The Third Princess and Her Pet Cat

The Third Princess and Her Pet Cat, a 1762 chuban print by Suzuki Harunobu in the Art Institute of Chicago, illustrates one of the most famous accidental disclosures in The Tale of Genji. In the 'Wakana' chapter of Murasaki Shikibu's eleventh-century novel, the Third Princess (Onna san no miya) is glimpsed by the courtier Kashiwagi when her pet cat tugs at a bamboo blind and lifts it, exposing her behind the curtain. The scene becomes the trigger for the doomed liaison that drives much of the second half of the Genji narrative, and it was rehearsed endlessly in Japanese painting and ukiyo-e from the medieval period onward. Suzuki Harunobu, characteristically, refines the scene to its essential ingredients: a slender princess in courtly dress, the small cat with its leash or cord, the suggestion of the disturbed blind. Edo ukiyo-e viewers, who could be relied upon to know the source episode, did not need narrative spelling-out; Harunobu trusts a single calibrated moment to carry the full weight of the literary allusion. The chuban bijin-ga format intensifies the intimacy of the scene - the misdirected cat, the curtain - while Harunobu's elongated proportions transpose the Heian princess into the visual idiom of his own contemporary beauties. Produced in 1762, the print predates the 1765 nishiki-e revolution but already shows the cleanliness of line and economy of palette that would soon make Suzuki Harunobu's designs the touchstone of the new full-color print. The Art Institute's impression preserves a key example of how Edo ukiyo-e read and re-read its classical sources through the figure of the modern woman.