The Call of the Cuckoo from above the Clouds (parody of Minamoto no Yorimasa)

Suzuki Harunobu's 1761 chuban print The Call of the Cuckoo from above the Clouds parodies a famous incident associated with the warrior-poet Minamoto no Yorimasa, who was renowned for hearing or shooting at a cuckoo through cloud cover. Rather than depicting Yorimasa directly, Harunobu offers a mitate that recasts the scene in the world of contemporary Edo women, perhaps showing a young figure pausing to listen as the bird's call drifts down through a stylized sky. The classical reference would have been instantly legible to the kyoka literary circles whose patronage shaped Harunobu's career, and the print's pleasure lies precisely in the doubled vision of Heian heroism and Edo domestic grace. The cuckoo, or hototogisu, was one of the most prized auditory motifs of Japanese poetic tradition, and its placement above the clouds adds an extra layer of allusion to the long history of the bird as messenger between the mundane and the otherworldly. As with so much of Harunobu's chuban bijin-ga, the figure is rendered in the slim, idealized style that would set the template for mid-eighteenth-century Edo ukiyo-e bijin imagery. The work belongs to the years just before the 1765 breakthrough of full-color nishiki-e, and its careful color planning anticipates the harmonized brocade palettes that would soon dominate the medium. The Art Institute of Chicago's impression preserves an excellent example of Suzuki Harunobu's mitate-e mode at this pivotal moment.