Meeting her Lover (parody of the Yugao chapter of "Tale of Genji")

This 1761 chuban print by Suzuki Harunobu invokes the Yugao chapter of the Tale of Genji, in which Genji is drawn to the modest house and ill-fated mistress named for the evening glory vine. Rather than illustrating the classical scene directly, Harunobu offers a mitate, or parodic transposition, dressing his ideal Edo women in contemporary kimono and placing them within an Edo urban setting that nonetheless evokes the original tale through unmistakable visual cues. The flowering vine, perhaps a moonflower trailing over a humble fence, is rendered with attention as both a botanical detail and a literary signal that connoisseurs would have caught immediately. The figure type is fully Harunobu: a slender, oval-faced young woman whose poise and inwardness gesture to the romantic and melancholic register of the source material. This kind of dialogue between contemporary Edo ukiyo-e and Heian classics was the engine of much mid-eighteenth-century chuban bijin-ga, and it was especially prized by the kyoka poetry circles whose patronage shaped Harunobu's career. Created in the years immediately before the 1765 emergence of full-color nishiki-e, the print shows the careful color planning and harmonious palette that the brocade printing breakthrough would soon amplify across the genre. The Art Institute of Chicago's impression demonstrates how Suzuki Harunobu used a single literary allusion to fold a thousand years of refined feeling into the small format of a woodblock sheet.