Eight Indoor Scenes (Zashiki Hakkei): A Boiling Kettle-Night Rain (Daisu no yau)

Eight Indoor Scenes (Zashiki Hakkei): A Boiling Kettle - Night Rain (Daisu no yau) is a Suzuki Harunobu print drawn from the Art Institute of Chicago's collection and accessible through ukiyo-e.org. The image is one of the eight designs in his celebrated Zashiki Hakkei, a series that transposes the eight canonical views of Xiao and Xiang (Shoshou Hakkei) from a Chinese river landscape into the interior of an Edo room. Here the classical motif of "Night Rain" becomes the soft hiss of a boiling kettle on its daisu, the formal lacquered stand used in chanoyu. The visual joke is also a connoisseurial one: the gentle sound of the water replaces the rain of the classical model, and the indoor scene with its quiet kettle stands in for an evening landscape on a Chinese river. The series is foundational for Edo nishiki-e. Originally issued in the mid-1760s, in part as a private commission tied to calendar prints, the Zashiki Hakkei was among the first sustained showcases of full polychrome printing on heavy hosho paper, with quietly graded colors, soft snowfall and rain effects, and figures distilled to the slender, almost weightless type that defines Harunobu's Edo bijin-ga. The print is documented through ukiyo-e.org at ukiyo-e.org/image/aic/110607_596291 as Eight Indoor Scenes (Zashiki Hakkei): A Boiling Kettle - Night Rain (Daisu no yau) by Suzuki Harunobu in the Art Institute of Chicago.