Meeting on the River (parody of Hakurakuten)

Suzuki Harunobu's 1762 chuban print Meeting on the River offers a mitate of the celebrated encounter between the Chinese poet Bai Juyi, known in Japan as Hakurakuten, and the deity Sumiyoshi Myojin, who appeared to him on the sea or river to assert the priority of Japanese poetry over Chinese verse. The classical tale, dramatized in noh theater, became a touchstone for the affirmation of native poetic tradition. Harunobu transposes the lofty encounter into the contemporary Edo present, replacing the Tang poet and the Shinto god with elegant young figures meeting in a boat or at the river's edge, and inviting viewers to read the everyday scene through the lens of literary precedent. The result is the kind of cultured wit that the kyoka literary circles around Harunobu prized: a small, intimate Edo ukiyo-e design that opens onto centuries of poetic discourse. The chuban bijin-ga figures are rendered in the artist's signature slender style, and the river setting is treated decoratively rather than topographically, in keeping with mid-eighteenth-century Japanese woodblock conventions. The print belongs to the years just before the 1765 breakthrough of full-color nishiki-e, and it shows the careful color planning that brocade printing would soon make standard. Held by the Art Institute of Chicago, the impression provides an excellent example of how Suzuki Harunobu used mitate-e to negotiate between Chinese and Japanese cultural authority within a single elegant sheet.