Shoki in Love

Suzuki Harunobu's 'Shoki in Love,' dated to about 1763, is a playful, almost satirical inversion of the iconography of the Chinese demon queller Zhong Kui (Shoki in Japanese). Traditionally depicted with sword, beard, and ferocious expression, Shoki is the guardian against evil spirits and a favourite subject of apotropaic prints, particularly for Boys' Day. Here Harunobu domesticates him: the great demon queller is shown smitten, his ferocity disarmed by an Edo bijin. The conceit belongs to a wider category of comic mitate, in which heroic male figures from Chinese and Japanese tradition are placed in modern romantic situations and thereby relocated within the everyday emotional world of the Edo townsperson. The Art Institute of Chicago, the museum source for this record, dates the impression to about 1763, on the cusp of the full polychrome nishiki-e revolution of 1765 that Harunobu would help to drive. The print works with a restrained palette and depends on the viewer's familiarity with Shoki's usual martial portrayal to enjoy the joke. For collectors, 'Shoki in Love' is an important reminder that Suzuki Harunobu's contribution to Edo bijin-ga was not only formal but conceptual: he showed that the genre could absorb and recast a wide range of male protagonists, including divine ones, by passing them through the contemporary lens of romantic feeling.