A parody of Narihira's eastern journey

A parody of Narihira's eastern journey, dated 1759, applies the mitate parody format to one of the foundational episodes of the classical Japanese narrative tradition, the eastern journey of Ariwara no Narihira recounted in the Ise monogatari. The Heian courtier, having departed the capital after a romantic disappointment, traveled eastward through the provinces, composing waka at celebrated places including Yatsuhashi, where he encountered the irises that prompted his acrostic poem on the kakitsubata flower, and Mount Fuji, whose snow-capped form he likened to a heap of salt. The mitate genre invited ukiyo-e designers to substitute contemporary figures, typically beautiful young women, for the classical protagonists, with the parody legible through selected landscape or compositional cues that referenced the original source. Torii Kiyomitsu I, third head of the Torii school after Kiyonobu I and Kiyomasu I, here works in the polished benizuri-e mode that defined the school's mid-eighteenth-century output, a two- or three-color printing technique in which delicately registered pink and green pigments were laid over a precisely cut sumi outline. The benizuri-e process represented an intermediate stage between the earlier hand-colored tan-e and beni-e sheets of the founding Torii generation and the full-color nishiki-e revolution of the 1760s, and Kiyomitsu was the leading designer of the format during its peak years. Kiyomitsu draws the figures with the refined, slightly slender proportions and delicate facial features characteristic of his polished bijin idiom, with selected attributes referencing the Narihira eastern-journey narrative through legible cues distributed across the composition. Patterned robe motifs supply the principal visual interest against the lightly inked ground. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this impression (source_url https://www.artic.edu/artworks/44118) as a representative document of how Kiyomitsu adapted classical literary parody to the polished benizuri-e idiom at the close of the 1750s.