Ono no Komachi Washing the Copybook (Soshiarai Komachi), from the series The Seven Ukiyo-e Aspects of Komachi (Ukiyo-e nana Komachi)

Ono no Komachi Washing the Copybook (Sōshiarai Komachi), from the series The Seven [Ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) Aspects of Komachi (Ukiyo-e nana Komachi), is a color woodblock print designed by Torii Kiyonaga in 1775. Ono no Komachi was a ninth-century waka poet of legendary beauty whose biography was elaborated by later medieval traditions into a cycle of seven episodes, the Nana Komachi, frequently depicted in painting and on the Nō stage. Sōshiarai (Washing the Copybook) recounts how Komachi, accused by a rival of plagiarism, washed the manuscript whose verses had supposedly proven her theft and saw the implanted lines float away, leaving her own poem intact. Kiyonaga's series transplants each Komachi episode into the [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) idiom of contemporary Edo, replacing the Heian poet with a fashionably dressed Edo woman whose actions playfully echo the original story. As a designer within the Torii school of woodblock artists, Kiyonaga uses this learned mitate to build elegant Edo bijin-ga compositions while suggesting a flattering parallel between the women of his time and the most celebrated poet of antiquity. The Art Institute of Chicago, which holds this impression, places the print within Kiyonaga's productive mid-1770s output. The figure leans over a basin or trough into which a paper has been dipped, her gesture both modest and decisive. Color is gentle, with warm whites, soft pinks, and patterned grounds. For modern viewers, the sheet demonstrates how thoroughly Edo print culture absorbed classical Japanese literature into a daily visual vocabulary of urban elegance.