An Inauspicious Day

Suzuki Harunobu's 'An Inauspicious Day,' dated to about 1764, plays with the calendrical superstitions that ordered everyday life in Edo. The Japanese calendar of the period included a system of lucky and unlucky days (such as the rokuyo) on which certain activities, weddings, business ventures, travel, were considered ill-advised. The title of the print announces that the viewer is encountering one of these inauspicious days, and the design uses contemporary bijin figures to dramatize the small frustrations and ironies of trying to live around the calendar's prohibitions. The Art Institute of Chicago, the museum source for this record, dates the impression to about 1764, just before the full polychrome nishiki-e revolution of 1765 that Suzuki Harunobu helped to define. The composition is characteristic of his pre-nishiki-e manner: slender elongated figures, a restrained palette, and a carefully balanced negative space that lets the gestures of the figures carry the narrative weight. For collectors of Suzuki Harunobu, prints organized around named days or specific calendrical situations are particularly valuable because they document the deep intertwining of Edo bijin-ga with the city's textual culture, including almanacs, ritual calendars, and popular prose. The print is a small but eloquent example of how the genre could turn the most mundane fact of daily scheduling into a quiet visual joke.