condition without recourse to overt theatricality. The print thus participates in two simultaneous lineages within Japanese printmaking - the classical bijin-ga of Utamaro and Eisho, and the kaidan or ghost-story tradition exemplified by Hokusai and Yoshitoshi. The impression recorded here is preserved in the JAODB reference set on ukiyo-e.org (record Seien_Shima-Complete_works_of_Chikamatsu-The_Departed_Spirit_of_a_Courtesan-00030269-020401-F06), which retains an image and standard title. Block-cutter, printer, and exact issue date for this specific furoku sheet are not stated in the source and are not inferred here.