Mibuno Tadami

Mibuno Tadami, recorded on ukiyo-e.org from the Art Institute of Chicago collection, is one of Suzuki Harunobu's portrait-style mitate prints in which a poet from classical anthologies is restaged as a contemporary Edo figure. Mibu no Tadami was a tenth-century waka poet, known principally through his appearance in the Hyakunin Isshu, where his contest with Taira no Kanemori is recorded as a story of poetic rivalry so intense that Tadami died of disappointment after losing. Harunobu strips away the historical setting and presents a slender, fashionably dressed young figure who carries the poet's name forward into the Edo present. The yatsushi convention, in which a classical figure is dressed and styled as a modern beauty, was a favorite vehicle for the kyoka poetry circles that supported Suzuki Harunobu's most refined work, and the slim figure of the print embodies that mode perfectly. Technically the sheet belongs to the mature nishiki-e period that Harunobu inaugurated in 1765, with the soft pinks, greens, and blues of his characteristic palette and the precise color registration that the multi-block technique made possible. As a foundational figure in Edo bijin-ga, Suzuki Harunobu repeatedly used such poet-portraits to embed his contemporary subjects within the long tradition of Japanese classical literature, gently asserting that the cultivated young people of his Edo were entirely worthy of standing in for the courtly poets of the past.