Returning Sails of the Towel Rack (Tenugui-kake no kihan), from the series "Eight Views of the Parlor (Zashiki hakkei)"

Returning Sails of the Towel Rack (Tenugui-kake no kihan), made around 1761, is another print from Suzuki Harunobu's witty Eight Views of the Parlor (Zashiki hakkei), preserved in the Art Institute of Chicago. The series replaces the famous Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers, a staple of Chinese ink painting, with eight quietly humorous scenes drawn from the interiors of well-to-do Edo households. Here the returning sails of fishing boats are transformed into hand towels (tenugui) draped over a domestic rack, billowing slightly in the air as a young woman tends to them. A second figure looks on, and the soft diagonal of the rack provides the only formal echo of the riverbanks and masts of the source imagery. The print is among the earliest examples of true nishiki-e, the multi-block, full-color technique that Harunobu helped pioneer in 1765 through privately commissioned calendar prints; the carefully aligned color blocks, the subtle blind-printing on the fabrics, and the delicate flesh tones all advertise the new medium's capabilities. As a foundational figure in Edo bijin-ga, Suzuki Harunobu specialized in slender, almost adolescent figures inhabiting quiet domestic interiors, and Zashiki hakkei represents the perfect marriage of that visual idiom to the cultivated literary games favored by his kyoka-poet patrons. The viewer is invited to recognize the Chinese precedent, smile at the substitution, and admire the technical refinement all at once.