First Love (Hatsu koi), a parody of the well-curb episode of the "Tales of Ise"

In this 1761 chuban print, Suzuki Harunobu offers a mitate, or parodic update, of the well-curb episode from the classical Tales of Ise, in which two children measuring their heights against a well's frame grow into adults and eventually become lovers. Harunobu transposes the famous scene into the world of contemporary Edo, dressing his figures as a young woman and her companion in fashionable mid-eighteenth-century kimono while preserving the iconic motif of the wellhead. The result is a Hatsu koi, or first love, that flickers between the Heian past and the Edo present, drawing a sophisticated charge from the temporal layering that the kyoka poetry circles of Harunobu's patrons relished. The figure type is fully Harunobu: slim, oval-faced, and quietly absorbed, with all the affective concentration of the chuban bijin-ga genre. The wellhead becomes both a literal architectural element and a metaphor for memory, the means by which present feeling discovers its classical depth. The print belongs to the years just before the 1765 breakthrough of full-color nishiki-e, and its careful color planning anticipates the harmonized brocade palettes that would soon dominate Edo ukiyo-e. As with many of Harunobu's mitate-e from this period, the design rewards literary readers as much as visual ones, an emblem of the way Suzuki Harunobu fused image and text. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this impression of one of his most beloved Tales of Ise parodies.