Ono no Komachi Praying for Rain (Amagoi), from the series "The Seven Fashionable Aspects of Komachi (Furyu yatsushi nana Komachi)"

Ono no Komachi Praying for Rain (Amagoi), from Suzuki Harunobu's series The Seven Fashionable Aspects of Komachi, draws on the legend that the Heian poetess Komachi composed a waka so powerful that it ended a devastating drought, summoning rain to nourish the parched fields. The Amagoi Komachi episode appears in Noh and other classical sources as a demonstration of poetry's ritual force; Harunobu translates it into Edo idiom by replacing the imperial poetess with a fashionable young woman who composes or reads in a contemporary setting. The print thus enacts the mitate technique central to Suzuki Harunobu's bijin-ga, where a historical or legendary figure stands behind an unmistakably current Edo body. Surrounding details suggest, but do not strictly illustrate, the dry landscape and the prayer for moisture: perhaps a poetry slip, a parched garden, or an upraised brush mediates the historical scene through the present. Produced as part of one of the most ambitious Edo nishiki-e series of the 1760s, the sheet shows the registered color printing that gave Harunobu his reputation, with finely graded background tones meeting the patterned brightness of the figure's robe. The series collectively functioned as an introduction to Komachi for Edo readers and as an album of fashionable mid-eighteenth-century style. Source: Art Institute of Chicago, no. 20856.