Ono no Komachi, from the series A Collection of Fashionable Beauties of Japan (Wakoku bijin ryaku shu)

Ono no Komachi, from the series A Collection of Fashionable Beauties of Japan (Wakoku bijin ryaku shu), is a 1776 Torii Kiyonaga print that, like the Wakoku bijin Yatsushishu sheet of the same year, transposes a canonical female figure of Japanese literary history into contemporary Edo dress. Ono no Komachi, the ninth-century waka poet whose legendary beauty made her a fixture of later painting and poetry, is here reimagined as a fashionable 1770s woman, her identity signaled through subtle attribute or title cartouche rather than through period costume. The strategy is characteristic of mitate (parodic substitution) and yatsushi, the modes by which Edo bijin-ga regularly invested the classical canon with present-day immediacy. Kiyonaga's figure carries the slighter proportions of his early independent style and shows the imprint of Kitao Shigemasa and Isoda Koryusai, the contemporaries against whom he was at this date measuring himself. The series also offers evidence of how the Torii school, under his developing leadership, used grouped print sets to extend its commercial reach beyond the kabuki signboards that had defined the studio's earlier identity. The Art Institute of Chicago records this 1776 print among its early Kiyonaga holdings, where it documents the artist's engagement with the Rokkasen and broader canonical-beauty tradition.