Young Man Riding a Giant Tortoise (parody of Urashima Taro)

Young Man Riding a Giant Tortoise (parody of Urashima Taro), dated 1762 and held by the Art Institute of Chicago, brings one of the most fantastical folktales in the Japanese repertoire into the close, almost domestic register of Suzuki Harunobu's chuban bijin-ga. The legend of Urashima Taro - the fisherman who rescues a tortoise, is carried beneath the sea to the dragon palace, marries the princess Otohime, and returns to land only to discover that centuries have passed - is one of the oldest stories in Japanese literature and was a favorite subject for parody in Edo ukiyo-e. Suzuki Harunobu, characteristically, dispenses with the supernatural machinery of dragon court and time-warping treasure box. He simply shows a young man astride a great tortoise, the slow undulation of the creature's body anchoring the composition while the figure rides above with the casual elegance Harunobu reserved for his lovers and poets. The result is mitate stripped to its essential conceit: a present-day Edo youth is briefly granted the mythic gravity of Urashima Taro, and the tortoise becomes a graphic emblem rather than a literal sea-monster. As with the rest of Harunobu's 1762 designs, the print precedes his role in the nishiki-e revolution of 1765 but already uses the keyblock and palette discipline that would soon become standard. The Art Institute's impression captures Suzuki Harunobu's gift for shrinking even cosmic narratives to the chuban scale of intimate ukiyo-e, where one figure and one beast can carry the whole of a tradition.