Ehon iroha uta

Ehon iroha uta, a Suzuki Harunobu illustrated book in the Art Institute of Chicago (artwork 230996), is an example of his work in the ehon (picture book) format that ran alongside his single-sheet prints. The iroha uta is the celebrated forty-seven-syllable Japanese poem that uses each kana exactly once, traditionally serving as a primer for learning the syllabary and as a meditation on impermanence in the Buddhist style. An ehon based on the iroha pairs each syllable, or each line, with a small illustration that fixes the meaning visually and brings the moral content of the poem into a contemporary Edo setting. Harunobu's contribution to this kind of book is a natural extension of his work in Edo bijin-ga and in nishiki-e. The polychrome printing technique that he and his workshop had brought to maturity in the 1760s is deployed at the smaller scale of book leaves, with carefully registered colors describing the robes, accessories, and architectural framework of each illustrated syllable. The figures themselves follow the slender, gently elongated type that he had refined for his single-sheet prints, so that the syllabary becomes, in effect, a procession of small floating-world scenes. The book is recorded by the Art Institute of Chicago at artic.edu under artwork 230996 as Ehon iroha uta by Suzuki Harunobu, an example of his contribution to the printed book culture of mid-eighteenth-century Edo.