Ono no Komachi at Seki Temple (Seki), from the series The Seven Fashionable Aspects of Komachi (Furyu yatsushi nana Komachi)

Ono no Komachi at Seki Temple (Seki) belongs to Suzuki Harunobu's celebrated series The Seven Fashionable Aspects of Komachi (Furyu yatsushi nana Komachi), in which seven episodes from the legendary life of the Heian-era poet Ono no Komachi are reframed in the dress and settings of Edo. The Seki-dera Komachi scene comes from a Noh play in which the aged Komachi, living in poverty near Seki-dera temple, is approached by a young priest curious about her former glory. Harunobu replaces the haggard old woman of the play with an elegant Edo beauty, applying the device of yatsushi (literally 'casting in modern dress') so that contemporary viewers could enjoy the legend through the surface of fashionable bijin-ga. The composition's setting - a wooden veranda, the temple eaves overhead - is sketched in just enough detail to evoke Seki-dera, while the figure's robes and hairstyle situate her firmly in mid-eighteenth-century Edo. The print exemplifies how Suzuki Harunobu's nishiki-e treated the classical canon: not as something to be illustrated literally, but as raw material for visual punning that drew educated and casual customers alike. Each print in the series rewards both kinds of viewers, since the Komachi legends were widely known through Noh performance and printed digests. Source: Art Institute of Chicago, no. 26770.