An Elegant Parody of the Seven Komachis (Fûryû yatsushi nana Komachi): Amagoi

An Elegant Parody of the Seven Komachis (Furyu yatsushi nana Komachi): Amagoi, recorded on ukiyo-e.org from the Art Institute of Chicago collection, comes from the same Suzuki Harunobu series that retells the seven canonical Ono no Komachi legends through contemporary Edo figures. The Amagoi episode refers to the story in which Komachi composed a rain-prayer poem during a drought and brought rain through the power of her verse. In Harunobu's version the legendary court poet is replaced by a young Edo bijin, and the miraculous rain becomes a domestic shower implied through soft tonal gradations rather than the dramatic dragons or thunderclouds that earlier Kano or Tosa painters used to render the same subject. The yatsushi convention, in which a familiar story is re-clothed in contemporary garb, was a central feature of late eighteenth-century print culture, and Suzuki Harunobu was among its most articulate practitioners. Stylistically the print belongs to the mature nishiki-e period that Harunobu helped inaugurate in 1765, with carefully aligned color blocks, soft pinks and greens, and the slender doll-like figures that defined his contribution to Edo bijin-ga. The Amagoi sheet works on multiple registers simultaneously: as a fashionable image of a young woman, as a knowing reference to a classical episode, and as a technical showpiece for the multi-block color printing that made the entire Komachi series possible.