Young Woman Holding a Kerria Branch (parody of Ota Dokan)

Young Woman Holding a Kerria Branch (parody of Ota Dokan) by Suzuki Harunobu, dated 1759 in the Art Institute of Chicago, takes one of Edo's most famous local legends and turns it into a piece of refined bijin-ga. The tale concerns Ota Dokan, the fifteenth-century warlord who built the original castle on the site that would become Edo: caught in the rain while hunting, he requested a straw raincoat from a country girl, who instead offered him a branch of yamabuki (yellow kerria). The gesture quoted a classical poem that punned on the homophones for 'kerria' and 'fruit,' meaning that as the kerria bears no fruit, neither did her family have a raincoat to offer. Harunobu reframes the historical anecdote as a fashionable Edo scene: a young woman, dressed in current robes, extends a sprig of yamabuki toward an unseen recipient. The viewer recognized in this mitate composition a sophisticated joke about poetic learning, the local geography of Edo, and contemporary feminine elegance all at once. Such layered humor was central to Suzuki Harunobu's contribution to Edo bijin-ga, where literary allusion was used to license sensual delight in modern dress. The sheet's color separations exemplify the careful registration that nishiki-e demanded, with each pigment block aligned precisely to render skin, textile, and foliage. Source: Art Institute of Chicago, no. 8906.