Young Girl Throwing Fish into Pond

Young Girl Throwing Fish into Pond, a color woodblock print in chuban format dating to around 1771/72, is preserved in the Art Institute of Chicago. The print depicts a young Edo girl in the act of releasing small fish into a garden pond — a gesture associated with the Buddhist practice of hōjō-e, the ritual liberation of living creatures to accumulate spiritual merit. Whether intended as a direct religious reference or as a more playful genre observation of a child at the water's edge, the composition pairs the slender, willow-like figural style of post-Harunobu bijin-ga with a quiet scene of seasonal domestic activity. Harushige composes the figure with the elongated proportions, small head, and softly arched eyebrows characteristic of Suzuki Harunobu's late 1760s style — the manner that Harushige had so completely absorbed that many of his early-1770s prints were misattributed to Harunobu for over a century. The chuban scale and the muted palette of soft greens, mauves, and pale yellows give the scene the suspended, lyrical quality that defines the immediate post-Harunobu moment in Edo ukiyo-e.