Casting a curse at the hour of the ox (ushi no koku mairi)

Suzuki Harunobu's Casting a curse at the hour of the ox (ushi no koku mairi), dated 1765 and held by the Art Institute of Chicago, draws on the eerie folk tradition in which a wronged person, traditionally a woman, visits a shrine in the deepest hours of the night to nail a straw effigy of her enemy to a sacred tree. The ritual was already a familiar subject in Japanese literature, theatre, and visual art by the eighteenth century, and Harunobu's treatment brings the legendary subject into the polished idiom of his Edo bijin-ga. The figure is depicted in the costume and posture associated with the rite, complete with the iconography that contemporary viewers would have recognized as belonging to the legend, while her body retains the slender proportions, small oval face, and refined linework characteristic of Harunobu's mature style. By staging this dramatic narrative through the visual vocabulary of stylish urban femininity, the artist performs a sophisticated mitate, layering folkloric horror over the refined surface of the floating world. The composition was produced in the celebrated year of the nishiki-e revolution, and its polychrome handling demonstrates the new tonal possibilities that the full color palette had brought to ukiyo-e woodblock printing. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves the impression among its deep Suzuki Harunobu holdings, where it documents the artist's willingness to test his elegant idiom against subjects of psychological intensity, finding common ground between popular legend and the cultivated visual culture of Edo.