Parody of the Seven Komachis (Mitate nana Komachi): Amagoi

Parody of the Seven Komachis (Mitate nana Komachi): Amagoi, recorded on ukiyo-e.org from the Art Institute of Chicago collection, is another version by Suzuki Harunobu of the Amagoi episode from the canonical seven Komachi legends. The original story tells how the ninth-century poet Ono no Komachi composed a rain-prayer poem during a drought and called down a sudden shower through her verse. In Harunobu's elegant translation, the legendary court poet is replaced by a contemporary Edo bijin, and the miraculous rain becomes a soft, almost atmospheric event evoked through tonal blocks rather than dramatic ink work. The print exemplifies the mitate-e tradition that Suzuki Harunobu did so much to popularize, in which a familiar classical or religious story is gently re-staged through the visual idiom of nishiki-e and the figural conventions of Edo bijin-ga. The slim, doll-like figure is rendered with the soft pinks, leaf greens, and pale blues of the mature polychromatic palette that became standard after 1765, and the careful registration of the colored blocks displays the multi-impression technique that Harunobu and his collaborators helped perfect. As with the other Komachi mitate, the print works on multiple registers at once: as fashion plate, literary in-joke, and technical demonstration, all collapsed into a single sheet aimed at the cultivated circles of Edo connoisseurs and kyoka poets.