Murasaki Shikibu

Murasaki Shikibu is a 1779 woodblock print by Torii Kiyonaga, preserved in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. The design honors the great Heian-period author of the Tale of Genji, presenting her in the conventional iconography of a court lady seated near a writing desk. Kiyonaga renders her with the elongated proportions and dignified bearing of his contemporary Edo bijin-ga, rather than attempting an archaeological recreation of Heian dress; the effect is to translate Murasaki Shikibu into the visual register of late-eighteenth-century Edo, a gesture entirely in keeping with print-culture practice of the period. As head of the Torii school, Kiyonaga had inherited a workshop tradition associated chiefly with kabuki, but he extended its range to embrace literary and historical subjects of the kind found in mitate prints, where classical figures and modern beauties are deliberately conflated. Murasaki Shikibu, the patron exemplar of female literary attainment in Japan, was an unsurprising choice for such treatment, and Kiyonaga handles her with the gravity her cultural status demanded while still composing her within the formal conventions of his Edo bijin-ga. The Art Institute of Chicago documents this impression among its Kiyonaga holdings, where it stands as evidence of the artist's interest in connecting present-day beauty with the classical literary canon. For students of Edo print culture, the design is useful in showing how late-eighteenth-century viewers conceived of Heian women through the lens of contemporary fashion, and how the Torii school could lend its disciplined graphic style to subjects that lay well outside its original theatrical territory.