The Evening Mistress at Ueno (Ueno no bansho), from the series "Eight Fashionable Views of Edo (Furyu Edo hakkei)"

The Evening Mistress at Ueno (Ueno no bansho), from the series Eight Fashionable Views of Edo (Furyū Edo hakkei), is a 1764 chuban-format design by Suzuki Harunobu in the Art Institute of Chicago. Harunobu's series adapts the venerable Chinese theme of the Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang, long naturalized in Japan as the Eight Views of Omi, to the spaces and personalities of contemporary Edo. Each view is paired with a stock atmospheric subject such as evening bell, returning sails, autumn moon, or evening snow, then transposed onto a beauty within a specifically Edo locale. Here the subject is the evening bell at Ueno, whose temple bells were among the city's most famous timekeepers, and the bell becomes a metaphor for the close of the day and the appearance of a refined female figure. Harunobu's bijin stands or sits within a discreet interior or path, the falling light implied through compositional restraint rather than literal description. The print exemplifies the way Edo ukiyo-e absorbed continental topographic conventions and reissued them at the scale of urban experience, allowing Edoites to see their own city through the prestigious lens of classical poetic landscape. Within Suzuki Harunobu's body of chuban bijin-ga, the Furyu Edo hakkei series is one of the most ambitious uses of locality as a frame for portraying women.