Parrot Komachi (Omu Komachi), from the series The Seven Fashionable Aspects of Komachi (Furyu yatsushi nana Komachi)

Parrot Komachi (Omu Komachi), from the series The Seven Fashionable Aspects of Komachi (Furyu yatsushi nana Komachi), illustrates the episode in which the aged Komachi receives a poem from the retired emperor Yozei and responds by changing only a single word, like a parrot, to transform praise into a request for return to the capital. Harunobu reimagines this scholarly anecdote as a piece of Edo bijin-ga, replacing the elderly poetess with a fashionable contemporary woman who holds a poem slip or brush in a posture that hints at the act of substitution central to the story. The mitate device underlying the whole series allows Suzuki Harunobu to make a tale of imperial poetic exchange feel current to townspeople in 1760s Edo. The composition's clean registration of multiple woodblocks, the soft pinks and greens of the figure's costume, and the carefully spaced blank ground demonstrate the matured nishiki-e technique that Harunobu helped develop in collaboration with the carvers and printers of Edo workshops. By referencing a single-word transformation of a poem, the print also pays quiet homage to the technical precision of woodblock printing itself, where the change of a single carved line could alter the entire emotional resonance of an image. Source: Art Institute of Chicago, no. 89011.