Beauty of Ibarakiya Pulling at a Man's Umbrella - a Parody of the Legend of Watanabe no Tsuna and the Ibaraki Demon

An oban benizuri-e by Torii Kiyohiro of around 1759 entitled Beauty of Ibarakiya Pulling at a Man's Umbrella - a Parody of the Legend of Watanabe no Tsuna and the Ibaraki Demon. The composition is a mitate (parody) substitution in which a young Edo beauty of the Ibarakiya house takes the place of the Ibaraki demon - the demon at the Rashomon gate whose severed arm was retrieved in the medieval legend of Watanabe no Tsuna, a tenth-century retainer of the warrior commander Minamoto no Yorimitsu. In the original legend Watanabe no Tsuna cuts off the demon's arm during the encounter at Rashomon, and the demon - disguised as an old woman, in some versions of the tale - returns later to recover it. The mitate substitution of an Edo courtesan-house woman for the demon supplies the print with the cognitive pleasure of pictorial puzzles whose solution required familiarity with the classical canon: the Edo viewer, recognising the Watanabe no Tsuna legend, would have understood that the act of pulling at the umbrella replaced the demon's retrieval of the severed arm. Such mitate compositions were a recurring intellectual pleasure of Edo print culture, displaying the designer's wit and flattering the reader's literary education. The oban benizuri-e format and pink-and-green palette date the print to the period immediately before the introduction of full-colour nishiki-e. Held at the Art Institute of Chicago.