Looking for Crickets at Night

Looking for Crickets at Night is a Suzuki Harunobu print documented through ukiyo-e.org from the Art Institute of Chicago. The composition draws on a familiar seasonal pastime of late summer and early autumn Edo, when townspeople would go out at night with small lanterns or paper torches to catch singing crickets and bell-crickets (suzumushi), whose calls were prized and whose tiny bodies were kept in finely woven cages as miniature musicians. Harunobu builds his image around this entirely urban, entirely seasonal ritual, placing one or more slender figures in a darkened garden or open ground where the small points of lantern light pick out the hunters and their immediate surroundings against a quieter ground. The treatment is characteristic of his mature contribution to nishiki-e and to Edo bijin-ga. The figures are dressed in the layered, softly patterned kimono that he had made the default visual signature of the floating world's women, and the polychrome blocks bring up pale flesh tones, muted greens, and the warm glow of a lantern against a more reserved overall palette. As in many of his prints, the simple genre subject doubles as a meditation on transience: the cricket's brief autumn song stands in for the fleeting beauty of the figures who hunt it. The image is accessible through ukiyo-e.org at ukiyo-e.org/image/aic/80088_350968 as Looking for Crickets at Night by Suzuki Harunobu.